Marble Bust of the Emperor Pupienus

The bust depicts the co‑emperor Pupienus, who ruled briefly with Balbinus in AD 238. As a sculptural portrait, it exemplifies the Roman practice of commemorating imperial authority through idealized marble likenesses, offering scholars a visual reference for the emperor’s iconography.

Laffon employed the wet‑collodion process, the dominant photographic method of the era, to capture fine detail and tonal range. Her approach aligns with the Realist tendency to document objects with fidelity, emphasizing the texture of marble and the subtle play of light across the sculpture’s surface.

The photograph was part of a series Laffon produced for the Campana collection, then displayed at the Musée Napoléon III in Paris. In 1864 the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired 500 prints from this series through the dealer E. Cappe, integrating them into its National Art Library holdings for educational use.

During the 1850s and 1860s the V&A (then the South Kensington Museum) pioneered the systematic collection of photographs, recognizing their value for artists, students, and museum staff. Female photographers like Laffon contributed significantly to this mission, supplying images of classical artifacts for study and reference.