Eynard and the birth of photography

The statement announcing the invention of the daguerreotype and its publication on 19 August 1839 by François Arago and Jean-Baptiste Biot, two influential members of the Académie des sciences, caused an immense stir. The process bore the name of one of its inventors, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851). With the death of Nicéphore Niépce in 1833, six years after the start of their association, Daguerre was alone in carrying on their work to fix the image produced in a camera obscura and eventually perfected the technique. The announcements of 1839, which crowned years of research, took place in a context of rivalry among scientists and artists. The daguerreotype dominated paper-based processes, the calotypes of William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) and the direct positives of Hippolyte Bayard (1801-1887). Spurred on by the fanfare that the daguerreotype was generating, Talbot and Bayard hurried to present their own processes the same year. In July of 1839, Bayard submitted thirty proofs to an event that history now holds up as the first photography show in the world. Although they enjoyed the advantage of being less costly and yielding reproducible images, paper-based techniques at the time could not boast the precision of the daguerreotype; it would only be in the 1850s that the glass negative would begin little by little to supplant Daguerrean plates.

An exceptional reception

The reception Daguerre’s invention met with owes nothing to chance. It was the result of a plan that was carefully elaborated and executed. Starting with the announcement of January 1839, Daguerre performed numerous demonstrations before guests from not only France, but also England, Germany, Italy, and Russia. He joined forces with Isidore Niépce, the son and heir of his former partner, before signing a contract with Alphonse Giroux, a tabletier (manufacturer of small luxury items) and furniture maker. He wanted to produce and market the photographic devices and necessary materials. Daguerre also wrote, working with the celebrated optician Noël-Marie-Paymal Lerebours, a detailed how-to manual and ensured its publication in several languages.[1] Finally, with Arago’s support, he convinced the French government to acquire the copyright of the process, earning him a state annuity which he shared with Isidore Niépce. Hardly had the process been made public, mere weeks after being purchased by the state, when it was being offered to one and all royalty-free, paving the way for the broadest and quickest spread of the medium imaginable.

While other techniques were also revealed to the public during that pivotal year, the craze for the daguerreotype was unequaled, as were the signs of distrust, moreover, and ridicule. The daguerreotype left no one indifferent; it heralded a change in the economy of images and the conditions of their commercialization, and upended their status in society, things that no one could ignore. In the review L’Artiste, Jules Janin, the literary critic for the Journal des débats, spoke of the “Daguerotype” as “the finest, most delicate, and most complete reproduction to which God’s works and the fruits of man’s industry can aspire.”[2] The physician and member of the Académie des sciences Alfred Donné had attended the announcement of the process in August of 1839; he described the impression the discovery made on him, “There the magnifying glass revealed that legion of microscopic objects the human eye alone seeks in vain, delineated with precision and delicacy, with that admirable gradation of hues…"[3] On the other hand, twenty years later, Baudelaire – certainly not the first to do so – would caustically return to the popular craze that Daguerre’s invention had sparked in The Salon of 1859, “An avenging God has heard the prayers of the multitude. Daguerre was His Messiah. And so they told themselves, ‘Since photography gives us every desired guarantee of exactitude (they believe that, the senseless fools!), art is photography.’ From that moment on, loathsome society rushed, like one vast Narcissus, to gaze upon its trivial image on metal.”

Looming over the debate pitting enthusiastic promoters and detractors was the question of the place Daguerre was claiming for his process among the arts. Not insignificantly the Académie des beaux-arts came down on the side of Bayard, preferring the velvety finish of his paper proofs over the cool precision of Daguerre’s metal plates. In the review La Caricature, Théodore Maurisset published a cartoon titled “Daguerreotypomania”[4] that illustrates the excesses brought about by the rage for daguerreotypes. Complete with commentary poking fun at the crowds of “daguerreotypolaters” and “daguerreotypomaniacs,” the cartoon features in a welter of details gawkers lining up to fit themselves into a machine that grips the head in a vise to immobilize it. Nearby a sign advertises “gallows to let for gentlemen engravers,” although a few, henceforth out of work, have taken advantage of the offer and are already at the end of their rope. Critics called into question the ability of the new medium to imitate reality and its supposed ease to do so, praised by Daguerre but largely disputed after Arago’s presentation at the Academie. The controversy pushed Daguerre to mount still more public demonstrations and personally train numerous operators of the new device to guarantee the spread of his process far and wide.

The daguerreotype seemed like an extraordinary curiosity to men of science in the year 1839. This peculiarity meant that it was to enjoy pride of place in the Louis Figuier’s study of modern scientific discoveries, his Exposition et histoire des principales découvertes scientifiques modernes, the first two volumes of which came out in 1851. In subsequent editions, Figuier was to further develop the chapter on photography. His work led to his being widely recognized as a go-to historian, a reference in his field, and as the author of the “best if not [the] sole synthesizing account of photography’s early years.”[5] The exceptional nature of the daguerreotype also made it an object of prestige for the grandees of this world. The King of France, Louis-Philippe I had views of the monuments of Paris sent to the courts of Europe in Bavaria, Austria, Russia, and Prussia in 1839.[6]

The earliest professional and amateur users

Taking daguerreotypes quickly conquered society. Because of its technical aspect, from the very first it drew mechanics and watchmakers, who were well experienced in handling elaborate systems, but also chemists and opticians, professionals who found new opportunities in this invention. They began to produce and sell the required equipment and materials, and gave lessons on how to work with them. The quality of the optics was in particular a sign of success for the first devices since it enabled the user to reduce the time of the pose by increasing the quantity of light introduced into the chamber of Daguerre’s camera. The Parisian opticians Vincent (1770-1841) and Charles Chevalier (1804-1859), inventors of the achromatic lens, were in contact with Niépce and Daguerre very early on; they offered cameras that were coveted and practiced photography themselves.

