The Silver Canvas - Daguerrotype Masterpieces (Art Photography Ebook)

Chapter One
THE WORLD POSES FOR THE SUN
Detail, Plate 5
WHEN, IN 1839, word first began to
make its way from the scientific and
literary gazettes into the popular
press that a French artist had found a way to make
the sun itself create a work of art that exactly copied
a scene from nature without any aid from an artist's
brush, the general public was suspicious. After all,
only four years earlier these same newspapers had
startled the world by reporting that people actually
lived on the moon, even showing illustrations of
winged moon-creatures lolling on the beach of a
lunar lake. 1
Such images had been described as coming
from sightings made by the eminent scientist Sir John
Herschel through his gigantic telescope in South
Africa. For months, detailed articles traveled around
the globe and were taken so seriously that a group of
clergy began planning how missionaries could be
sent to the moon to spread the word of the gospel.
Although finally revealed as a hoax perpetrated by an
ingenious New York Sun reporter and denounced as
false by Herschel, the moon story had made such an
impact that the world greeted other startling scientific
news with skepticism.
Now, only a few years later, should the public
believe these astonishing reports of "sun pictures,"
especially when the same scientist, Herschel,
endorsed them as being genuine? What was one to
believe from such reports? If people had unscrupulously
been led to believe winged creatures occupied
the moon, why should they now believe the
sun would be willing to be shut up in a box to produce
works of art on a metal plate with the curious
name daguerreotype'?
During the months before any accurate details
emerged about what appeared to be more a concoction
of fiction than a scientific invention, newspapers
compounded, rather than explained, the mystery
of the daguerreotype because the editors themselves
were not actually confident of their own understanding.
One of the earliest examples of such reports
appeared in the Cincinnati Republican of March 1839,
where it was intriguingly entitled "Farewell to Ink,
Types, Clocks!" 2 This headline represented what the
editors understood from early London reports about
this new invention—that the daguerreotype could
do everything previously accomplished by painting
and printing and could show the passage of time
because plates made early in the morning looked different
from those made at noon or in the evening.
Fantasies about this new use of the sun blossomed
during this early period of little precise information,
and one American wrote a lengthy poem
about what the new solar device would allow him to
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