1003
Further Reading
Auer, Michèle, and Michel Auer, Encyclopédie internationale
des photographes de 1839 à nos jours [International Ency-
clopedia of Photographers from 1839 to the Present], 2 vols.,
Hermance, Switzerland: Editions Camera Obscura, c. 1985.
Colson, R., Mémoires originaux des créateurs de la photographie
[Original Reports on the Creators of Photography], Paris:
Georges Carré and C. Naud, 1898, 115–142.
Larousse, Pierre, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle
[Large Universal Dictionary of the 19th Century], 17 vols.,
Paris: Administration du Grand dictionnaire universel,
1866–1890, vol. 11, pp. 999–1000 [under the entry heading,
“Niépce de Saint-Victor (Claude-Félix-Abel)”].
Lefebvre, Bernard, A. Niépce de Saint-Victor et la table servie
[A. Niépce de Saint-Victor and the Set Table], Rouen, France:
Association Recherche et Documentation Photographiques et
Bernard Lefebrve, 1984.
Marignier, Jean-Louis, Nicéphore Niépce: 1765–1833: l’inven-
tion de la photographie [Nicéphore Niépce: 1765–1833: The
Invention of Photography], Paris: Belin, 1999.
Niépce de Saint-Victor, Claude Marie François, Recherches
photographiques [Photographic Research], Paris: Alexis
Gaudin, 1855.
Niépce de Saint-Victor, Claude Marie François, Traité pratique
de gravure héliographique sur acier et sur verre [Pratical
Treatise on the Heliographic Gravure on Copper and Glass],
Paris: V. Masson, 1856.
“Notice sur les travaux de M. Niépce de Saint-Victor [Note on
the Work of M. Niépce de Saint-Victor],” La Lumière [Light],
no. 17, 1 June 1851, pp. 65–67.
NIÉPCE, JOSEPH NICÉPHORE
(1765–1833)
French inventor
A decade of intense experimentation with light-sensitive
chemicals and the camera obscura led the Frenchman
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce to produce the fi rst permanent
images made by the action of light in a camera some-
time between 1826 and 1827. The ultimate inability of
Niépce to capitalize upon his discovery, which he called
Heliography, during his lifetime, left his work in rela-
tive obscurity for more than a century. At the time of
his death in 1833, Niépce was in a business partnership
with Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, and the extent
of Niépce’s contribution to the wildly successful Da-
guerreotype process, made public in 1839, has been the
subject of considerable debate. Although Niépce did not
himself succeed in perfecting a marketable photographic
process, he did resolve perhaps the greatest problem
facing early experimenters, how to fi x the action of
light so as to preserve images formed in light-sensitive
materials. Moreover, Daguerre’s eponymous process
can be seen to emerge directly out of his partnership
with Niépce, in the specifi c chemicals and materials that
Daguerre used. More broadly, the details of Niépce’s
career as an inventor illustrate many of the social and
economic forces that fueled the rise of photography
in the mid nineteenth century. Niépce sought to bring
together advances in optics, chemistry, and mechanics
to create a fully automatic means of image production,
and thereby to make his fortune.
Niépce’s father Claude and his father before him had
been King’s Counselors, and held land in and around
Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy, where Niépce was born
the third of four children. Following school in Chalon
he enrolled in 1786 at the Oratoire in Angers with the
intention of entering religious service but withdrew after
two years, prior to taking his vows. In the course of his
studies he had developed a strong interest in chemical
and physical science. After 1788, six years of Niépce’s
life were devoted to military service, both domestic
and foreign. During the early years of the Revolution
Niépce was in the National Guard in Chalon, and in
1792 he joined the Revolutionary Army, serving in Sar-
dinia and Italy. He left the army in 1794 with an ocular
disorder and settled in Nice, where his older brother
Claude joined him. Niépce married Agnès Roméro in
1794, and their fi rst child (the only of three to survive
childhood), a son Isidore, was born in 1795. While in
Nice, Nicéphore and Claude began investigations into
the idea of an internal-combustion engine, work that
eventually led to their invention of a boat motor called
the Pyréolophore, patented in 1807.
Nicéphore and family, with Claude, returned to
Chalon in 1801. In addition to overseeing the family
lands and vineyards, the two brothers began to pursue a
host of engineering and manufacturing projects. In this
respect they were early examples of the new occupation
offered to middle-class Frenchmen in the post-Revolu-
tionary years: inventor. The Pyréolophore, which they
tested successfully on the River Saône, was the fi rst in-
ternal combustion boat motor. Also in 1807, in response
to a public competition, the brothers conceived a new
hydraulic pump system for the town of Marly to deliver
water to Versailles. In 1811, Nicéphore answered a gov-
ernment call for a new process of extracting indigo dye
from the woad plant, undertaking nearly two years of
intense experimentation. When the new printing process
of lithography, invented by Alois Senefelder in 1798,
was introduced to France in 1813, Niépce endeavored
to practice the technique in Chalon, largely self-taught
and at a distance from the material and technical re-
sources found in Paris (in a similar spirit, when the fi rst
bicycle, the Draisienne, invented in Germany by Baron
Karl von Drais, appeared in 1817, Niépce responded by
building his own working model). According to Isidore
Niépce, his father’s approach to lithography was far from
conventional, as he would experiment with different
varnishes and acids, on a variety of supports. He also
began to attempt to impress designs onto lithographic
plates through the action of light, perhaps out of a lack
of drawing facility (Gernsheim, 29).