Such was the case as well of another famous Parisian optician, Noël-Marie-Paymal Lerebours (1807-1873), whose devices were famous for the quality of their optics. Beginning in 1839, he helped draft Daguerre’s manual and in the same year became one of the main suppliers of equipment to the first photographers. He quickly understood the interest that lay in using the new medium in the process of producing images. Between 1840 and 1843, he embarked on a commercial venture, namely, the sale of views made from daguerreotypes, which he brought together in albums he called Excursions daguerriennes.[7] Formally, nothing distinguishes these collections of engravings and later lithographs from other illustrated works. But the images, executed from photographs, had the force of truth and reproduced a renewed vision of the world. “Thanks to the sudden precision of the Daguerreotype,” Lerebours writes in his introduction, “places will no longer be reproduced after a drawing that is always more or less modified by the taste or imagination of the painter.”[8]

Amateur and professional daguerreotypists were hired to provide images of monuments in France and the rest of Europe, and throughout the Mediterranean world. Here it is worth noting several views of Switzerland in particular, including one of Geneva and one of the city’s surroundings which count among the first traces to have come down to us of the practice of photography in the country. The painters Frédéric Auguste Antoine Goupil (1817-1878) and Horace Vernet (1789-1863), trained by Lerebours in the daguerreotype process, brought back views from Egypt that were published in the Excursions daguerriennes. Begun in 1839 with the publication of Daguerre’s manual augmented with notes by the optician, this publication won Lerebours a choice spot in the daguerreotype milieu and brought him international fame, which was to figure highly in the eyes of the first Swiss photographers.

While it attracted professional producers of images, photography also offered enlightened and wealthy amateurs the chance to create images themselves without turning to artists. Up to that time, they had been forced to rely on such artists or learn how to draw and develop a personal practice of the profession. Daguerre explicitly intended his system for this well-off clientele when he wrote, in an 1838 prospectus that was published before the announcement of his invention, that “without any notion of drawing, without any knowledge of chemistry or physics… anyone will, with the daguerreotype, create the view of his château or house in the country.”[9] The financial investment that taking daguerreotypes involved ruled out the medium’s embrace by a broad public, for the cost of the device was some three hundred and fifty francs, the equivalent of one hundred days of work for the average laborer.[10] The fields in which photography could be applied in wealthy circles were vast, given how the consumption of images had developed and diversified in the first half of the 19^th century. First, there was the photography of real estate, mentioned by Daguerre, then isolated or group portraiture quickly arose, which was meant to be passed along to one’s friends and family through the practice of exchanging images. The chambre daguerrienne, the Daguerreotype camera, very rapidly became an indispensable companion of rich travelers. In the introduction to his book The Pencil of Nature, Fox Talbot recounts the melancholy that overcame him because of his inability to draw despite the use of a camera lucida when he found himself on the shores of Lake Como in 1834 with his family.[11] But even those who had been trained in the art of painting, like Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804-1892), took up photography. In 1841 Prangey kitted himself out with the necessary equipment to bring back images of the architecture during a trip around the Mediterranean that would take him as far as Egypt. He also produced views of Switzerland, where he made several stays between 1845 and 1850.[12]

The spread of the daguerreotype from Paris to Switzerland

The spread of the daguerreotype, from Paris to the provinces[13] and beyond the borders of France, initially involved the press, which relayed the latest news touching on the new invention. In Strasbourg, Lyon, and Marseille, several regional newspapers reprinted the article Jules Janin published in the review L’Artiste following the announcement on 7 January 1839. In Switzerland, the Gazette de Lausanne also published the news on 15 January.[14] A little later, on 12 July, the Nouvelliste vaudois covered an exhibition of daguerreotypes that had been held in the Chamber of Deputies, “One noted three streets of Paris, the interior of M. Daguerre’s studio, and a group of busts in the Museum of Antiquities. One admired the prodigious sharpness of the details… everything is reproduced with an incredible exactitude.”[15] The Journal de Genève, which had failed to carry the announcement of Daguerre’s process before the Académie des sciences in January, informed its readers in June of the French government’s intention to acquire the patent.[16]

