This unrecorded carte de visite of Alfred Cottin (Paris, 21 December 1863 – 18 January 1923), inscribed in ink in 1887 to Eugène Bergeron, constitutes a rare and precisely datable early visual document of a musician who would later become one of the central figures in the French classical guitar revival. At once a studio portrait, a professional statement, and a personal gift, the photograph occupies the intersection of photography, performance, and sociability that characterized the formative stages of many nineteenth-century musical careers.
The image presents Cottin full-length, standing with a classical guitar held confidently at his side. He is dressed not in contemporary bourgeois attire but in overtly theatrical costume: a broad-collared, doublet-like garment, knee-length breeches, stockings, and a soft hat evoke a romanticized early-modern or troubadour idiom. This visual language was widely adopted by professional guitarists and singer-instrumentalists during the 1880s to confer poetic authority on an instrument that, while popular in salons and cafés-concerts, still occupied an ambiguous position within elite musical hierarchies. The pose and costume together signal a consciously fashioned artistic persona rather than a casual likeness.
The guitar itself is central to the composition, serving as an emblem of vocation rather than as a strictly documentary object. Although the photograph does not permit a definitive identification of the instrument depicted, Alfred Cottin is documented as playing a guitar by Antonio de Torres, the Spanish maker whose instruments defined the modern classical guitar. By the 1880s, Torres guitars—still relatively rare in Paris—were increasingly adopted by forward-looking professional players for their enhanced projection, tonal balance, and expressive capacity. Cottin’s documented use of a Torres places him among the earliest French guitarists to align themselves with this modern Spanish tradition.
The photograph was taken by Alcide Allevy at 14 rue de Castiglione, Paris, an address near the Tuileries associated with a fashionable, performance-oriented clientele. Allevy’s studio attracted actors, musicians, and cultural professionals who understood the importance of visual presence within Paris’s competitive artistic environment. Cottin’s choice of this studio aligns with a period in which he was completing his formative training, notably his studies with Jaime Felipe José Bosch, and actively positioning himself within Parisian musical networks.
The inscription, dated 1887, is of particular chronological significance. Written in ink and addressed “à mon bon ami Eugène Bergeron,” it fixes the photograph at a moment when Cottin was twenty-three years old, still several years before his emergence as a published composer and pedagogue. At this stage, his career was being built through performance, teaching, and personal affiliation rather than through print. The dedication transforms a reproducible photographic format into a singular relational object, while the autograph “Alfred Cottin,” likewise in blue ink, confirms the deliberate personalization of the image.
Seen in light of Cottin’s later trajectory, the 1887 inscription marks a pivotal pre-publication phase. Within a few years he would publish his Méthode complète de guitare (1891), establishing himself as a serious pedagogue, and produce a substantial body of compositions for guitar and mandolin. His close association with Francisco Tárrega, the leading advocate of Torres guitars, culminated in Tárrega’s dedication of Recuerdos de la Alhambra to Cottin—an acknowledgment that firmly situates him within the Torres tradition and the international modernization of guitar technique.
As an unrecorded example, this carte de visite contributes materially to the understanding of how musicians such as Cottin navigated the cultural infrastructure of late nineteenth-century Paris. It demonstrates how a standardized photographic format could simultaneously serve professional ambition, artistic self-representation, and personal friendship. Anchored by its 1887 inscription and informed by Cottin’s documented use of an Antonio Torres guitar, the photograph preserves not only his likeness, but a precisely situated trace of the moment when French guitar culture was turning decisively toward the modern classical instrument.
