SYMHC Classics: Louis Daguerre

This 2021 episode covers Louis Daguerre, who comes up almost any time we mention photography. Well before he figured out how to capture images through a camera obscura, he was an artist and innovator in entertainment. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  Happy Saturday. We're following up this week's episode on Elizabeth Fulham and her connections to the world of photography with our episode on Louis de Guerre, inventor of the de Guerrot type. This episode originally came out December 27, 2021. Enjoy.

• 1:41Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 1:52Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.

• 1:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 1:57Holly Frey?

  You have Probably noticed that there's a name that pops up pretty much anytime we're discussing photography in history, and that is Degas. We have referenced him and his daguerreotypes and the invention of that many times on the show, and we often use it as a reference point for when other people are taking pictures and how far along they've come. We're probably going to reference it again because he really innovated and touched a lot of lives. But well before he figured out how to capture images through a camera obscura, he was an artist and an innovator in entertainment. So today, we are going to talk about all of that because we've never covered him before. And of course, we will also talk about his work in photography.

• 2:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  He's one of those people that has come up so many times that we had to have the conversation about whether we had already done this episode.

• 2:46Holly Frey?

  Yes. Tracy, are you sure we haven't covered Degas?

• 2:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  I just looked through the whole spreadsheet, not in there.

• 2:52Holly Frey?

  Oh.

• 2:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  So he was born Louis-Jacques Mondeau Degas on November 18th, 1787, about 180 kilometers west of Paris in a town called Cormeum Perisie. The family, especially Degas's father, who was named Louis, they were royalists in their politics. And Louis had a sister who even was named after Marie Antoinette. That sister was born in 1791. The senior Louis Degas worked as a court crier before the revolution, and that was a civil service job. But as the French Revolution really heated up, that job, of course, went away. For a while, that meant that the family moved to Orleans, where Louis senior found work as a clerk in an estate.

• 3:38Holly Frey?

  And in 1793, of course, Louis XVI was guillotined, and the reign of terror began. Degas's father was employed by Louis Philippe II, Duc d'Orléans, who sided with the revolution. But he was, of course, a cousin of the king, and he was eventually guillotined for his association with the House of Bourbon. And though Louis Degas senior remained employed at the estate, this seems to have pretty much meant that life in Orleans was a little bit more somber than it had been when the family first arrived there.

• 4:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  There are some holes in the story of Degas' early life. Some of that is just because it would have been unusual for just a regular child's life to be well documented, but it's also because of the period in which he was born. So, consider, for example, he would have still been basically a baby, not even two years old, when the Bastille was stormed in 1789. So, his whole childhood was happening at a time when the monarchy was falling, the revolution was raging. That all would have been very difficult for his royalist father, and it also would have meant that a lot of just so-called "normal" life was significantly disrupted.

• 4:52Holly Frey?

  So, we know that Louis Degas was enrolled in public school in Orleans, but due to those constantly shifting sands of the French government, there were stretches, long stretches sometimes, where classes did not assemble. So, Degas got something of a patchwork education, but he spent that ample free time that he was afforded by the gaps in school to develop his natural talent, which was drawing.

• 5:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  While Louis Degas' name is forever linked to photography, he really did not start out on a career path that would suggest that outcome. In 1800, Louis Degas drew a portrait of his parents. This was sort of an audition. The skill that he exhibited with this portrait led to him being offered an apprenticeship. Not exactly with an artist, though. It was with an architect. This was a stable career path for an artistic 13-year-old in a time when France really did not have that many stable career paths. So, for three years, he dutifully worked at perfecting his ability to render the drawings of building structures. That's something he seems to have really enjoyed.

• 6:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  He loved recreating true life detail in his drawing, and architectural drawings were to him just another iteration of that.

• 6:09Holly Frey?