Photography piqued the interest of cultivated circles, notably in Geneva, from very early on. The naturalist Jean Senebier (1742-1809), while studying in Geneva the influence of light in the plant kingdom, had already discovered in 1782 silver chloride’s photosensitivity.[17] It was partly in Geneva, during a stay in the autumn of 1834 that William Henry Fox Talbot worked on his “photogenic drawings”; he carried out experiments there as well on how to fix images produced by the action of light – what would later be called “fixing” – but the fact doesn’t seem to have had any impact on the local scientific milieu.[18] The professor of veterinarian medicine in Bern Andreas-Friedrich Gerber (1797-1872) succeeded in recording views through a microscope on paper made light sensitive with a coating of silver chloride. Spurred by the official announcement of the daguerreotype on 7 January 1839, he published a communiqué in the Schweizerische Beobachter on the following 2 February in which he described the results he had obtained. The discovery at the University of Bern of the views taken by Gerber in January 1840 meant that he was “considered one of the independent inventors of the photographic process.”[19] In Geneva, the Société des Arts turned its attention to the daguerreotype. In August 1840 at the Classe d’industrie et de commerce, the physicist Auguste De la Rive (1801-1873) presented a device that bore the original Daguerre trademark.[20]

The paper-based processes

The paper-based processes cannot be overlooked for they were the subject of various experiments carried out concurrently with those involving the daguerreotype. In 1842, in Geneva, the chemist Etienne Melly was one of the first to get “excellent proofs on paper obtained through the Talbot system.”[21] The oldest datable photograph of Geneva is a salted paper print that dates back to the spring of the same year. In the foreground can be seen the building site that was transforming the former covered market of Bel-Air; work on heightening the building, which was underway when the photograph was taken, allows us to accurately date the image, a hypothesis confirmed by the absence of leaves on the trees.[22] But it was above all painters like Jean-Louis Populus and François D’Albert-Durade who lent credibility to salted paper prints on the Geneva arts scene. They presented their work to the Société des Arts de Genève in 1849 and 1853.[23]

The first Swiss daguerreotypists: Isenring, Joly, and Détraz

The speed with which the invention spread starting in the autumn of 1839 probably makes it impossible to identify the first attested photographer in Switzerland. At least three Swiss figures can claim the title. The first to take an interest in photography was Pierre Gustave Joly de Lotbinière (1798-1865), who acquired the Daguerre device quite likely from Lerebours, immediately after the invention was made public in August of 1839. Since 1827, he had been allied with a rich Canadian family after having worked in the Champagne wine business his father had founded in Epernay. He hailed from eastern Switzerland, even if he had ties to Geneva, where his father had been born. Equipped with his brand-new device, he embarked, 19 September 1839, on a trip that would take him to Greece, Egypt, the Middle East, and Turkey. Six views are known thanks to their 1840 publication in Lerebours’s Excursions daguerriennes. Some were also used to create the illustrations of Hector Horeau’s Panorama d'Egypte et de Nubie, which was published the same year.[24] Joly notably penned a text for Lerebours on the Parthenon, “This view was taken in the autumn of the year 1839. I wish to state this because it is the first time the image of the Parthenon has been fixed on a plate thanks to Daguerre’s most ingenious process.” Choosing next to immortalize the Propylaea, he lets his enthusiasm as a photographer show, “A strict observer of Daguerre’s libretto, I thought I had not a minute to lose to present my plate to the influence of the rays of the sun.”[25]

Another precursor of photography in Switzerland was the St. Gallen painter and engraver Johann Baptist Isenring (1796-1860), who brought back from Paris an original Daguerre proof on 18 October 1839, which he publicly showed in his home in his native town.[26] Shortly after that, on 30 November 1839, the St. Galler Zeitung[27] reported that Isenring had acquired a copy of Daguerre’s original camera. He had also received Daguerrean proofs depicting the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, the Tuileries Palace, and a still life. Isenring mounted in his St. Gallen studio an exhibition of photographs that ran from 13 to 20 August 1840. This is the first true photography show in Switzerland, which the catalogue described as an “art exhibition comprising a collection of daguerreotypes, for the most part portraits done from nature. Realized in May, June, and July 1840.”[28] Some of them had been colorized by Isenring according to a process he perfected, the copyright of which he then sold to an English chemist,[29] thus doing pioneering work in this domain as well.

Finally, mention must be made of that “pupil from the secondary school of Lausanne, the young D.,” whom the Nouvelliste vaudois of 12 November 1839 praised for having managed to “put M. Daguerre’s discovery into practice,” construct a camera, and prepare the “metal plates.” This was most surely, as George-Antoine Bridel proposed in 1942,[30] the Lausannois Antoine Détraz (1821-1900), a chemistry assistant who was eighteen years old at the time. He was part of the first circle of pioneering photographers in the Canton of Vaud. He notably worked with Adrien Constant de Rebecque (1806-1876) for whom he would manage the Société anonyme de l’atelier photographique du Grand-Pont until 1864, before settling in Vevey, and then permanently in Geneva in 1878.

The three Swiss figures mentioned just now – Joly, Isenring, and Détraz – all of whom began practicing photography in 1839, are actors in the new medium who are representative of photography’s early days, i.e., a professional maker of images, a rich traveler, and a specialized worker. In Lausanne, where Antoine Détraz was active, as we have seen, there formed a veritable network of expertise that played a leading role in the development of the budding medium of photography. The mathematician and astronomer Marc Secrétan (1804-1867), the engraver and draftsman Friedrich von Martens (1806-1885), and the tinsmith Samuel Heer (1811-1889) together began experimenting with the daguerreotype in the early 1840s. Benjamin François Marie Delessert (1817-1869) and especially Adrien Constant de Rebecque, related to Delessert through his marriage with Benjamin’s cousin, complete this Vaudois milieu, which Jean-Gabriel Eynard was associated with, as we shall see.

