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became his father-in-law, he represented the liberal
vanguard within the Academy, pressing unsuccessfully
for a reform of the jury system which was preventing
talented younger artists from showing at the Salon. His
most substantial work of the decade, completed in 1841,
was the huge semi-circular Hémicycle des Beaux-Arts,
erected in the offi cial amphitheatre of the school, which
offered a colourful pageant of ‘artists of all ages’ from
the Ancient Greeks to Nicolas Poussin. The format
of this work, which spread his reputation throughout
Europe, compares with the spectacular panoramas then
popular in Paris.
Delaroche’s name has entered the mythology, if
not the history, of early photography as a result of an
apocryphal remark, supposedly made on seeing his fi rst
daguerreotype: ‘From this day painting is dead!’ (‘La
peinture est morte, à dater de ce jour!) No earlier source
for this anecdote can be found than the tendentious Les
Merveilles de la photographie, fi rst published by Gaston
Tissandier in 1873. It is, however, certain that Delaroche
was asked by François Arago to provide a brief report on
the artistic potentiality of Daguerre’s invention for the
decisive meeting of the Academies of Sciences and Fine
Arts on 19 August 1839. Arago quoted from this report at
the meeting, and Delaroche’s manuscript, which contains
signifi cant additional material, is preserved in the Cromer
Collection (George Eastman House). The notion that De-
laroche chose this occasion to make the attributed remark
(repeated by Helmut Gernsheim and others) is inherently
improbable. What cannot be challenged is Delaroche’s af-
fi rmation, quoted by Arago, that the daguerreotype would
aid the education of painters by providing unequalled
studies of the ‘distribution of light.’
In effect Delaroche was familiar with Daguerre’s
work long before August 1839. In a speech to the
Academy of Sciences on 7 January 1839, the astrono-
mer Jean-Baptiste Biot spoke of visiting Daguerre’s
‘new gallery of light drawings (dessins de lumière)’
in company with Delaroche.In a subsequent letter to
Willaim Henry Fox Talbot, Biot revealed that Horace
Vernet and Louis Hersent, then Vice-President of the
Academy of Fine Arts, were also present. A painting
by Prosper Lafaye (Conférence dans le salon de M.
Irisson, Musée Carnavalet) portrays both Delaroche
and Vernet giving a ‘lecture on the discovery of pho-
tography’ in a private house in Paris. This suggests that,
quite early in 1839, Delaroche and his father-in-law
were playing a role in facilitating the understanding
of the new medium.
Unlike Horace Vernet, Delaroche seems not to have
practised photography, nor indeed to have been photo-
graphed. Yet it is no accident that several major French
photographers of the next generation, such as Gustave
Le Gray and Henri Le Secq, were originally his students.
Delaroche was identifi ed more than any other painter
with the public announcement of the invention of the
daguerreotype, and the attempt to justify its utility for
artists. It can also be held that he came to understand
some of the wider historical and cultural implications of
photography. Several paintings produced shortly before
his death in 1856 indicate close study of light effects
produced from a small aperture in a darkened chamber,
and one shows Saint Veronica prostrate before the im-
print of Christ’s face, which radiates light.
Delaroche’s privileged connection with photography
did not end with his death. As a result of the initiative
of his print editor, Adolphe Goupil, the English-born
photographer Robert Jefferson Bingham was entrusted
with the task of recording his life’s work, much of which
was on view at a posthumous exhibition in 1857. The
Oeuvre de Paul Delaroche, published in 1858, was
the fi rst catalogue raisonnné to be fully illustrated by
photographs.
Stephen BannBiography
Paul Delaroche was born on 17 July 1797 in Paris.
Brought up by parents who were closely engaged in the
world of the visual arts, he nurtured an early ambition to
be a painter, and studied fi rst of all with the landscape
painter Louis Watelet and secondly with the history
painter, Antoine Gros. His exhibition of paintings at
the Paris Salon, between 1822 to 1834, did much to
popularise the new category of ‘historical genre,’ in
which the subject matter was taken from medieval and
early modern history. He was elected to the Académie
des Beaux-Arts in 1832, and became Professor at the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1833. Among the pupils in his
studio, which was open until 1843, were several major
French photographers of the next generation. In 1839,
he provided a favourable report on the relevance of the
daguerreotype to artists, which was utilised by Louis
Arago. After the death of his wife in 1845, he retired
from public life, and spent much of his time in his studio
in Nice, working on paintings with religious themes. He
died in Paris on 4 November 1856.See also: Bibliothèque Nationale; Daguerreotype;
Tissandier, Gaston; Talbot, Willaim Henry Fox; Le
Gray; Gustave; and Le Secq, Henri.Further Reading
Bann, Stephen, Paul Delaroche: History painted, London: Reak-
tion, 1997.
Bann, Stephen, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Pho-
tographers in Nineteenth-Century France, London and New
Haven, Yale University Press, 2001.