  Now, as a note, this is something that I stumbled across a lot while researching this episode. You will sometimes see it mentioned in biographical write-ups of Degas, that he also worked as a revenue officer during this early period of his life without much additional information about it. And it kind of seems like this might actually be the result of some confusion due to his name being the same as his father's. And since we know that his father did work as a clerk at an estate, that kind of seems like the most likely scenario.

• 6:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  When the younger Louis Degas finished his apprenticeship at the age of 16, he didn't take the next step into architecture. Instead, he went back to his love of art. He decided to move to Paris to study painting and to try to make a life as an artist. This was something that his parents found terrifying. They had supported his artistic tendencies, but there was just uncertainty and a lack of stability in an art career. And then on top of that, they were also concerned that the young Degas would fall into a life of debauchery in Paris. Finally, after a lot of discussion, they made an arrangement that was agreeable to the parents and the son alike. Louis's father got him an apprenticeship in Paris with Ignacio Eugenio Maria Degas.

• 7:27Holly Frey?

  And Degas was born in Turin, Italy in 1758. And like young Louis Degas, he showed artistic proclivity from a very young age. And he too had moved to Paris to pursue his art, although he did so when he was in his 30s. And by the time his life met up with Degas, he had become a renowned theatrical designer and a painter for the Paris Opera. And Degas moved in with him as part of this apprenticeship deal. That was something his parents insisted upon.

• 7:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  This was a time in his life when Louis Degas lived a pretty enviable existence. He was young, he was making connections in the Paris art scene, and he made the most of that. There are stories about how much fun he was at parties and how he would go into such gatherings, walking on his hands. He loved Paris and Paris loved him back. He was really beloved among his peers. At one point, he even appeared onstage in a small role in the Paris Opera.

• 8:24Holly Frey?

  Yeah, there was one section of a biography about him I was reading where it said that he knew How to walk a tightrope? And that he may have learned this when he was a young boy because festivals would come through the area where they lived. And I'm like, yes, but how did that come up?

• 8:42Holly Frey?

  While he's just hanging out with his friends, like, oh, would you like to see me walk this tightrope that just happens to be here in present? That's a little less clear. But he had a lot of fun skills, it sounds like. And just as he had spent three years as an architect's apprentice, he spent three years under De Gaudy's tutelage before deciding that he wanted to move on. And this was a pretty natural progression because his next move was to take on an assistantship with another artist. And this time it was Pierre Provost, famed panorama painter.

• 9:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  Panoramas are enormous paintings. They were mounted in circular rooms and intended to be viewed from a central viewing platform. They had made their debut in London in 1793. And then Paris had quickly embraced this medium. And Provost really excelled at creating deeply detailed vistas that captured the attention of visitors. He didn't do all this on his own. He had a team of assistants who worked with him, and that is where Degas fit in. In addition to being an apparently delightful party guest, Degas was also a really hard worker.

• 9:50Holly Frey?

  Yeah, he did not ever shirk his work. And moreover, he seemed to have an attitude of like, I will learn everything I can from my mentors. And he really applied himself in every position he was in by all reports. In 1810, while Degas was still working for Provost, and he was 23 at the time, he married the 20-year-old Louise Georgina Aerosmith. Her name is English, that's because her parents were English, although she was born and raised in France. And these two were very much in love. This was a love match. And when Louise's brother had a child out of wedlock, the Degas raised her as their own daughter. Her name was Marguerite Felicite.

• 10:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  After almost 10 years working under Provost, Degas was offered and accepted a new job. That was chief painter at the Theatre de Lambaugu Comique. In that job, Degas elevated the production significantly. He didn't just create backdrops that were far superior to what the theater had before. He also introduced a new way to use them through lighting design. He devised systems of lighting effects to create convincing moonlight scenes. And when it came time to stage the eruption of Mount Etna in a play titled La Belvedere, Degas created a sensation with his lighting design. This spurred ticket sales for the theater.

