The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

by Dominic Smith

  “Of course everyone knew. They say that a man cannot change his undershirt in the Latin Quarter without all of Paris knowing.”

  Louis looked down at his feet.

  “Good luck, Louis. Your painting has matured a great deal. You now paint exactly what you see instead of what you wish to see.”

  “Goodbye,” said Louis, shaking Degotti’s hand.

  Degotti walked out into the street towards a waiting carriage. The markets were coming to life; the flower stalls were being stocked with daylilies and pansies. Louis watched his old master move among the flower women, suddenly certain that he would not see him again. The man would be dead within a few months. He carried the certainty of it in his halting walk and mannerisms, a calm awareness that nothing else was expected of him. Degotti had come to say goodbye, to pass along the torch. Saddened and touched by this gesture, Louis stood in his doorway and watched the markets flood with daylight.

  Louis called his gallery the Diorama. With a bank loan, he had financed a custom-made building with a rotating gallery. It housed scenic paintings of enormous proportions, rendered on transparent lawn or calico, and lit from various angles. On one side of the linen, Daguerre sketched a scene in lead. He used colors ground in oil, applied them with essence of turpentine, then concealed the brushstrokes with badger’s skin. On the other side of the linen, he applied a wash of transparent blue and sketched the desired effects of light and shadow that would be seen through the first side. The viewer saw a seamless rendition of nature, a scene of perfect shade and hue.

  The first diorama was based on the Valley of Sarnen in Switzerland, where dog-toothed mountains rimmed a valley floor. The audience watched as the scene migrated through early morning into noon before an afternoon storm threatened. Louis watched a woman reach for her parasol as protection from the oncoming deluge. Later, when he rendered Holyrood Chapel, old men doffed their hats and genuflected upon entry. This was exactly the effect he wanted—a realism that was felt in the body.

  But something else was emerging in his work—an emptiness that was, in part, a result of such naturalism. It was a journalist for The Times who mentioned this new element in the very first diorama, noting, …in the midst of all this crowd of animation, there is a stillness, which is the stillness of the grave. The idea produced is that of a region of a world desolated; of living nature at an end; of the last day past and over. A quarter century later, Louis Daguerre would think of these words and wonder if he’d foreseen the apocalypse all those years before.

  In the first year of its operation, the Diorama earned him two hundred thousand francs, though it was not until later that he fully realized his sudden wealth. Dioramas soon opened in London and throughout Europe, all under contract with Louis. He knew on some level that fame is not the story we tell; it is the story the world tells us. And the world was telling Louis it wanted to see itself reflected in the gouache and charcoal of painted calico; that the human eye longed to trust the illusion of likeness. Render perfectly a meadow at dusk, a horizon at dawn, and people will love you for it. For giving them something they didn’t know they already had.

  Louis continued to take his walks through the Paris streets in the autumn of 1823. He passed through the Arc de Triomphe, its massive shadow looming over the outdoor cafés in the late afternoon. There was money in his pockets, there were gold cuff links on his wrists. He walked with a cane and a folded newspaper under his arm. At his regular café, he sat and smoked a pipe and read of the world—the shipping news of the South, the stock reports of London, the crop yields of Provence. He found pleasure in commerce and weather. He was, in a sense, happy. He felt a part of things, not in the way he had amid the saffron fields around Orléans, but in a new way. He felt a sense of balance and order, a rush of benevolence at the curbstone.

  He read the newspaper reviews of his dioramas and sometimes repeated to himself favorite adjectives and journalistic phrases. Fame was a ripple, a springhead. People selected words to describe your creations. He wondered about the empty perfection suggested by the journalist from The Times. Wasn’t he trying to empty all artifice from a scene? Another journalist asked why no people appeared in the dioramas and called Louis Daguerre a misanthrope. No, he thought, I am connected to everything that matters. And when he set off on his evening walks, he smiled at the faces waltzing past on the promenade and felt part of a widespread fraternal emotion—the simple pleasure of being alive in a century whose great ideas were progress and perfectability. The reason I don’t paint people is because they move. If I were to paint an old man into the Valley of Sarnen, we might see him age and die in the light cycles of an afternoon. Nobody would pay two and a half francs for that.