The importance of Paris and the influence of Lerebours

The point in common between these figures is the central role played by Paris and especially the optician Noël-Marie-Paymal Lerebours. We have already mentioned that Joly quite probably acquired his photographic equipment from him, made his images available to him, and penned texts for his Excursions daguerriennes. Von Martens, who divided his life between the French capital and Lausanne, doubtless discovered photography for himself while engraving plates from daguerreotypes that were to serve as illustrations for the very same book. Secrétan worked closely with Lerebours and cowrote with him a treatise on photography in 1842 before joining him in Paris to seal a partnership in 1845.[31] Furthermore, the Swiss practitioners regularly showed their work in Paris. Von Martens began exhibiting the first panoramic daguerreotypes there in 1842[32] and it was in the same city that Constant de Rebecque put his efforts on display under the name of Constant-Delessert, work that established his reputation as a daguerreotypist.

The Excursions daguerriennes, moreover, proved to be a model that was picked up on in Switzerland. The lithographer Hercule Nicolet (1801-1872), based in Neuchâtel, published in 1840 an album titled Souvenirs de Neuchâtel,[33] which includes views executed from daguerreotypes; what is more, one of these shows a daguerreotypist at work like the draftsmen in an earlier age depicted in landscape paintings; this item constitutes one of the oldest, if not the oldest depiction of a photographer at work. While we do not know for sure if Nicolet knew Lerebours’s work,[34] there is no doubt whatsoever that the daguerreotypist from Solothurn Franziska Möllinger (1817-1880) did. In 1842 she began shooting views of Swiss landscapes, which she then had the lithographer Johann Friedrich Wagner (1801- after 1850) copy for the edition of Vues daguerréotypées[35] devoted to several Swiss towns and regions, which was brought out in 1844.

We also owe to Lerebours the oldest publication of a photographic image of Geneva and probably Switzerland that has been conserved. Executed after a daguerreotype, it was published in the Excursions daguerriennes in 1841. The depiction of the building site of the Hôtel de l'Ecu, which was begun in February of the same year, locates the moment in time when the original daguerreotype was taken. It is known that shortly after this one of Lerebours’s clerks, back from Italy, showed the Genevan optician and passionate enthusiast of daguerreotypes Marie Valentin Bénédict Artaria (1796-1874) images that had been created during a trip through several transalpine cities and towns; the view may have been taken at that moment, especially since Artaria’s shop stood on the Place du Rhône, which figures at the center of the engraving.

Lerebours’s publication also lies at the heart of the criticism leveled by a man like the Genevan writer, illustrator and art critic Rodolphe Töpffer. In March of 1841 he reacted to Daguerre’s invention in an article titled “De la plaque de Daguerre. À propos des Excursions daguerriennes” (On Daguerre’s Plate. Regarding Excursions daguerriennes). It is conceivable that he saw not only the book and its engravings with their slightly arid precision, but also the several daguerreotypes that had been shown at Artaria’s shop the preceding year and probably some other plates as well. He faulted the process for its purely technical dimension, from which art is absent, “This thing that is missing from the Daguerrean plates… it is the seal of thought, human and individual, it is the soul spread over the canvas… it is Art!”[36] Töpffer inaugurated a train of thought that would also be turned against painters on occasion. Thus, on 14 September 1850, Le Nouvelliste vaudois (p. 4) criticized the realist skill of the painter Joseph Hornung, likening it to the “daguerreotype, which would not yield more,” like a painting where the “feeling of life” is missing.[37]

The first Genevan studios

Very few of the optician Artaria’s photographs have been conserved,[38] although he figured among the first daguerreotypists to open a studio in Geneva.[39] As early as 4 April 1840, he was promoting the idea of offering grieving families a daguerreotype portrait of the dearly departed for “a fee… so modest that it is within everyone’s means,” which supposes that he was already selling plates.[40] This news item was taken up again by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on 24 April 1840.[41] His talent was recognized. The Société des Arts hailed the quality of the views done by Artaria, who “gives hope that Geneva will not lag behind when it comes to what is being done abroad.”[42] On 15 July 1841, the Journal de Genève once again praised the talents displayed by Artaria, “an artist of this city,” whose portraits “surpass by far in beauty, tone and depth, the very best that is being done in Paris.”[43]

Other professional studios rounded out what Artaria was offering in Geneva. Louis Bonijol (1796-1869), a maker of physics instruments located on the Place du Grand-Mézel, had been practicing daguerreotype photography on a commercial scale probably since 1841, as the label on the reverse of one of his proofs attests.[44] Bonijol is the creator of a daguerreotype taken at Beaulieu, one of Jean-Gabriel Eynard’s properties (dl 03). Some hand noted that it had been executed in the “autumn of 1841,” an indication that was later corrected to “rather the summer of 1840,” two indications that would make this plate by Bonijol one of the first, if not the very first, Swiss photograph that has come down to us. It should be noted that the “Collection industrielle de Lausanne” thought it conserved, in 1862, “one of the first daguerreotypes done in Switzerland by Bonijol.”[45]

