The first publicly available photographic process was invented by Louis Daguerre and introduced around the world. A daguerreotypist in the early nineteenth century would polish a sheet of silverplated copper to a mirror finish to treat it with light sensitive fumes before exposing it in a camera and then make the latent image visible using mercury vapour. The resulting images sealed under glass are detailed and have been used both for documentation and artistic expression.
Daguerreotype photography spread rapidly across the United States after the discovery first appeared on the page in newspapers by February early in the decade of the 1840s after the invention was introduced in a period of months to practitioners in the United States by the inventor of the telegraph code Samuel Morse.
The inventor of the daguerreotypes Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre was in Paris and met Morse in January of 1839 when Daguerre’s invention was announced. One of the original Morse daguerreotype cameras currently is displayed at the National Museum of American History in a branch of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
Born in Cormeilles en Parisis in the Val d’Oise the French artist and photographer was apprenticed in architecture, theatre design and panoramic painting. Skill in theatrical illusion led to the invention of the diorama which debuted in Paris in 1822.
A Frenchman in Jamaica Adolphe Duperly produced a booklet of daguerreotypes called Daguerreian Excursions in Jamaica, being a collection of views … taken on the spot with the Daguerreotype in 1844 which probably appeared in Paris. François Arago had in his address to the French Chamber of Deputies outlined a wealth of possible applications including astronomy and the daguerreotype was used occasionally for astronomical photography until the decade of the 1870s.
The first known photograph of a solar eclipse was taken on the twenty eighth of July in 1851 by Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski using the daguerreotype camera.
Without bills being passed by Parliament as had been arranged in France Arago having presented a bill in the House of Deputies and Gay Lussac in the Chamber of Peers, the possibility of repeating the French arrangement in England was unlikely as the daguerreotype was given to the world by the French government with the exception of England and Wales for which Richard Beard controlled the patent rights.
Alexander Simon Wolcott invented the mirror daguerreotype camera according to John Johnson’s contemporary account in one single day after reading the description of the daguerreotype process published in English translation. The New Yorker substituted a concave mirror to gather more light resulting in improved image quality of the first photographic portrait created by photographing John Johnson’s father with the innovation.
Wolcott’s mirror camera which gave postage stamp sized miniatures was in use for about two years before it was replaced by Petzval’s portrait lens which gave larger and sharper images. Chemist Jean Baptiste Dumas who was president of the National Society for the Encouragement of Science as the Société nationale d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale is known in the French language put a laboratory at Daguerre’s disposal.
According to the Austrian chemist Joseph Maria Eder, Daguerre hardly was versed scientifically so that it was Dumas who suggested Daguerre use sodium hyposulfite discovered by Herschel in 1819 as a fixer to dissolve the unexposed silver salts. François Arago briefly referred to the earlier process that Niépce had developed. Daguerre had helped to improve it without mentioning the photograph by name as the heliograph and the physautotype at a joint meeting of the French Academy of Sciences and the Académie des Beaux Arts held on the nineteenth of August in 1839 at the Institut de France.
A well exposed and sharp large format daguerreotype is able to record faithfully the detail at a fine resolution. Two innovations were introduced that dramatically shortened the required exposure times namely by a lens that produced a much brighter image in the camera and a modification of the chemistry used to sensitize the plate.
Cameras were fitted with Chevalier lenses which were slower but projected a sharp and undistorted dim image onto the plate. Such a lens was necessary in order to produce the highly detailed results which had elicited so much astonishment and praise when daguerreotypes primarily were exhibited. The appeal of the image object medium lies in the magic mirror effect of light striking the polished silver plate and revealing a silvery image which can seem ghostly and ethereal even while being perfectly sharp by the dedication and handcrafting required to make a daguerreotype.
Since the Renaissance period in the arts inventors had searched for a mechanical method of capturing visual scenes. Using the camera obscura artists traced manually the visible or used the optical image as a basis for solving the problems of perspective and parallax on deciding colour values. A camera obscura optically reduces a real scene in three dimensions to a flat rendition in two dimensions.
The early seventeenth century Italian physician and chemist Angelo Sala wrote that powdered silver nitrate was blackened by the sun but did not find any practical application of the phenomenon. The first reliably documented attempt to capture the image formed in a camera obscura was made by Thomas Wedgwood as early as the 1790s according to an account of his work in 1802 by Sir Humphrey Davy.
From the discovery and commercial availability of the halogens iodine, bromine and chlorine developed a few years earlier by the French chemist Courtois in 1811, the production of bromine by Carl Jacob Löwig in Germany in 1825 and by Antoine Jérôme Balard a French chemist who found bromine independently in 1826 working during his lifetime from 1802 until 1876 and chlorine as a previously unknown gas by the Swedish Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1774 contributed to the meaningful silver photographic processes that rely on the reduction of silver iodide, silver bromide and silver chloride to metallic silver became feasible. The daguerreotype is one of the inventions but it was not the first as a French inventor Nicéphore Niépce had experimented using a technique that allowed a camera to produce the first permanently fixed photograph with paper silver chloride negatives in 1826 and 1827 while Wedgwood’s experiments were with silver nitrate as were Johann Heinrich Schultze’s stencils of letters without the use of a camera. Hippolyte Bayard had been persuaded by François Arago to wait before making the paper process public.
Frederic Chopin 1849
Two Paintings from the Circle of Eynard
Other Family Gems: paintings and etchings
Jean Gabriel Eynard was a wealthy amateur photographer born in Lyon in France in 1775 who made photographs chiefly for his own amusement. Daguerreotype processes in Paris were learned in the early 1840s not long after the invention was announced in the previous year. Financial independence afforded for the artwork of the era the time and ability to practice photography which was from its infancy an expensive pastime and difficult to master.
Assisted by a gardener Jean Rion at home Eynard photographed his family and his servants in the general daily life at a Geneva house in Switzerland. Artworks by the Swiss daguerreotypist or group were created and their role in the creation of ninety two works in the Getty Museum collection is listed below the title of each work.
Perhaps revelling in the daguerreotype’s capacity for recording minute detail Jean Gabriel Eynard combined sumptuous patterns to give the daguerreotype an extraordinary richness of texture. While he wore a boldly graphic dressing gown and slippers and his wife Anne sported an equally intricate jacket, striped skirt and lace cap and the giraffe skin patterned tablecloth together with the diamond patterned footrest add to the abundance of ornament.
Madame Eynard’s steady worshipful gaze might reflect the devotion of a wife to Jean Gabriel Eynard or it might indicate the desire not to move the eyes during the exposure. Often the pose was assumed with an elbow propped on a table when being photographed.
Comte de Traz de Budé served as a diplomat representing Swiss interests abroad and diplomatic postings allowed him to engage with other European nations during a period of significant political and social change. The Swiss aristocrat and diplomat hailed from a prominent family with the life intersected by various cultural and historical contexts.
Born in 1808 the Comte’s lineage included notable individuals and their influence extended across Switzerland and beyond. While the diplomatic work remains significant the photographic portrait adds a personal dimension to the story.
A daguerreotype portrait of Comte Ernest André Gabriel de Traz de Budé and his sister Amélie exists. The daguerreotype created in 1843 captures the two children at the beach. The image itself is a testament to the evolving art of photography during the middle of the nineteenth century.
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