When was the daguerreotype developed?
36541909#5
With the development of the daguerreotype in the 1840s, the role of the portrait painter declined in general, because it was now much easier and much cheaper to have one's likeness presented in a visual format. While many portrait painters lost business in competition with the daguerreotype, Billings instead began to produce daguerreotype prints himself. It is not known exactly which prints were made by Moses Billings, as daguerreotypes were usually signed, when signed at all, along the side of the plate. Due to the traditional storing methods of daguerreotype plates, even this signature usually quickly became illegible. However, it has been generally noted, or at least hypothesized, that his daguerreotype prints showed a level of talent and artistry above that of amateur daguerreotypists. Though it is not known exactly which prints were his, it is known that he had largely abandoned the process by the 1850s. Even after he stopped making daguerreotypes, he did continue to paint people's portraits on canvas.
Moses Billings
103177#90
Morse met the inventor of the daguerreotype, Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, in Paris in January 1839 when Daguerre's invention was announced [2]. While the daguerreotype fascinated Morse, he was concerned about how the new invention would compete with his telegraph. However, Morse's viewing of the daguerreotype alleviated his fears when he saw how revolutionary its technology was. Morse wrote a letter to his brother Sidney describing Daguerre's invention, which Sidney then published in the New-York Observer on April 20, 1839. While this was not the first report of the daguerreotype to appear in America, it was the first in-person report to appear in the United States.
Daguerreotype
47751956#1
In spring 1839, the daguerreotype was introduced into the United States by an Englishman named D.W. Seager, who took the first photograph of a view of St. Paul’s Church and a corner of the Astor House in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Painter and inventor Samuel Finley Breese Morse had met Louis Daguerre in Paris in the spring of 1839, becoming the first American to see his photographic process and becoming enamored with it as a result. When he returned to the United States later that year, he enthusiastically promoted the daguerreotype while hailing Seager's prototypical image. Morse had painted "The Gallery of the Louvre" in 1833, and the appeal of the medium of the daguerreotype was an obvious one to him: it was a means of making faithful copies of artworks, in addition to anything else that would be still in front of the slow eye of the camera.
Photography in the United States
103177#33
It is said that Daguerre has found the means to collect, on a plate prepared by him, the image produced by the camera obscura, in such a way that a portrait, a landscape, or any view, projected upon this plate by the ordinary camera obscura, leaves an imprint in light and shade there, and thus presents the most perfect of all drawings ... a preparation put over this image preserves it for an indefinite time ... the physical sciences have perhaps never presented a marvel comparable to this one.
A further clue to fixing the date of invention of the process is that when the Paris correspondent of the London periodical "The Athenaeum" reported the public announcement of the daguerreotype in 1839, he mentioned that the daguerreotypes now being produced were of considerably better quality than the ones he had seen "four years earlier".
Daguerreotype
103177#1
Invented by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and introduced worldwide in 1839, daguerreotype was almost completely superseded by 1860 with new, less expensive processes yielding more readily viewable images. In the late 20th century, there was a revival of daguerreotypy by a small number of photographers interested in making artistic use of early photographic processes.
Daguerreotype
103177#55
The latent image was developed to visibility by several minutes of exposure to the fumes given off by heated mercury in a purpose-made developing box. The toxicity of mercury was well known in the 19th century, but precautionary measures were rarely taken. Today, however, the hazards of contact with mercury and other chemicals traditionally used in the daguerreotype process are taken more seriously, as is the risk of release of those chemicals into the environment.
Daguerreotype
9286137#47
In the 1840s, the daguerreotype portrait had virtually supplanted the hand-painted portrait miniature. Some critics complained that the daguerreotype portrait on a metal plate was cold and harsh and lacked the finesse and charm of the small-scale painted portrait. In March 1842, Richard Beard had patented a method of colouring daguerreotype pictures. The following month a newspaper reported that "Mr Beard has now discovered the means of colouring the plates after the photographic drawing is completed, thus giving the warmth and truth of a miniature painting." It is known that Mayall used a similar method of hand-colouring daguerreotype portraits while based in Philadelphia. When two journalists visited Mayall's new premises in London's Regent Street in 1853, they observed the work of the "colouring room" in which "two damsels were busily at work" adding colour to Mayall's daguerreotype portraits.
John Jabez Edwin Mayall
17328838#8
During the 1860s, improvements in photographic development caused daguerreotypes to become out of fashion. Easterly refused to acknowledge these changes believing the highly detailed daguerreotypes were far superior in terms of beauty or permanence urging the public to ""save your old daguerreotypes for you will never see their like again"". During the next decade, both his health and financial situation worsened. Despite the declining interest for pictures on silver, he was able to maintain his gallery until it burned in a fire in 1865. He was forced to move to a smaller location and continued working in near obscurity until his death in St. Louis on March 12, 1882. He had suffered from a long illness and partial paralysis in his final years and is thought to have been caused by prolonged exposure to mercury, one of the key ingredients used in the daguerreotype process.
Thomas Martin Easterly
3175911#4
Parallel efforts to produce coloured photographic images affected the popularity of hand-colouring. In 1842 Daniel Davis Jr. patented a method for colouring daguerreotypes through electroplating, and his work was refined by Warren Thompson the following year. The results of the work of Davis and Thompson were only partially successful in creating colour photographs and the electroplating method was soon abandoned. In 1850 Levi L. Hill announced his invention of a process of daguerreotyping in natural colours in his "Treatise on Daguerreotype". Sales of conventional uncoloured and hand-coloured daguerreotypes fell in anticipation of this new technology. Hill delayed publication of the details of his process for several years, however, and his claims soon came to be considered fraudulent. When he finally did publish his treatise in 1856, the process – whether bona fide or not – was certainly impractical and dangerous.
Hand-colouring of photographs
103177#97
Although the daguerreotype process is sometimes said to have died out completely in the early 1860s, documentary evidence indicates that some very slight use of it persisted more or less continuously throughout the following 150 years of its supposed extinction. A few first-generation daguerreotypists refused to entirely abandon their old medium when they started making the new, cheaper, easier to view but comparatively drab ambrotypes and tintypes. Historically minded photographers of subsequent generations, often fascinated by daguerreotypes, sometimes experimented with making their own or even revived the process commercially as a "retro" portraiture option for their clients. These eccentric late uses were extremely unusual and surviving examples reliably dated to between the 1860s and the 1960s are now exceedingly rare.
Daguerreotype
18736933#10
Calotype was an early photographic process developed by Henry Fox Talbot who was a colleague of Collen's. Talbot supplied the photographic knowledge and Collen the artistic know-how. In an article titled "Photography in the 1840s," Peter Marshall describes the distinction between daguerreotypes and calotypes. "The daguerrotype spread rapidly around the world...There were some limitations on the spread." Daguerre's process was somewhat limited by his prior patent in the UK, and so only those professionals who could afford a license were able to do so. Meanwhile, Talbot patented his calotype process in the UK and the US, but he was unable to get a patent in France which also limited its growth. Also, Marshall states, "In general, most professional photographers used the daguerreotype process in the 1840s, while the calotype was generally favored by those who were not attempting to earn an income." (A chart describing the differences between calotypes and daguerreotypes is included in the Appendix).
Henry Collen