  The initial steps towards photography were accidental. For years he’d used the camera obscura, measured the opacity of Paris light, attempted to infuse reality into a stagnant piece of fabric. What came to him now, as if in a vision, was the idea that nature could sketch herself using nothing but sunlight; that, given the right cavelike aperture—just like his childhood bedroom window, just like the rotunda and light slats of the Diorama—and the right receptive material, light could emblazon a scene for all time. The secret of light was this: it carried images with it. Loosed from the helium roil of the sun, light streamed down and traced everything in its path—the brain-shaped silhouettes of clouds, the Y of midflight birds, domed rooftops, spindle-trunked trees, a man’s hand held aloft. It not only painted shadow but rendered—somewhere, if only we could see it—a crystalline blueprint of the material world. Find the right receptor and nature would do the drawing for you.

  Louis set up a laboratory-cum-studio next to the Diorama. From its window he could look out and see people lined up for the dioramas, and this always fueled his work. One autumn afternoon he prepared a canvas for a diorama study. He mixed a small amount of iodine into his whitewash and brushed it onto his canvas. He wanted a darker undertone in the picture of Holyrood Chapel, and he hoped the iodine would create a heavier effect. Normally, he left his prepared canvases for an hour before painting on them, but today he was called away by the crank man, who ran in yelling that the shaft had broken and three hundred people were waiting to see the next diorama roll into place. Louis, ever resourceful, went out into the street, hired a few sturdy and unemployed men on the spot, and supervised as the barebacked team heaved the next diorama along the circular rail of the viewing chamber. He didn’t return to his studio for several hours.

  When he entered, he found a startling effect: the silhouette of the window—quadrants, some latticework—had been etched onto the iodine-prepared canvas. Somewhere in the hazy geometry was also the outline of nearby rooftops. This effect sent Louis’s mind ticking, and he began painting new canvases and mixing varying amounts of iodine into his whitewash. He left them for a day and returned to find the same effect. The iodine had trapped shadowy images using only sunlight. There began a three-day stupor in which he did not leave the studio. He surrounded himself with books on the history of optics and light manipulation. He discovered he was part of a quixotic lineage of light tinkerers. The search for the sun-sketched image was the conjugal child of chemistry and optics. Here were the chemists who blackened horn silver from the mines of Freiberg in 1556, who treated papers with caustic and chalk and silver nitrate and tried to write characters on the surface, who tried to harness ultraviolet light as if it were a species of alpine flower. Here was the dark chamber—Giambattista della Porta’s black box with a hole. The genius of the camera, a pinprick of light through a swath of darkness. It must have been how God made the stars. Then there were the 1802 experiments of Wedgwood and Davy, two Englishmen who claimed to have found a method of copying paintings upon glass, using the agencies of light and nitrate of silver. They called the effect sun drawing. A Swede named Schecle had exposed silver chloride on bitumen and yielded a fleeting image from the sun. As Louis read, he sensed that momentum was gathering in this slipshod realm; a major discovery was looming sidelong in the
murk of minor triumphs. I shall go further. I shall capture these fugitive images.

  He sought out a shop run by the father and son opticians Vincent and Charles Chevalier. The shop stood in a ferny alcove on the Left Bank, its front window full of bifocals and optical equipment. Inside, the walls were lined with more spectacles, ground glass and crystal instruments, lenses and cylinders for kaleidoscopes and microscopes. Myopic old ladies and tweed-clad astronomers browsed the aisles.

  Upon meeting Louis Daguerre, Vincent Chevalier said, “My son makes these lenses by hand for the Paris Observatory. Surely you are an astronomer.” He governed the shop with a solicitous air, a proprietary style that suggested patrons more than customers.

  “No,” said Louis. He did not want to share the nature of his experiments. “I am the painter behind the dioramas. My interest is in using lenses to paint nature with greater clarity.”

  “Yes, a delight, those dioramas. I took my wife last Sunday afternoon” said Vincent. He was balding, mustachioed, with murky pale eyes that suggested a fondness for self-pity.

  “I’m glad you enjoyed them,” said Louis.

  “Charles,” Vincent called, “fetch Monsieur Daguerre some coffee.”