• 11:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  He became so recognized as an asset for the theater that the Paris Opera wanted to hire him. So for a couple of years, he was designing the scenery for both of those at the same time.

• 11:21Holly Frey?

  Yeah, this is such a striking development because again, remember, right? Like they're doing all of this manually. And at a time when it was like night has fallen and all of the lights would be blown out or all of the windows closed. He was like, no, no. What if we find a way to do this subtly? Which was a complete shift. So all of this and working for these two theater houses at the same time kept Louis very busy, but he still had time to think of new projects. And in 1821, he partnered with an old friend and colleague who had worked as an assistant to Pierre Prevost at the same time that Degas had. That was a man named Charles Marie Bouton. And the two men had a plan to launch a new entertainment venture that built on their

• 12:06Holly Frey?

  knowledge of panorama painting and incorporated the lighting expertise that Degas had acquired through his theater work.

• 12:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  The two men set up a limited stock company and they leased a plot of land and they sold shares to investors to fund their project. On July 11th, 1822, Bouton and Degas opened the Paris Diorama. This scenographic entertainment was something completely new. The two had to design a theater to house and display what they were working on. It had large scale images in common with the panorama, but it offered entirely new spectacles for audiences to witness.

• 12:44Holly Frey?

  And we're going to talk more about what the diorama was and how it was received in just a moment, but first we'll pause for a quick sponsor break.

• 12:56Speaker 05

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• 13:26Speaker 06

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• 14:17Holly Frey?

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• 15:02Holly Frey?

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• 17:11Holly Frey?

  So in the diorama, scenes like landscapes and architectural views were painted in large scale for audience viewing. But in this version, they were painted on linen, so they Would be translucent. Then lighting effects were used to bring the painting seemingly to life before the viewer's eyes. This was, again, remember, before electrical current was used in buildings by a number of decades. So, Degas had designed the theater to make use of natural light. There were windows and skylights around the theater that had shutters, which could be operated manually to great effect.

• 17:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  To add to the illusion, there were sound effects. Sometimes there would be an actor to fill out the image in a three-dimensional way. There wasn't any story in play for these scenes. It was just the magical illusion of feeling like you were sitting in a meadow by a mountainside, or standing near a brook, or looking out over the interior of Canterbury Cathedral from a high-up gallery. These scenes would last for 10 or 15 minutes, and then a massive turntable would rotate the image away and bring a second one into view that would be similarly animated with light and other effects. Both the public and critics really raved over the diorama. Some were said to have been reluctant to accept that they had been looking at a two-dimensional image that whole time.

• 18:32Holly Frey?

  Yeah, there was allegedly one woman who, like, asked to be led down the steps of the cathedral, and they're like, "They're not there."

• 18:40Holly Frey?

  In less than a year, the business had made back the money that it had caused to open it and to operate it, and it started to turn a profit. The next obvious step was to open a second location, and that second one was in Regent's Park, London. Because this had been a proven success already in Paris, Botton and Degas had no trouble finding investors for their second theater. And when it opened, it was covered extensively in the British press.

• 19:07Tracy V. Wilson?

  On September 29, 1823, The Morning Chronicle of London ran a story that was simply titled "The Diorama." It read, quote, "The diorama, which has long been an object of wonder and delight at Paris, is at length established in this metropolis. A spacious building has been expressly constructed for this exhibition in that part of the new road which adjoins Portland Place, at an expense which is said to have exceeded £10,000. And on Saturday, a select number of visitors was admitted to a private inspection, previous to it being opened to the public on this day."

• 19:44Holly Frey?

  There was also an assurance in the write-up to potential visitors that this was definitely a very different thing than the panoramas, which had been popular in London for years at that point. It read, quote, "The diorama differs in this respect from the panorama that, instead of a circular view of the objects represented, the whole picture is seen at once in perspective, but it differs from it still more essentially in the extraordinary fidelity with which the objects are depicted, and in the completeness of the optical illusion." Later on, after describing pretty much every corner of the theater in detail, the journalist writes, quote, "In the diorama, everything contributes to favor the illusion.

