As November ends, I wondered what event or happening in November had some impact on the art world.  The easiest route, which of course I took, was who was born in November.  There were plenty of wonderful artists to choose from: one of my favorite painters Claude Monet, painters Georgia O’Keefe and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, poet William Blake, cartoonist Charles Schultz, and sculptor Auguste Rodin.  But the one person who truly has had an impact on my life and every other photographer is Louis Daguerre.  Her perfected one of the first photography processes and was arrogant enough to name it after himself.

Louis-Jacques Daguerre was born on November 18, 1787, near Paris , France.  By trade, Daguerre was a chemist and scene painter for the opera.  In 1826, he became partners with Joseph Niepce.  Niepce had already begun experimenting with heliographs or sun prints.  The problem with Niepce’s process was the exposure took eight hours and the final product tended to fade rather quickly.  Their partnership was short lived because Niepce died in 1833.

Boulevard du Temple, Paris by Louis Daguerre 1839

Daguerre accidentally discovered a more effective way to develop an exposed plate.  In 1835, he left an exposed plate in a cabinet, not knowing there was a broken thermometer also in the cabinet.  A few days later he discovered that the mercury vapor from the broken thermometer developed the latent image on the exposed plate.  He also realized he could cut down the exposure time from eight hours to thirty minutes.  After further refinement, the exposure time was cut down even more.

Abraham Lincoln by Nicholas H. Shepherd 1846

Edgar Allen Poe by W.S. Hartshorn 1848

At the meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, in August of 1839, Daguerre introduced the Daguerreotype process to the public.  He and Niepce’s son sold the rights of the Daguerreotype to the French government later that year.

Louis Daguerre died on July 10, 1851.