Portrait photograph.

Ca. 36 x 28 cm. Silver gelatin print mounted on cardboard. Exceptionally large print of one of the four photos of Marx that the London photographer John Mayall jr. (1842-91) made in rapid sequence, showing Marx, seated, at knee-length. - Mayall was the son of the photographic pioneer John Jabez Edwin Mayall (1813-1901), who in 1860 took the first carte-de-visite photographs of Queen Victoria. The renowned Mayall studio had produced a fine portrait of Marx as early as 1872 (it was used as a frontispiece in the first livraison of the first French edition of "Das Kapital"). The four 1875 Mayall portraits went on to become Marx's most widely disseminated likeness: after his friend's death in 1883, Engels ordered 1200 prints to send to socialists all over the world, deciding that this was "the final, the best picture, showing Mohr [his nickname for Marx] in all his serene, confident, Olympian calmness". - Edges somewhat roughly cut, but only slightly trimmed from the original full image; some small scratches and scuffs. Probably printed ca. 1900-1910. Provenance: Paul Longuet (1909-79), French politician and great-grandson of Karl Marx: the son of the socialist Edgar Longuet, whose parents were the Proudhonist Charles Longuet and Marx's eldest daughter, Jenny Caroline. - Cf. IISG call no. BG A 9/363.