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DAGUERRE, LOUIS JACQUES MANDÉ
throughout his career for employing both his art and
social connections to gauge changing public taste and
to curry the favor of the current regime in power.
In 1810, Daguerre married Louise Georgi(en)ne
Schmit(te) (called Arrowsmith or Smith), daughter of
William Schmit (called Smith), who had immigrated
to France from London in 1783, and eventually served
as porter for the Orléans family. During the early days
of the July Monarchy, and the return of the Orléans
to power, Daguerre converted to the new spirit of re-
publicanism. He was one of the fi rst artists to become
a member of the Société libre des beaux-arts, which
professed a program of conservative liberalism. Op-
posing both the outdated traditions of the Academy
and the abandon of romanticism, this group of artists,
founded by Charles Farcy of the Journal des artistes,
supported Victor Cousin’s doctrine of beauty and utility
in the arts. Cousin had energized the fashionable, liberal
society of the Restoration with his philosophy classes
at the Sorbonne, which were discontinued in 1822, and
recommenced in 1828. Seen as threatening to the politics
of Charles X, Cousin’s philosophy went hand-in-hand
with the program of industrial progress of the July
Monarchy. This program, along with the conservation
of French national heritage responsible for François
Guizot’s creation of the Commission des monuments
historiques in 1830, later played an essential role in state
support of the daguerreotype. During the Restoration,
Daguerre catered to a slightly liberal public that came
into power and prestige under the July Monarchy. In
this way, he survived not only the change of political
power, but personal bankruptcy as well.
Daguerre was also among the fi rst French artists
to experiment with lithography, registering two litho-
graphs, printed by Charles Motte, on 20 June 1818:
Souterrain exécuté pour l’Ambigu Comique 1817 and
Citerne en ruine à Montmartre. In 1819, his lithograph
L’Entrée de l’église du St. Sépulcre for Count Auguste
de Forbin’s Voyage dans le Levant, was shown at
the Salon. In 1820, Daguerre contributed to the fi rst
volume of Charles Nodier and Baron Isidore Taylor’s
Voyages romantiques et pittoresques dans l’ancienne
France. His lithograph Ruines de l’abbaye de Jumièges
(Ancienne Normandie, t. I, pl. 12) was shown by the
printer Godefroy Engelmann in the Salon of 1822.
Between 1820-33, Daguerre contributed (preparatory
drawings or lithographs) to a total of 11 plates for
successive volumes of this publication, including An-
cienne Normandie, t. II, 1825; Franche-Comté, 1825;
and Auvergne, t. I, 1829 and t. II, 1833. His theater
decorations for Victor Ducange’s Elodie, presented at
the Ambigu-Comique in 1822, were popularized by
the lithographer Jean-Philippe Schmit and shown in
the Salon of 1824.
Daguerre was best known as the entrepreneur and
creator of the Diorama, which he organized as a lim-
ited stock company in 1821 with his partner Bouton.
The society was registered under the name “Bouton,
Daguerre et Cie” on January 3, 1822, with shareholders
including Jean-Baptiste Isabey and the Count Charles
de Clarac, the curator of antiquities at the Louvre. In
1823, Daguerre formed a second society with the printer
James Smith to exploit the Diorama in London under
the supervision of John Arrowsmith. Daguerre and Bou-
ton jointly directed the Paris Diorama until September
1830, when Bouton left the society for declared health
problems. Despite his declaration of bankruptcy in 1832,
Daguerre continued as sole director of the Paris Diorama
until it burned down on 8 March 1839.
The Diorama was a building designed by Daguerre
that housed two large, semi-transparent paintings il-
luminated by natural light. Inspired by the success of
the panoramas, as well as the transparent paintings of
Louis Carmontelle and Franz-Niklaus Kœnig, Daguerre
and Bouton employed blinds and colored screens to
represent natural effects of time, light, and movement
in contrasting interior and exterior views. The public,
seated in a central auditorium, was transported from one
scene to the next by means of a rotating viewing plat-
form. On rare occasions, Daguerre used the Diorama as
a venue to capitalize on current political events in order
to win political favor, as with the Vue de Porte Sainte-
Marie (1824), which depicted the Duke d’Angoulême
(son of the future Charles X) meeting Ferdinand VII in
Spain during the French effort to restore the absolutist
Spanish monarch to the throne. Shortly after the Duke
d’Orléans assumed the throne as King Louis-Philippe,
Daguerre depicted the taking of the Hôtel de Ville dur-
ing the spontaneous insurrection of French citizens and
the National Guard against the army on 28 July 1830.
In 1834, Daguerre and his student Hippolyte Sébron
developed the double-effect diorama. Like the earlier
diorama pictures, the double-effect paintings featured
temporal and climatic changes, but were also episodic;
the paintings represented events or scenes that often
included the appearance of fi gures, painted on the back
of the canvas, which were only visible when lit from
behind. In The Inauguration of the Temple of Solomon
(1836), for instance, a nighttime scene of a deserted
architectural setting was gradually transformed into
a magnifi cent, candelabra-lit golden temple in which
viewers eventually saw thousands of people celebrating
the dedication of the temple.
Although Daguerre envisioned the Diorama as a
permanent public display of his work, he exhibited at
three other Paris Salons as part of his program to gain
offi cial, as well as public, recognition for his art. In 1824,
he showed Chapelle d’Holyrood and an oil sketch, La