• 20:26Holly Frey?

  The skill of the artist is the first thing which strikes us in the panorama and the last in the diorama."

• 20:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  Both Degas and Botton were made knights in the French Legion of Honor by Louis XVIII. Many dioramas popped up in Europe and in North America after their success in Paris and in London. These were run by other operators who were hoping to cash in on the popularity of the medium, but the original partners kept developing shows in only their two theaters.

• 20:55Holly Frey?

  And while the diorama business was still growing, Degas had begun to conduct experiments in image capture. As early as 1824, he had set up a lab in the basement of the Paris diorama building so that he could pursue his fascination with the field of photography. Although it was, of course, not called that yet, it didn't get that name until 1839. He just knew he was trying to capture light and use it to replicate the imagery of the world around him. He did not seem to know that a lot of other men had already been doing the same thing for quite a while with no real success.

• 21:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  It makes sense that after creating the diorama, Degas would feel driven to find a new level of realism to keep audiences buying tickets. Part of his drive was probably the realization that Botton wasn't really interested in staying with the diorama long-term. Degas knew the success of the business was totally up to him. Additionally, the business had a lot of overhead. Every time a new scene was staged, it had to be created from scratch, and that was expensive. But if Degas didn't keep new images rotating in, audiences would just stop coming. He eventually sold off his interest in the London location just to keep his finances afloat.

• 22:11Holly Frey?

  And according to friends and acquaintances, none of whom were allowed to see what he was up to, he was completely obsessed with his secret project. His beloved wife Louise brought him food, but even she was not allowed into the lab. He sometimes, again, according to friends, went for two to three days without leaving that lab, often foregoing sleep for unhealthy long stretches as he worked.

• 22:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  He had been familiar with the camera obscura for a while. For a refresher, this is a dark chamber, either a room or a box, that has a tiny hole to allow light in. Through that hole, an image of whatever is outside of the chamber is projected onto the opposite wall, inverted. Camera obscura, which means dark chamber in Latin, is a concept that's been around since antiquity. So this was not a new technology when Degas was alive. But he thought that somehow it could be used not just to project images, but also to capture the light somehow.

• 23:12Holly Frey?

  Because Degas didn't really document what he was doing, but also he probably didn't really know what he was doing to be able to put it into words, we don't have a lot of information about how this whole thing played out for him. There were certainly experiments being done by other men using chemistry to try to create images with light, including the work of people like Jacques Charles, who figured out that you could capture a person's silhouette on paper by treating the paper with light-sensitive chemicals and then projecting the person's shadow onto it. But even Charles's images were temporary. The entire paper would eventually darken because it had been treated. The use of chemical processes was also probably pretty challenging for Degas.

• 23:55Holly Frey?

  Thanks to his inconsistent education in his early years, he really just did not have a command of chemistry to start from. But he did have access to optics expertise and the associated equipment, thanks to his friend Charles Chevalier. The Chevalier family business was in producing various scientific equipment, including lenses. So at least in that area, Degas had a very steady supply.

• 24:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  It was through Chevalier that Degas made a crucial connection that would finally give him a breakthrough. Nissifor Nyeps sent his cousin to Chevalier's shop to purchase a camera obscura.

• 24:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Nissifor Nieps had been working on a process to create pictures using sunlight since the 18 teens. He had used a camera to create a heliograph with batumin on paper in 1826, but that had needed eight hours of exposure to work. Even with that eight hours, it was kind of gauzy and faded in appearance. So he was trying to improve on that. When he asked about a new camera obscura, Charles Chevalier got Nieps' address, gave it to Louis de Guerre, who in turn reached out to Nieps via a letter.

• 25:10Holly Frey?

