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Chapelle de Roslin. The same year he was awarded the
cross of the Legion of Honor and Forbin, then director
of the Louvre, described him as one of the most remark-
able painters of the time. His 1827 Salon entry, Village
d’Unterseen en Suisse (lost in 1848) was purchased by
the Duke d’Orléans. All three of these works were also
subjects of Daguerre’s Diorama. The repetition of di-
orama subjects was not merely a commercial endeavor,
but also represented Daguerre’s concern with establish-
ing his reputation as a painter outside the realm of the
ephemeral and popular pictures for the Diorama. His
fi nal Salon entry, in 1834, was an original landscape,
Paysage, and is unique in Daguerre’s oeuvre for its
heavily worked foreground, in which the impasto of
the paint is apparent. The rugged terrain and foliage of
the foreground reveal the infl uence of the new school
of landscape represented by Théodore Rousseau and
indicate the direction Daguerre’s Salon painting might
have taken had he continued to exhibit.
By 1834, however, Daguerre was completely oc-
cupied with experiments related to the Diorama and
photography. For his diorama paintings, he had already
studied different materials according to their reaction
and sensitivity to light, in particular working with
phosphorescent materials in a camera obscura in an
attempt to produce incandescent colors. Daguerre’s
talent for lighting effects and illusionism, along with
his solid understanding of printmaking techniques, led
to the invention of the daguerreotype, the fi rst publicly
announced and commercially successful photographic
process. After fi ve years of joint experimentation with
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Daguerre produced his fi rst
daguerreotypes as early as 1834 and announced the
invention in the Journal des artistes on 27 September
- The daguerreotype is a photographic image with
a mirror-like surface on a silver or silver-coated copper
plate. A unique photograph, the daguerreotype is not
produced from a negative, and the fi nal image appears
either positive or negative depending on the angle of
refl ected light.
Daguerre fi rst contacted Niépce in January 1826,
after hearing about his heliographic experimentation
from the optician Vincent Chevalier. Niépce eventually
visited Daguerre at the Diorama in August 1827, and
the two men formed a company on 14 December 1829
in order to exploit both Niépce’s invention, based on
the photosensitvity of bitumen of Judea, and Daguerre’s
improvements to the camera obscura. After Niépce’s
death (5 July 1833), Daguerre signed a new contract
in 1835 with Niépce’s son, Isidore. The new contract
changed the name of the partnership from “Niépce-
Daguerre” to “Daguerre and Isidore Niépce,” in light
of Daguerre’s recognition of the chemical bases of the
daguerreotype, iodine and mercury. A fi nal contract was
signed in 1837, naming Daguerre as the sole inventor of
the new process, which was announced by the politician
and scientist, François Arago, on 7 January 1839. Arago
formally divulged the process to a joint meeting of the
Académie des Sciences and Académie des beaux-arts on
19 August 1839, after King Louis-Philippe signed the
law granting lifetime pensions to Daguerre and Isidore
Niépce on 7 August 1839.
According to the terms of the law, Daguerre was
required to publish details of the daguerreotype pro-
cess and techniques for painting diorama pictures. In
addition to Arago’s public explanation of the technical
production of daguerreotypes, Daguerre produced an
illustrated manual outlining the various steps of the
process. Daguerre added his correspondence with
Niépce, in which he suggests experimenting with the
photosensitivity of silver and iodine, in order to dem-
onstrate that the daguerreotype was indeed his own
invention. The cited letters—which document the fact
that Daguerre’s systematic experiments with silver ni-
trate, and eventually mercury, led him to the discovery
of his own photographic process—only revealed part
of the picture. In fact, Niépce already had used iodine,
but only as a kind of “developing agent,” to darken the
shaded parts of his proofs. Daguerre’s claims in the
manual angered Niépce’s son, Isidore, who responded
with his own pamphlet, in which he asserted that his
father invented the daguerreotype.
Following Arago’s announcement, Daguerre sent
daguerreotypes to Ludwig I of Bavaria, Ferdinand I of
Austria, Nikolaus I of Russia, Friedrich Wilhelm III of
Prussia, the Austrian chancellor Klemens Metternich,
and Austrian ambassador to France, A.G. Aponyi.
Daguerre also offered daguerreotypes to Arago and
Alphonse de Cailleux. These dedication plates, like
many of the images the fi rst generation of photographic
artists produced, comprised views of Paris and still-life
arrangements of plaster casts, architectural fragments,
bas-reliefs, and copies of sculpture. Daguerre’s earliest
extant daguerreotype is generally considered to be the
still life presented to Cailleux, which includes a bas-
relief after Jean Goujon. Georges Potonniée, who fi rst
exhibited the plate in 1920, dated it to 1837 based on an
inscription that is no longer visible. The image itself is
now almost completely faded, as is the case with many
of Daguerre’s earliest daguerreotypes. The state of many
of these early plates, along with lack of documentation,
accurate provenance, and conservation studies, renders
precise dating, as well as fi rm attribution, diffi cult at
best. For these reasons, the date and identifi cation of
Daguerre’s earliest portrait daguerreotype remains a
debated topic.
After Arago’s disclosure of the daguerreotype pro-
cess, Daguerre gave a series of public demonstrations in