The machine manufacturer Charles Sechehaye opened his workshop for different-sized daguerreotypes in 1843,[46] for which the Société des Arts awarded him its Industry and Commerce Class medal.[47] One such workshop soon gave way to many in the years that followed.[48]

Traveling daguerreotypists

Traveling daguerreotypists and their practice are not as well documented. It is known, for example, that a certain Sulzberger passed through Zurich in October 1839, while Johann Baptist Taeschler crisscrossed Switzerland in 1840 before settling in St. Gallen in 1846.[49] The Parisian L. Compas, who claimed to be one of “Daguerre’s pupils,” toured Swiss cities, notably demonstrating the daguerreotype process in the great hall of Lausanne’s Hôtel de Ville in August 1840, giving lessons as well as displaying and selling at his lodgings in Saint-François cameras and plates (“pictures,” “drawings”) of French, Italian, and Swiss towns and cities. He repeated the operation in Geneva in September 1840[50] at his residence in the city’s Pâquis neighborhood (“Maison David”), with an exhibition of views of Switzerland. He also offered to do portraits or views of the properties of individuals who so desired.[51]

It would be wrong to minimize the importance of these traveling photographers. In Lausanne, Compas’s demonstrations, which Secrétan attended, made a strong impression on him, which may well lie at the root of his interest in the medium. He published an article in the Gazette de Lausanne dated 7 August 1840 praising the quality of Compas’s views, “It is the first time no doubt that our fine cathedral has been depicted in its true proportions.”[52] Among the traveling daguerreotypists, we should mention Auguste Meylan, even if he was only to take up photography several years later. He partnered with Auguste Garcin – together they found themselves in Turin around 1845 – as itinerant photographers, working in the studio of a fellow daguerreotypist by the name of Gioacchino Boglioni (1799-1859). This is one of the few confirmations of contacts between Italian and Genevan photographers, with the latter boasting of having introduced the Parisian process south of the Alps. Pursuing his activities as a traveling daguerreotypist, Meylan is also attested working as such in Bern in 1849 still, before setting up shop in Geneva on the Rue du Rhône.[53] In 1855, he moved his studio to the third floor of the same building, which was fitted out with glass skylights. It is one of the first Genevan indications of a studio photographer moving to an attic to take advantage of the natural light, heralding a new era, even if Meylan offered his clientele daguerreotype portraits.[54]

Jean-Gabriel Eynard within the context of early photography

Because of the place he occupied in society, both in Paris and on the shores of Lake Geneva, Jean-Gabriel Eynard enjoyed access to the most influential actors. His love of the sciences, which had already prompted him to take an interest in chemistry in 1809,[55] as well as his attraction to the arts, which transformed him into a very knowledgeable collector, logically led him to try his hand at taking daguerreotypes. The first trace of his photographic practice dates from March of 1840.[56] He was not the only Genevan to turn his attention to photography at the time. As we have seen above, in the spring of that year, Daguerre’s invention largely spread through the city, thanks notably to the pioneering activity of an Artaria, and even earlier in the preceding fall in the canton of Vaud, where Eynard lived a good part of the year.

He was already interested in portraiture but his first photographs seem to have focused especially on “Roman monuments” (including the Trevi Fountain, the Arch of Titus, Trajan’s Forum, the arches of Constantine and Septimus Severus);[57] we can get an idea of this early stage of his output from a self-portrait that shows him next to a plate depicting the Forum (84.XT.255.38). He deemed these images sufficiently interesting to present them, in August of that year, at the Société des Arts. The person taking the minutes of the meeting noted their “particular tint.”[58] Over the course of the first months then, his photographic practice likened him to the traveling photographers whom we mentioned above, notably a Joly. Later, with a few exceptions,[59] he would give up making images of places that had no direct connection with his family. At the very start, the family portrait did not play a central role in his output, even though he began making portraits immediately. A few months later, his use of daguerreotype was limited to illustrating almost exclusively his private world. Again in 1840, if we are to believe the year written in his hand on the back, he produced a daguerreotype depicting his family by the lake. This is the oldest of his works that has been conserved and the first to show members of his family (2013 001 dag 040).

It is not known if Eynard met Daguerre. On the other hand, two of his daguerreotypes tell us about the affinities he may have had with the budding milieu of photography. Two group portraits show us the Genevan financier with a brace of photography’s pioneers, the Parisian Noël-Marie-Paymal Lerebours and the Vaudois Adrien Constant de Rebecque (2013 001 dag 037 and rm 010). Care was clearly lavished on these compositions which are focused on him, lending Eynard the status of first among equals. He was also in contact with several other French-speaking Swiss who were active in the new way of making images. He corresponded with Secrétan, Lerebours’s future partner, as manuscripts conserved in the Bibliothèque de Genève attest.[60] He also maintained close ties with the Delessert family, who owned the Bougy-Saint-Martin manor, not far from his Beaulieu property. Starting in March of 1840, he began exchanging plates with his friend Benjamin Delessert,[61] who also figures in a group portrait by Eynard with Adrien Constant de Rebecque and several other members of the Delessert family (DE 062). He was likewise in touch with daguerreotypists who played a less significant role, as is evidenced by the double portrait depicting him with the Genevan Simon Bertrand (2013 001 dag 030).

