The Terraces
The ink — every line and halftone dot holds at full size

The Eleven

A Player, 1922

The single-figure studio portrait — a footballer photographed the way an actor was.

Work
glass plate negative, Agence Rol
Maker
Agence Rol
Date
1922
Ground
Paris
Era
The interwar game · 1919–1930
Source
Agence Rol / Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1922 · Wikimedia Commons
Figure
Régnier — publicity clear
Someone decided a player was worth a portrait.

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.

Size

$29.00

The story

A footballer, photographed alone in 1922 on a full plate, standing the way a stage actor of the period was photographed. This is a small revolution: for fifty years the game’s image had been crowds, teams and action, and the individual player existed mainly as a name in an agate-type line-up. By the 1920s he was a subject in his own right — worth a plate, a pose, and a lighting set-up. The star system arrived in football at almost exactly the moment it arrived in cinema, and for the same reason. Someone decided a player was worth a portrait, and the game was never collective again.

See it on your wall

The piece, in the room it was made for

A Player, 1922, printed large and framed — in the den, the club bar, the supporters’ bar. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

A Player, 1922 framed on the wall
A Player, 1922 framed on the wall
A Player, 1922 framed on the wall
A Player, 1922 framed on the wall

About this reproduction

  • A reproduction of glass plate negative, Agence Rol — Agence Rol, 1922 — from the copy held by Agence Rol / Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1922 · Wikimedia Commons. The source. The work was published before 1931 and is public-domain verified.
  • Printed faithful to that source scan — restore honestly, disclose always. We do not re-colour it, complete it, or interpret it; the piece you receive is the image as it survives, halftone grain honored as history, not damage.
  • Printed to order on museum-grade cotton-rag stock with pigment inks — the pairing is rated 100+ years.
  • Colour-managed to the source; the tone of the paper and the ink is the period’s, not ours.
  • Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed editions ship flat-packed).
  • If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our pieces cost more than a poster: a poster is a mass run on wood-pulp stock, colour-corrected to whatever flattered the press that day. This is one sheet, pulled for you, at a size where the maker’s hand is visible — the linework, the halftone grain, the lettering — on materials made to outlast their owner.

From the same hand

The Bordeaux Ground, 1908 — glass plate negative, Agence Rol, Agence Rol, 1908

Agence Rol · 1908

The Bordeaux Ground, 1908

The earliest surviving Rol plate of the French game — a provincial ground before the crowds arrived.

Everything starts on a field with a rope round it.
Lisbon and Barcelona in Paris, Boxing Day 1920 — glass plate negative, Agence Rol, 26 December 1920, Agence Rol, 1920

Agence Rol · 1920

Lisbon and Barcelona in Paris, Boxing Day 1920

A Portuguese club against a Catalan one, in France, two days after Christmas — the game already stateless.

The rules travelled faster than anything else Britain exported.
An English Club in Paris, May 1921 — glass plate negative, Agence Rol, 15 May 1921, Agence Rol, 1921

Agence Rol · 1921

An English Club in Paris, May 1921

A London side lines up at the Bergeyre — the missionary fixture, photographed at last.

Football was taught by demonstration, on tour, in the spring.