  Both of these men were a bit cautious initially. De Guerre did not want to risk any potential business interest by giving away what he had been working on. And Nieps was not entirely clear who De Guerre was, or how he had gotten his address. And this letter out of the blue seemed kind of rude and suspicious to him. It was very forward. It would be like if a stranger called you Tracy and went like, hey, can I have your research logins at the following three places?

• 25:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Holly Frey?

  And you'd be like, jum excuse.

• 25:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  Considering my response when I get unsolicited PR pitches to a personal email address that I've never publicized, I totally get this reaction.

• 25:48Holly Frey?

  Yeah. So the reply that Nieps sent was brief, and it merely confirmed that yes, he had been doing some experiments along the lines of what De Guerre was asking about.

• 25:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  It took De Guerre months to reply, but when he did, he once again offended Nieps by asking for a sample of his experiments. Nieps knew that De Guerre was the man behind the popular diorama, so he started asking acquaintances in Paris if they knew him. He found that De Guerre had a reputation in the art world for his talent and his work with light, but Nieps still only wrote him a short reply without a sample. He said that he thought they were on different paths.

• 26:27Holly Frey?

  He's so polite. He wouldn't leave it unanswered, but he was kind of like, hey, go with God, but I'm doing something else.

• 26:36Holly Frey?

  Whether out of genuine interest or just desperation, De Geir wrote him once more, and this time he actually sent along a sample of his own work. But he didn't know that Neeps had also reached a sort of breaking point where the family money was running out. He had spent a lot on this effort and he too was hitting a dead end and not progressing any farther. He still thought De Geir might not be trustworthy, but he did reach out with the suggestion that, quote, "It should be of mutual interest to reciprocate our efforts to attain the goal." And he sent a sample, which De Geir sent him a pretty scathing critique of.

• 27:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  These two men finally had a meeting in Paris in 1827. Understandably, they remained pretty tentative with one another. Each was concerned that he was lagging behind the other. But Neeps described having a pretty great time with De Geir, who had given him a tour of the diorama. There was another gap in their exchanges due to the illness and death of Neeps brother Claude, but eventually the two of them were writing to one another with regularity. It was not until autumn of 1829 that the two officially entered into a partnership, which had a 10-year contract.

• 27:50Holly Frey?

  So we're going to talk about some of the details of Neeps's progress in image capture after we first pause and hear from the sponsors that keep Stuff You Missed in History Class going.

• 28:02Speaker 05

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• 28:56Holly Frey?

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• 29:40Holly Frey?

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• 31:43Holly Frey?

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• 32:05Holly Frey?

  In his work, Niappes had coated a paper with silver chloride to capture an image from his studio window of the landscape outside. This was what he called heliography. Eventually he made a more permanent image from that same window, this time on a pewter plate. He wanted to make a printable plate and he had also managed to reproduce an engraved portrait with his process and make two prints from it. Deger traveled to visit Niappes and learn about how he had progressed and he took all of the information he learned back to Paris so that he could do more experiments.

• 32:37Tracy V. Wilson?

  But then in 1830, everything got complicated. The diorama was in financial trouble. Gouton finally left the business entirely and the July Revolution in which Charles X was deposed and King Louis Philippe took on the throne, took the throne. That left France in a tense time when letters that talked about something like chemicals could easily be misconstrued as some kind of revolutionary correspondence. So Deger and Niappes stopped communicating.

• 33:06Holly Frey?

  Things were so financially tenuous that Deger wrote to the Crown to ask for a promotion to officer in the Legion of Honor. The thinking was that that would come with a financial payment that would help to keep him from his own financial ruin.

• 33:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  But in the time that he had free from working on the diorama to try to keep that going, Daguerre learned Niéppe's method of capturing images. He wanted to see if he had any ideas for how to move it forward. He and Niéppe were writing to each other in code so they could keep collaborating. This was really a frantic time. Daguerre declared bankruptcy in March of 1832, but he and Niéppe kept working.