  Charles—a thin, young man in a leather apron—appeared from the rear of the shop. Head down, he crossed to a small stove where a coffeepot smoked.

  “He makes the lenses and I sell them,” Vincent confided. “But one day,” he said loudly, “this shop will be his and he’ll be forced to become a salesman.”

  “I see,” said Louis. He scanned the walls of glass.

  “What exactly are you looking for?” asked Vincent.

  “A lens for a very small aperture.”

  “How interesting,” said Vincent. Charles did a half-turn at the stove and angled an ear back towards the shop.

  Vincent took out a tray lined with scarlet velvet and placed several lenses in it. He carried the box, Louis at his side, and laid it in the middle of a ramshackle table piled with screws and wires and splinters of fine glass. He gestured for Louis to sit, and something shifted in the optician’s manner; he was now lost to a reverie of glass discs and framed lenses. Vincent arranged the offering on the velvet and slid it across the table to Louis.

  “You must excuse this unsightliness,” Vincent said.

  “Reminds me of my studio,” said Louis.

  Both men chuckled at this, and Charles arrived with coffee. He set the cups amid the tin-wire squalor, the lens tray a velvet sanctuary in the middle. Charles looked at the two men, waiting to be dismissed. Vincent obliged and, without looking up from his rumination, said, “Charles, I believe Madame Fabriose will be returning for her reading glasses this afternoon. Could you attach the lenses to the wire rims for me?”

  Charles nodded and left for the rear workshop.

  “Normally,” Vincent said, “we custom-fit the glass. So perhaps you could bring me the apparatus.”

  “Apparatus?” said Louis.

  “I assume you are using a camera obscura or observation cylinder of some description.”

  “Oh, yes, of course.”

  “For your paintings.” There was an elliptical tone, perhaps irony, in Vincent’s words.

  Louis took out each of the lenses and looked through them. He said, “I may purchase one or two different types and then return them if they don’t work as I wish.”

  “That is a possibility,” said Vincent. Louis now understood that Monsieur Chevalier hand-selected his clients. This was clearly not commerce, but the shopfront of a family renaissance guild. Louis changed strategies. “You are the expert on light,” he said. “What do you suggest if I want to sharpen the light before I paint something? I will probably use my camera obscura and sketch from the view. But I want the light to be very sharp indeed. I need brilliance.”

  “We all want brilliance,” said Vincent, turning jovial. He blew across his coffee as if to excuse this brief lapse in taste. He handed Louis a convex lens and said, “This will do the job.”

  “Just the ticket,” Louis said, picking it up and holding it to the light. “How much is it?”

  “Consider it on loan,” said Vincent. “I would not dream of charging you until you are perfectly satisfied with the achieved effect. Charles could also manufacture a lens to your specifications. It takes six weeks.”

  “So fast,” said Louis.

  “We work quickly,” called Charles.

  Vincent cast a glance to the rear of the shop. Charles bent over a pair of wire-rim spectacles.

  Vincent took the lens from the tray and wrapped it in several layers of cloth. He led Louis to the front of the shop. He said, “There is no job too strange for the Chevalier family. If you dream up a chandelier made from granulated wine bottles, we will make it for you.”

  “I appreciate that a great deal,” said Louis. He had the wrapped lens in his hands. “Goodbye, monsieurs.”

  “Do let us know how your experiment proceeds,” said Vincent.

  “Of course,” replied Louis.

  “Au revoir,” called Charles from the workshop.

  Louis raised a hearty wave. Vincent closed the shop door. Louis resisted the urge to run back to his studio. He walked briskly, and within minutes of arriving, he loaded the lens into the camera obscura. He placed an iodized plate into the back of the camera obscura and opened the diaphragm before a view from his window. It was aimed down at the diorama crowd, and he left it for several hours. When he returned to check it, he saw that the new lens had yielded no new depth or clarity. He waited for several hours, but soon the sketchy image had faded. Standing by his studio window, looking down into the street, Louis realized that the light was not the problem. It was the receptor.