Presumably, as with other Swiss practitioners of the new technology, Eynard learned to take daguerreotypes in Paris, quite probably at Lerebours’s side. He had an interest in and apparently an aptitude for chemistry, which must have made his training easier.[62] Lerebours was able to provide him with the necessary equipment, even if it was available in Geneva starting in the spring of 1840. The Fondation Auer Ory in Hermance (Geneva) owns a Daguerre camera with a Lerebours lens, thought to be the oldest camera of Switzerland.[63] By 1842 Eynard had five of Daguerre’s devices.

The ties between Eynard and Lerebours appear to have run deeper than the mere furnishing of photographic materials. Those ties formed thanks to the painter Horace Vernet (1789-1863), who did in 1831 the two portraits of the Eynard couple that are now conserved in the Palais Eynard in Geneva (Collection of the Musée d’art et d’histoire).[64] We see Vernet ten years later as a photographer in the East, kitted out by Lerebours, who was to use part of his images for publication in his Excursions Daguerriennes.[65] It is also possible that Eynard followed Lerebours’s example by turning to a draftsman-lithographer, Antonio Fontanesi (1818-1882), to engrave twenty views of Beaulieu, including several that reproduce his own daguerreotypes.[66] Eynard’s portraits of Lerebours, like the praise the optician lavished on the former’s work in his Traité de photographie, testify to the close relationship that existed between the two men by the early 1840s.

Thus, like Constant de Rebecque, Eynard was part of the most learned circle of practitioners of the nascent medium of photography in Switzerland. This milieu was not, however, closed to an artisanal output; in 1841, Eynard could turn to the young Louis Bonijol for views taken at Beaulieu (dl 03). In 1853, he visited the studio of the Mayer brothers in Paris to have several portraits done. His interest in the technique encouraged contacts with others. He paid a visit notably to Jules Duboscq-Soleil, who took Eynard’s portrait with his wife, Anne (2013 001 dag 086). The image, moreover, is in stereoscopy, a process that had been developed by this French optician and adopted in turn by Eynard in the early 1850s.[67]

Up to his death, Eynard was to enjoy extraordinary renown among his peers. Besides Lerebours, we should mention Antoine Claudet (1797-1867), a user of Daguerre’s invention from the outset who was active in London; he was to recall very favorably his visit with Eynard.[68] The Genevan photographer was a welcome guest at the highest levels of European society. His earlier career as a diplomat, like his talent as a photographer, proved an irresistible calling card and he was invited to take the family portrait of Louis-Philippe I at his Neuilly palace in 1842, beyond a doubt a highpoint in his prolific career as a man of the world and a photographer.[69]

[1] Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and Noël-Marie-Paymal Lerebours, Historique et description des procédés du daguerréotype et du diorama [augm.], Paris, 1839.

[2] Jules Janin, “Le Daguerotype,” L’Artiste, 2^nd series, t. II, 1839, quoted in Quentin Bajac and Dominique Planchon-de Font-Réaulx, Le Daguerréotype français : un objet photographique, exhib. cat., Paris, Réunion des musées nationaux, 2003, 388.

[3] Alfred Donné, “Le Daguerrotype,” Le Journal des débats, 1839, reproduced in Bajac and Planchon-de Font-Réaulx, Daguerréotype français, 386.

[4] Théodore Maurisset, “La Daguerréotypomanie,” La Caricature, 6, 1839, reproduced in Collection M.+M. Auer : une histoire de la photographie, exhib. cat., Geneva, Musée d’art et d’histoire, 2004, 55.

[5] Collection M.+M. Auer, 110.

[6] Jean-Louis Bigourdan, “1839 : Les ‘ vues de Paris’ et l’introduction du daguerréotype en Europe,” Paris et le daguerréotype, exhib. cat., Musée Carnavalet, Paris, 1989, 32.

[7] Excursions daguerriennes. Collection de 50 planches représentant les vues et les monuments les plus remarquables du globe : Paris, Milan, Venise, Florence, Rome, Naples, la Suisse, l’Allemagne, Londres, Malte, l’Egypte, Damas, Saint-Jean d’Acre, Constantinople, Athènes,..., Paris, Rittner et Goupil, Lerebours, Hector Bossange, 1841-1842.

[8] Noël-Marie-Paymal Lerebours, Excursions daguerriennes : vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe, Paris, Lerebours 1841. It is worth noting that the daguerreotype’s fascinating precision and the possibility to reproduce it through engraving inspired counterfeiters. By engraving proofs reproducing banknotes, they produced almost perfect imitations (Gazette de Lausanne, 5 December 1843, 1.)

[9] An advertisement by Daguerre for his process, 1838, quoted in Bajac and Planchon-de Font-Réaulx, Daguerréotype français, 384.

[10] See the price list at the end of Noël-Marie-Paymal Lerebours and Marc Antoine Gaudin, Derniers perfectionnements apportés au daguerréotype, 3^rd enlarged edition, Paris, 1842.

[11] William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, London, 1844 (“When the eye was removed from the prism – in which all had looked beautiful – I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold.”)