• 33:43Holly Frey?

  Yeah, eventually they came up with a list where they gave chemicals number assignments and they each had it so they would just like use numbers in their letters, which to me would look like a suspicious code.

• 33:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  That would look very...

• 33:59Holly Frey?

  So Niéppe had used a bitumen coating that hardened when exposed to light for some of his experiments. And Daguerre came up with a variation on that idea that used distilled lavender oil to improve on the heliograph. That lavender oil left a white residue in areas of the image where light had hit it, and that created an improved image than they had had before that the duo called a physautotype. This was an improvement, but it wasn't really a breakthrough, not at the level they needed. So they kept working.

• 34:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  I like to think that this smelled really nice.

• 34:32Holly Frey?

  I hope so. If nothing else, they could say the studio smelled beautiful.

• 34:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. So Daguerre shifted his work back to using silver salts instead of a resin-based image capture. There's an apocryphal story about how he got to his next breakthrough in it. He had accidentally left a spoon on an iodized plate and then later realized that a perfect shadow of the spoon had been created on the plate when the light hit it. So he started to purposefully sensitize the silver on the plates that they were using. He did this with iodine fumes. Daguerre is said to have shared this story verbally throughout his life, but he never wrote it down. We don't really know how accurate it is.

• 35:14Holly Frey?

  Yeah, there are some questions about how much that story may have changed in the tellings. Initially, Degas's work with iodine to sensitize plates did not really return results. But he never got to share his frustration about this with Niépce because Nissifor died suddenly in July 1833 after having a stroke. And this left Degas without the scientific expertise of his collaborator. But once again, he was tenacious and he kept at the work.

• 35:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  And an accident is again said to have given him the next advancement. Degas is said to have placed one of his polished silver coated plates into a cupboard after having exposed it in a camera obscura. The cupboard was a lightproof chemical cupboard that was intended for storing exposed plates. But he noticed when he returned to the place roughly half an hour later, the image that he had exposed in the camera obscura had already developed. A thermometer had broken in the cupboard and Louis Degas realized that mercury vapor was speeding the development.

• 36:17Holly Frey?

  Yeah, again, this is apocryphal. So in some versions of it, you'll see that he left it overnight frustrated that it had not initially developed. But regardless, this was a huge step forward, but the process was still not solid and that is mostly because the images themselves were not. Permanence of those images remained a problem. Those plates would just keep developing over time and the image would be lost. So they would just like keep having more details until they just became a big blob. Eventually, Degas figured that problem out as well. It was merely a matter of stopping the developing process by removing the excess silver iodide from the plate. Degas used a salt solution of sodium thiosulfate to do this.

• 37:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  So the system for making what would be called a daguerreotype was, one, polish a silver coated copper plate. Two, sensitize the plate with iodine fumes and place it in a light, tight plate. Three, slide that plate into the camera obscura and then slide the light tight covering open. Four, expose that for some number of minutes. And that was variable depending on the light and the camera obscura and the concentration of the chemicals that were used. So this required some experience and know how of the person who was who was trying to make the image. Step five, develop the image in mercury vapor. And step six, stop the development process with a salt based solution.

• 37:45Holly Frey?

  The first public mention of de Gere's work actually appeared in 1835. This is several years before, like the big release about it. That was in an article in the Journal des Artistes that was about new shows at the diorama. It wasn't about image capture at all. But at the end of the write up, which had no attribution as to its author and has even made some people question whether maybe de Gere wrote this himself, there was the following paragraph, quote, "He has discovered, we are told, the means of collecting on a plate prepared by him, the image produced by a camera obscura, in such a way that a portrait, a landscape, or any view projected on this plate by an ordinary camera obscura,

• 38:26Holly Frey?

  leaves its impression in light and shade, and this presents the most perfect of all drawings. A preparation applied to this image preserves it for an indefinite time. Physical science has perhaps never presented a wonder comparable to this one."

