Nicolas Marie Paymal Lerebours 1807-1873

(Paris: Rittner et Goupil, Lerebours, H. Bossange, 1842 [1840-44]), 2 volumes containing together 112 plates, engravings of daguerreotypes by Horace Vernet, Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet, N. P. Lerebours, Joly de Lotbinière, Edmond Jomard, Emmaneul Lascases, and others, and including 2 plates printed directly from daguerreotype plates prepared by Hippolyte Fizeau, each accompanied by letterpress descriptive text.  Oblong folio, contemporary French green quarter-morocco gilt and green paper over boards (2)

Sotheby’s Belgravia, 18 November 1977, Lot 121

John Fleming, New York

Christie’s New York, 18 November 1988, Printed Books and Manuscripts from the Estate of John Fleming, Lot 211

Acquired by the present owner from the above

Truthful Lens 104

NYPL A21-2

Janet E. Buerger, French Daguerreotypes (Chicago, 1989), pp. 27-49 and pls. 23, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 40-43, 45, 57, 58, 253-268, pp. 27-49 and 246-250

André Jammes and Eugenia Parry Janis, The Art of French Calotype (Princeton, 1983), pp. 46-47 and fig. 33 and p. 116, n. 110. 

Beaumont Newhall, Photography 1839 – 1937 (New York, 1937), pl. 4

Lerebour’s Excursions Daguerriennes was the most elaborate of a number of travel books published in the 1840s that used photography as the primary source.   Issued in two volumes, with plates in the largest sets eventually numbering over 100, the Excursions gave its readers a detailed picture of some of the far-flung corners of the world at that time.  Janet Buerger, in an excellent account of Lerebours in her volume French Daguerreotypes, reports that the views chosen were culled from a reported 1,200 daguerreotypes.  The diverse locales depicted included Niagara Falls, London, Algiers, Spain, France, Russia, Egypt, Jerusalem, Sweden, and Switzerland (op. cit., pp. 27 – 40).

As Buerger describes, the majority of the engravings were made by tracing the outlines of the daguerreotyped images onto paper, then adding a wealth of detail, and sometimes figures, by hand.  Two plates of Paris, however, were reproduced by another method, adding to their veracity: a view of the Hotel de Ville and a detail of a bas-relief at the Tomb of the Virgin, Notre Dame, were printed directly from the daguerreotype plates themselves.  In order to accomplish this, Lerebours employed the services of Hippolyte Fizeau, a student of Arago at the Paris Observatory, who had devised a method of chemically etching the daguerreotype so that it could be used as a relief plate in printing.  The results were far more ‘photographic’ than any other engravings made from daguerreotypes at that time. As Buerger points out, these Fizeau plates were the ‘first real photogravures in a major publication’ (ibid., p. 40), making the Excursions Daguerriennes a landmark in photographic printing.