[12] Miroirs d’argent : daguerréotypes de Girault de Prangey, exhib. cat., Musée gruérien, Geneva, 2008.

[13] In this regard see Sylvain Morand, “Le daguerréotype en province, une histoire sans fin,” Le Daguerréotype français : un objet photographique, exhib. cat., Paris, Musée d’Orsay, Réunion des musées nationaux, 2003, 104.

[14] Gazette de Lausanne, no. 5, 15 January 1838, 1.

[15] Le Nouvelliste vaudois, no. 56, 12 July 1839, 2.

[16] Journal de Genève, 22 June 1839, 2.

[17] Marc Ratcliff, with the assistance of Patrick Bungener, Manuela Canabal and Jean-Daniel Candaux, Jean Senebier (1742-1809) : un polyglotte des sciences, proceedings of “Jean Senebier et la République des sciences et des lettres,” conference, Geneva, Société de physique et d’histoire naturelle de Genève, 2011.

[18] “Talbot’s Life,” The William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné. The Complete Corpus of the Works of the Victorian Inventor of Photography on Paper (https://talbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk), accessed 25.05.2020.

[19] Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse (DHS), accessed at https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/027247/2019-10-17/.

[20] Proceedings, no. XXII of the Société pour l’Avancement des Arts, Rapport du comité d’Industrie et de Commerce, Geneva, 13 August 1840, 32.

[21] See Marie Gaitzsch, “Amateurs, acteurs et ateliers genevois,” Pionniers de la photographie en Suisse Romande : à travers les collections de la Fondation Auer Ory, exhib. cat., ed. Michèle and Michel Auer, Hermance, Geneva, Fondation Auer Ory, 2019, 53, quoting Jean-Louis Populus, “Revue sommaire sur la photographie,” Bulletin de la Classe d’industrie et de commerce de la Société des Arts.

[22] Centre d’iconographie, Bibliothèque de Genève, phot21p 11 02.

[23] On the work of both Populus and Albert-Durade, see the online site of the collections of the Bibliothèque de Genève https://bge-geneve.ch/iconographie; Artistes à Genève de 1400 à nos jours, ed. Karine Tissot, 492-493.

[24] On this trip and this early photographer, see Pierre-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière, Voyage en Orient (1839-1840). Journal d’un voyageur curieux du monde et d’un pionnier de la daguerréotypie, presentation and remarks on the context by Jacques Desautels, journal text ed. Georges Aubin and Renée Blanchet with the assistance of Jacques Desautels, Quebec, Presses de l’Université Laval, 2010. In his introduction, Horeau mentions “kindly communication of daguerreotyped views” and credits Joly for the “Panorama of Cairo.” A single daguerreotype that is still conserved is sometimes attributed to Joly, the portrait of his wife, but it is a late work and very likely taken by another operator (Joly, Voyage, 299-300).

[25] Excursions daguerriennes. Collection de 50 planches représentant les vues et les monuments les plus remarquables du globe : Paris, Milan, Venise, Florence, Rome, Naples, la Suisse, l’Allemagne, Londres, Malte, l’Egypte, Damas, Saint-Jean d’Acre, Constantinople, Athènes..., Paris, Rittner et Goupil, Lerebours, Hector Bossange, 1840, the Parthenon or temple of Minerva (Athens) and view of the Propylaea (Athens, 1839). The same volume contains commentary on the View of the Hypætral Temple on the Island of Philae (Nubia); the Ruins of the Temple of the Sun in Baalbec (Syria), the daguerreotype which Joly marked with a line to indicate scale; and the Mussulman Cemetery in Damascus (Syria).

[26]  See Eric Stenger, Die beginnende Photographie im Spiegel von Tageszeitungen und Tagebüchern ein Beitrag zum Hundertjährigen Bestehen der Lichtbildnerei, 1839-1939 (no. 83 in the Zeitung und Leben series), Würzburg-Aumühle, Konrad Triltsch Verlag, 1940, 25.

[27] Stenger, Photographie, 26.

[28] See Stenger, Photographie, 33. Reproduction of Isenring’s exhib. cat., Kunstausstellung, enthaltend eine Sammlung von Lichtbildern, meistens Porträts nach dem Leben. Gefertigt im Mai, Juni und Juli 1840.

[29] Stenger, Photographie, 39, reproduction of an article published in Augsbourg in the Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 January 1842.

[30] George-Antoine Bridel, “Un dessinateur lausannois et les débuts de la photographie à Lausanne,” Feuille d'avis de Lausanne, 9 May 1942, 8.

[31] DHS, accessed at https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/027232/2011-12-05/.

[32] Paris et le daguerréotype, 246.

[33] Walter Welter et al., Souvenirs de Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, H. Nicolet, 1840. Engravings by Walter Welter, Joseph Bettannier, Auguste Thez, and Hercule Nicolet.

[34] As early as 1840 there existed other undertakings of this sort, which Swiss newspapers were covering. On 27 June 1840, the Journal de Genève announced the publication of a book that comprised one hundred views of “Paris and its surroundings reproduced by the daguerreotype” and explicated by the employees of the Bibliothèque royale. Edited by Charles Philipon, this work drew on the expertise of fourteen artists to reproduce in lithography the daguerreotype models and heighten them with human figures and animals (Stenger, Photographie, 79).