• 38:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  This was a considerable announcement, but nothing much seems to have been said about it for the entire year. But then architect Alphonse Eugene Hubert wrote a response that amounted to basically, I seriously doubt it. He had been trying to capture camera obscura images as well, but had not had any luck. So to him, it seemed highly unlikely that de Gere, who did not have a scientific background, could have managed it.

• 39:10Holly Frey?

  By 1837, Degas had tested and replicated his process enough times that it was set. He could always get consistent results. As with other aspects of his work, that we don't really know what that process of testing and refinement was like. We have no idea, truly no idea, the manner in which he arrived at realizing each step along the way was the correct one. We do know his process was different from all of the other photographic processes that were in development by other people that were having problems.

• 39:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  The Academy of Sciences heard a presentation that laid out exactly how Degas's process worked on January 7th, 1839. That lecture was not given by Degas, but by François Arago. Degas couldn't do it. He had felt ill.

• 39:58Holly Frey?

  Or at least he claimed he did. We don't know.

• 40:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  At least he said he felt ill.

• 40:02Holly Frey?

  He may have had nerves, and that is why an astronomer first explained photography at the Academy of Sciences. But Degas had decided to name this process after himself, of course, and that was something that really bothered Nissifor Niép's son Isidore, who felt that his father should really be recognized. But Degas really thought that he had changed the approach so much from the heliograph work that Niép's had done that the name shift was warranted. And in a revised version of the contract that he had originally agreed to with Niép's, Degas offered his former partner's family financial rights to half of the money made from Degas typing and the promise that Niép's name would always be included in formal announcements.

• 40:46Holly Frey?

  Isidore Niép's signed this new deal.

• 40:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  In terms of making money from this work, Louis Degas took an interesting approach. He knew from his experience with the diorama that imitators would pop up as soon as he filed for a patent. And in France at the time, there was really not much that could be done about it. So instead, he sold it to the French government and in turn, the French government released it free to the world as a gift on August 19th, 1839. As part of the sale to the government, Degas had arranged for annual payments to be made to both himself and Niép's family. Degas got 6,000 francs a year and Niép's heirs got 4,000. Daguerre did manage to patent his process in England, Ireland, and Scotland before

• 41:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  the French government released it. So he maintained his rights there and in their colonies.

• 41:38Holly Frey?

  Yeah, he did try for a while some other business sort of plans to try to make money off of this, but none of those were really working out, which is why he sold it to the government. As the Daguerre type took on a life of its own and the field of photography continued to advance through other inventors improving upon it, Daguerre retired. Again, he was financially set. A fire destroyed a lot of his early work in 1839, and he did not rebuild his burnt studio after that. He did give some presentations and lessons on occasion, but according to most people, he was actually kind of shy, particularly about talking about his achievement. And all he really wanted to do was go back to painting, and he did a lot of that in his later years. During the 1840s, he painted

• 42:23Holly Frey?

  a number of huge pieces for churches in Paris.

• 42:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  Louis Daguerre died of a heart attack on July 10, 1851, at his home in Brissoumerne, just outside of Paris. In the time between the announcement of the Daguerre type and his death, other innovators had come up with new ways to capture imagery with light. That included William Henry Fox Talbot, who patented a paper negative process, the callotype, in 1841. Daguerre type studios opened in Europe and the United States, and two photography journals were launched in the US. They were the Daguerrian Art Journal and the Photographic Art Journal. And then immediately before his death, starting in May of 1851, a Daguerre type exhibition had been mounted at the Great Exhibition of London.

• 43:10Holly Frey?

  Which is another thing that comes up a lot. Also, hey, surprise, this is the first of a sort of two-parter that we're doing on early photography. They are standalone episodes, but they're linked thematically. And on an upcoming episode, we are going to discuss one of the people who took Daguerre's new technology and kind of ran with it. Oh, Louis Daguerre.

• 43:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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