  Amid his early attempts to fix a fleeting image, Louis saw Isobel again. One summer afternoon, as he paced his workshop, he looked down at the line for the diorama and noticed a woman with caramel hair. Then he saw a husband and teenage daughter at her side. It stood to reason that it was Isobel—the dioramas and Louis Daguerre had received national attention; surely this was a daytrip from Lyons. He felt his pulse quicken. He closed the curtains. He stood by the window, fob-watched, cuff-linked, a man who knew weather and the increments of daylight and where to find lapis lazuli in the Pyrénées, a man not yet famous but on his way upstream, and in a second he was completely undone. The old hunger rose. The smell of camphor and rain on her skin. He left the room and descended the stairs two at a time.

  In the dimness the crowd was ushered inside. Louis made his way to a small landing where he could observe the audience in anonymity. A metallic voice called, “to your seats, straight ahead.” Louis curled up small and compact, his knees to his chest, and felt like some earth-burrowing animal. There was a hushed commotion. Shadows swam in the lantern light. Louis watched the Lyons family take their seats. The girl was as tall as Isobel. He calculated that she must have been fifteen, but he had to count on his fingers up from 1807, allowing for a birth in 1808, because his mental acuity at the moment could not have summed a dozen wine bottles without the use of his hands. The diorama glowed like an ember. It was a scene of jagged coastline, and as the white foam and agate rocks were lit, Louis saw the first real image of Isobel’s face. The daughter sat between husband and wife, and Louis could see the faces of mother and daughter shot with half-light and striking in their counterbalance. Isobel was supple-skinned, with a slight but reverberant poutiness still in her face—her chin cantilevered with pride, her eyes steady and defiant. The daughter was altogether different: heavy-mouthed, full-lipped, hair tousled, a countenance that suggested sloth and slow rising; a girl you imagined taking breakfast in bed, sitting propped by pillows with hot buttered toast and a chapbook.

  Louis watched Isobel smile at the shifting scenes of ocean and shore. Several times the daughter leaned close to the mother and whispered something, but Isobel seemed unable to break away from the tableau to respond. Louis wanted to stand and claim his creation. He wanted to kiss Isobel in ful
l view of her daughter and husband. His cheeks burned hot with shame, but nobody could see him, and the shame soon turned to anger, then remorse. He could not yield. He knew his success was connected to this loss—after all, losing Isobel had triggered his desire to be loved through his paintings—but the situation also seemed part of some inscrutable misunderstanding or quarrel he had made with God. Give me Isobel for one night, and I will offer up the dioramas, my money, my brushes…

  He left the gallery while the audience sat rapt and slack-jawed. He ran up to his studio and opened the curtains. He waited, and waited, timing the dioramas and knowing the chance of an audience member looking up at his window was fair, being as it was large and directly over the exit, and he imagined the portrait his figure might strike. He disgusted himself. He wanted to smash things. He wanted her to know that the perfectly rendered diorama was love abandoned, grief under glass. Then the audience spilled out, fanning into Rue Samson slightly dazed by the relative normality of a Paris afternoon. Surely the gas streetlamps were crude and the gutters coarse after his seaside sonata. The family filed out. The banker replaced his stovepipe hat. The daughter took her mother’s arm, a little sleepy. There was no chatter, just a languorous walk to a nearby carriage. None of them looked up. Louis watched them load into the carriage, and the last image he saw was Isobel flanked by her family, their backs above the rim of the carriage seat; the daughter’s messy hair, blond and with a stray organdy bow, was spilling into the wind and tangling with Isobel’s. He flat-palmed his hands against the window, and if an audience member had looked up, he or she would have seen a dark figure, arms wide, mouth open, staring out with the severity of a man who either craves or hates God.

  Eleven

  Louis resisted the idea of taking a naked portrait of Isobel’s daughter. So much floated about him: the haze of mercury, the memory of the girl and the mother’s hair intertwined that day in the carriage, the recognition that Pigeon was the walnut-sized life that had curled inside Isobel’s stomach that day on the Pont Neuf. He saw visions in the Paris daylight. From his balcony he saw a grove of plum trees growing from a high-walled courtyard. A white swan nested on a gabled roofline. He positioned his camera obscura on the balcony and tried to photograph these images, but nothing rendered. The flask of mercury rested on his kitchen table like a carafe of wine. At night he heard it shudder and lap, a river preparing to break its banks.