This is a superb cabinet card portrait by Armand Dandoy, a photographer with a studio in Namur, Belgium. The card features a striking young woman dressed in an ornate, exotic-style costume. Her long, flowing dark hair is decorated with lace and jewelry, while her layered dress has embroidered patterns and sashes, suggestive of Near Eastern or theatrical inspiration. Multiple necklaces—including pearls and a dark beaded collar—adorn her neck, and her wrists sparkle with bracelets. The woman is beautiful. Her pose is dignified and serene, with a hint of mystery in her gentle smile and a gaze turned slightly to the side. This portrait exemplifies the late 19th-century taste for “Orientalist” and costumed studio images, which were popular with both performers and fashionable sitters. Armand Dandoy was an excellent photographer but he was also noted as an artist. He operated operated in Namur during the late 19th century. His work is less commonly encountered than that of larger Parisian or Brussels studios, making this cabinet card all the more distinctive. Dandoy, born in Gougnies, Belgium in 1834 and died in Namur in 1898. He began his artistic career first as a painter—studying at the Namur Academy and exhibiting at the Brussels and Antwerp Salons in the 1860s. In 1856, he entered the field of photography in partnership with his brother Héliodore before running his own portrait studio in Namur. In 1869, the provincial government commissioned him to document the “Province de Namur, monumentale et pittoresque” – an ambitious series of 110 albumen prints of regional monuments and landscapes, produced through 1879. Nearly 400 negatives still survive in the Archaeological Society’s archives. He was among the first in Belgium to utilize the carbon process and exhibited photogravures and photolithographs by 1878. In 1895, he published postcards under the imprint “Photographic and collotype establishment of Armand Dandoy,” signaling a shift toward mass-produced imagery. Dandoy was a painter who regularly exhibited at local art salons—Namur, Brussels, Antwerp, Paris—between the 1860s and 1880s, blending fine arts and photography throughout his career. A founding member of the Belgian Photographic Association (ABP), Dandoy remained a significant figure in Namur’s cultural scene until his passing in 1898. The reverse of this card is finished in deep burgundy cardstock, elegantly imprinted with the photographer’s signature in gold. Burgundy and other colored card backs were especially fashionable in the 1880s and 1890s, when studios experimented with design, color, and ornate typography to make their mounts more visually appealing. By the early 1900s, cabinet card mounts shifted back toward plainer cream or black tones before the format itself fell out of popularity in favor of the postcard. Thus, the burgundy back places this cabinet card firmly in the 1880s–1890s period. (SOLD)
THE CABINET CARD GALLERY 
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