[35] Stenger, Photographie, 79-81, reproduction of “Vues daguerréotypées des villes capitales de la Suisse ainsi que des contrées les plus intéressantes de ce pays.”

[36] Rodolphe Töpffer, Réflexions et menus propos d’un peintre genevois, 11^th booklet, titled De la plaque Daguerre… le corps moins l’âme, Geneva, 1841, 8.

[37] Le Nouvelliste vaudois, 14 September 1850, 4; on these questions, see Paul-Louis Roubert, L'Image sans qualités : les beaux-arts et la critique à l'épreuve de la photographie, 1839-1859, Paris, Editions du patrimoine, 2006.

[38] A view of Geneva by Artaria was put up for sale at Drouot in 2014 (https://www.millon.com/lot/19244/4026723).

[39] See Marcel Suès-Ducommun, Une promenade dans la vieille Genève, Geneva, 1899, 59, who attributes to Artaria the first experiments in taking daguerreotypes in Geneva.

[40] Journal de Genève, 4 April 1840, 3.

[41] Stenger, Photographie, 11.

[42] Stenger, Photographie, 33.

[43] Journal de Genève, 15 July 1841, 2.

[44] See daguerréotype LM-101016, Collection du Musée national suisse, Zurich.

[45] Gazette de Lausanne, 2 January 1862, 3.

[46] Journal de Genève, 10 January 1843, 4.

[47] See the Registre des Séances de la Société pour l’avancement des arts, general session of 1 August 1850, 72-73.

[48] For an overall view of the Swiss studios, see the database www.photo-ch.ch, which can be supplemented for Geneva with the online site of the collections of the Bibliothèque de Genève https://bge-geneve.ch/iconographie.

[49] See Michèle Auer, Pionniers, 17.

[50] Journal de Genève, 3 September 1840, advertisement inset, 4.

[51] Ibid. The spelling of this name varies according to the source: Compas, Conpas, Compar, or Compaz.

[52] Gazette de Lausanne, 7 August 1840, 6.

[53] Anne Cartier-Bresson, Monica Maffioli and Béatrice Riottor El-Habid, Vu d'Italie 1841-1941: la photographie italienne dans les collections du Musée Alinari, 237-238; Michel and Michèle Auer, Pionniers, 46, 54 and 75.

[54] Journal de Genève, 24 May 1855, 4.

[55] See Edouard Chapuisat, Jean-Gabriel Eynard et son temps (1775-1863), Geneva, A. Jullien, 1952, 38. Eynard studied chemistry in the laboratory of Louis Jacques Thénard to manage his alum mines and ironworks.

[56] See the chapter “Eynard the Photographer.”

[57] These monuments are mentioned in a letter that Jean-Gabriel Eynard sent to his brother Jacques, 2 April 1840, in which he says he has three portraits; in a letter dated 7 March 1840, he speaks of a portrait “of the child” and a view, see Philippe Kaenel, “‘Je crois que l'art est fait pour quelque chose de plus’: Jean-Gabriel Eynard, Antonio Fontanesi, la photographie et les arts graphiques dans les années 1850,” Art + Architecture en Suisse, no. 4, 2000, 12, note 7.

[58] Proceedings no. XXII of the Société pour l’avancement des arts, Rapport du comité d’Industrie et de Commerce, Geneva, 13 August 1840, 32.

[59] See the chapter on the role architecture played in Jean-Gabriel Eynard’s work.

[60] Autograph letter by Eynard to Secrétan, BGE, Ms. suppl. 1882, f. 390.

[61] “We shall experiment together,” he wrote from Italy to his brother Jacques on 2 April 1840, “all the better since I’ve just received an excellent Dag. that B. Delessert sent me,” see Kaenel, “Je crois que l’art,” 12, note 7; on Eynard’s relationship with Benjamin Delessert, see Kaenel, “Je crois que l’art,” note 10.

[62] See the chapter “Eynard the Photographer.”

[63] Michèle and Michel Auer, Pionniers, 36.

[64] Inv. MAH 1905-0067 and MAH 1905-0068. See Renée Loche, “Un cabinet de peintures à Genève au XIXe siècle : La collection Eynard. Essai de reconstitution,” Genava, 27, 1979, 177-221, part. 217, nos 146 and 147.

[65] On Vernet’s travels in the East, see Joly de Lobtinière, Voyage, 62-64; Michèle Hannoosh, “Horace Vernet’s Orient: Photography and the Eastern Mediterranean in 1839,” The Burlington Magazine, 158, April and June 2016, 264-271 and 430-439. Joly met up with Vernet and his traveling companions in Alexandria in November 1839. His student, Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet, one of the engravers of Excursions daguerriennes, would later publish the chronicle of this voyage in 1843.

[66] Kaenel, “Je crois que l’art,” 6-14.

[67] See the chapter “Eynard the Photographer.”

[68] See in “Eynard the Photographer” the passages detailing the critical recognition of Eynard’s work, under the subheading “Critical reception of Jean-Gabriel Eynard’s body of work in photography.”

[69] Jean-Gabriel Eynard, Notes journalières 1831-1848, f. 622 à 627, BGE Ms. suppl. 1874, note for 7 June 1842.