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Original carte-de-visite photograph of Jules Verne by the French photographer Jean Nicolas Truchelut, who specialized in portraits of “celebrites contemporaines”, including politicians, generals, composers and actresses (“Photographie Universelle”, 17 Rue de Grammont, Paris, undated, circa 1875) With handwritten identification of Verne on verso. The French National Library has a copy of this image, dated 1883, but this was a imprint from a later partnership of Truchelut and Valkman.  

A pioneering daguerreotypist in his youth, Truchelut worked alone from the 1840s through the ‘70s, his Paris address dating from about 1871. So this photo (in which Verne appears somewhat thinner than in the Nadar portrait of 1878) is contemporary with the first American appearances of his Tour of the World in Eighty Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Mysterious Island. One of the most desirable of 19th century French literary photographs.