In 1839, a year after the first photo containing a human being was made, photography pioneer Robert Cornelius made the first ever portrait of a human being.
On a sunny day in October, Robert Cornelius set up his camera in the back of his father’s gas lamp-importing business on Chestnut Street in Center City, Philadelphia. After removing the lens cap, he sprinted into the frame, where he sat for more than a minute before covering up the lens. The picture he produced that day was the first photographic self-portrait. It is also widely considered the first successful photographic portrait of a human being.
It was 1839, two months after the French government had released instructions for replicating the photographs that had made Louis Daguerre an international sensation. Working with inventor Joseph Nicephore Niépce, who in 1825 produced the first “heliograph,” a bitumen print depicting the view from his window, chemist Daguerre had pioneered a process for recording images with light. When Niépce died in 1833, Daguerre kept experimenting until he came up with a complicated but successful method for capturing images. Copper plates were coated with nitric acid and exposed to iodine crystals, which reacted to create a layer of silver iodide. After a long exposure — between five and 30 minutes — the iodine crystals would record the light. After the plate was removed from the camera, it was held above heated mercury and fixed with a bath of sodium chloride. The product was a miniature representation of the world, etched in silver.
The daguerreotype, as it was dubbed, was an instant sensation. It was formally announced at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris on Aug. 19, and shortly afterward, ecstatic reports were published in the international press. American Samuel F.B. Morse, future inventor of the telegraph, visited Daguerre’s studio in Paris in 1839 and described Daguerre’s work as “one of the most beautiful discoveries of the age ... the exquisite minuteness of the delineation cannot be conceived. No painting or engraving ever approached it.”
A month later, Daguerre published a pamphlet detailing the process. The text was published in America in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, and as word spread, so did the creative and economic urge to improve on Daguerre’s discovery.
In Philadelphia, mechanic Joseph Saxton and physician and chemist Paul Beck Goddard shared a fascination with Daguerre’s innovation, as well as frustration that the exposure times and light requirements effectively limited the process to landscape or architectural subjects. Naturalistic portraiture was so far impossible, since no human could sit unblinking for the length of time required to record his image in silver.
To tackle that challenge, Saxton and Goddard recruited Robert Cornelius, who was trained in chemistry and metallurgy, to join them in their experimentation. They hoped that Cornelius’ expertise in silver-plating and metal-polishing, combined with Goddard’s top-secret discovery that bromine might work as an accelerant, would enable them to pioneer a more versatile and efficient means of producing daguerreotypes.
It was soon after that Cornelius earned his place in history that day in his father’s gas-lamp shop by sprinting in front of the camera’s lens. The picture he took shows a young man with rakishly tousled hair. Relaxed yet alert, he leans toward the right edge of the frame. In the history of image-making, there had never been a portrait so unmediated by the process of its production.
Cornelius took another test shot of himself with his children, and then displayed the results to Saxton and Goddard. They were thrilled, but judged those portraits too informal. For the next picture, Cornelius posed Goddard in the center of the frame in a high-collared suit and necktie. On Dec. 6, 1839, they presented their work to the American Philosophical Society on Independence Square. The minutes of the meeting record the society’s approval: The portrait was “a very good specimen” indeed.
With Goddard as his silent partner, Cornelius opened a studio in Philadelphia, charging $5 a shot. The space faced south; by the windows, mirrors mounted on pivots directed sunlight into the studio, and a large circular blue glass hanging above the sitter’s chair diffused the refracted rays. With all this light and the accelerant, portraits required an exposure of only 10 to 60 seconds.
After a defector from Cornelius’ studio spread word of the bromine accelerant, portrait studios blossomed throughout the country. For the first time, anyone could own an affordable reproduction of his own face. Even as the daguerreotype’s popularity surged, Cornelius remained the pre-eminent portraitist of his time. He traded plates with Daguerre himself, and earned praise from John Egerton, Daguerre’s agent in Britain, who wrote that Cornelius’ pictures were “the most beautiful specimens of the daguerreotype then in existence.”
Despite his success, Cornelius gave up his photography business after only two years. Gas lighting was becoming the illumination of choice for new buildings, and there was more money to be made in lamps and chandeliers than in image-making.
As decades passed, the American Philosophical Society lost track of the Goddard and Cornelius daguerreotypes. If not for interviews conducted by photographic historians Marcus Aurelius Root and Julius Sachse in the late 19th century, Cornelius’ contribution likely would have been lost to history, too.
“I am fully of the impression that I was the first to obtain a likeness of the human face,” Cornelius had told Sachse. But without the original artifacts, it was impossible to prove.
There were other early portraitists, and art historians quibbled over which pioneer deserved to be called “first”: Morse posed sitters in bright sunlight with their eyes closed, and John Draper painted his subjects with white flour to shorten exposure time. But the scholars agreed: None could compete with Cornelius’ ability to convey personality in his images. Although others may have beaten Cornelius in the race to record flesh in silver, what he captured was a true portrait rather than a simple likeness.
In 1975 the Philosophical Society made an extraordinary discovery: On a dusty shelf of its archive was found an unmarked wooden box containing Cornelius’ work, including the Cornelius and Goddard portrait. The images would be subjected to rigorous verification and dating techniques in order to prove their authenticity. But the words written on the back of the self-portrait, in Cornelius’ own hand, said it all: “The first light Picture ever taken. 1839.”
No comments:
Write comments