The Solari Foundation Collection holds a rare hand-colored stereo portrait Daguerreotype by Antoine Claudet (1797–1867), who made significant contributions to early photography. After its announcement in France in 1839, the Daguerreotype process spread quickly around the world. Those following the medium were an elite set of mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals who sought to understand and develop the potential beauty of this unique camera image. The varied group included entrepreneurs and painters, as well as scientists and historians. One of the very first commercial photographers, Antoine Claudet, was a French glass merchant who traveled to Paris in the late 1830s to learn the Daguerreotype process from its inventor, Louis-Jacques Daguerre. After purchasing from Daguerre a license to operate in England, Claudet established his first Daguerreotype studio in London in 1841, on the roof of the Adelaide Gallery, and later in two other sites in the city. In 1851, he moved his business to 107 Regent Street, a fashionable address where he established what he called a “Temple to Photography” and hung portraits of Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot, the British inventor of the calotype process.
Focused on creating and selling Daguerreotypes of Victorian London, Claudet enjoyed considerable success as a commercial photographer. His one professional rival was another photographer working with Daguerreotypes, Richard Beard (1802–1888), who had also established a prominent studio in London. However, Claudet’s Adelaide Gallery proved to be the more popular of the two studios, cementing his reputation as the most successful Daguerreotypist in England of that time.
Although a respected and successful photographer, Claudet is best known for his chemical experiments, by which he was able to speed up the image-making process, and for his experiments with photographic instruments. Claudet was responsible for numerous technical improvements in photography, including the discovery that red light did not affect sensitive plates and could therefore be used safely in the darkroom. Claudet also developed an accelerating process, using chlorine instead of bromine to reduce the length of the exposures. Because his process considerably decreased the time required for a portrait sitting, Claudet’s subjects appeared far more natural than those of his fellow Daguerreotypists. Furthermore, he also pioneered the use of painted backdrops and suggested the idea of using a series of photographs to create the illusion of movement. In 1845, Claudet began using a lens designed by the German-Hungarian physicist Joseph Petzval that was sixteen times faster than those lenses currently in use, enabling him to take photographs with even shorter exposures and to increase their size.
In the late 1850s, Claudet became interested in stereoscopic photography, a visual technique for creating the illusion of three-dimensional images by means of binocular vision. By presenting two offset pictures separately to the left and right eye of the viewer, the two-dimensional images are combined in the brain to give the perception of three-dimensional depth. The stereoscope featured an open top at the back for inserting Daguerreotypes. Seen in flat two-dimensionality, stereoscopic pictures often look cluttered and disorganized. Seen with the stereoscope, figures pop from the background and the space is instantly enlivened, as if by magic.
The primary aim of many stereographers was total photographic realism—art was only their second goal and could not be achieved without the first. Claudet, however, was not only interested in imitation, but also naturalism in the service of art, musing, “One admires above all those by the stereoscope which achieve magnificent relief. Photography thus possesses all the value of statuary enriched by color and live expression. The art attains here its highest degree of imitation.”1 In 1855, Claudet introduced a new kind of stereoscope with adjustable eyepieces, enabling them to be used by those with eyes spaced wider than the standard two and one half inches. He invented a folding pocket stereoscope and an endless belt viewer which
enabled one to view up to a hundred pictures in succession—a crucial development towards the eventual screen projection of motion pictures. At the same time, Claudet began to photograph with a prism, overcoming the problem of the image reversal in the daguerreotype process. Later, he invented a stereomonoscope, a projected picture that could be viewed by several people at once.
Claudet proposed a method of hand-coloring Daguerreotypes. Although many other photographers specialized in this technique, Claudet’s studio was considered to be the best and was known for using pastel hues. In the studio, Claudet often employed simple curtain drapery to offset the monotony of a plain background. He used minor props—a man’s hat, a desk, and lace clothing—to emphasize the three-dimensional quality of the pictures. His fame was derived primarily from his hand-colored pictures, and he continuously fought for the acceptance of his photography as art.
In his lifetime, Claudet received many honors by such notable figures as Queen Victoria and the Emperor of France. In 1853, he was even asked to be the official royal photographer and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. Less than a month after his death in 1867 at the age of seventy, a fire swept through his studio, destroying his “Temple to Photography.” Many of his most valuable photographic treasures, including 20,000 prints, negatives, and Daguerreotypes, were lost. The rare few that still exist are housed in some of the most important photographic collections in the world.
Brittany Corrales
Antoine Claudet, untitled, c. 1850s, Stereo Daguerreotype, hand-colored, (2) 6.9 x 5.8 cm, SOLARI 94.050.001L