Vincent Chevalier

Full plate daguerreotype. Vintage passe-partout and modern seal. Original frame.

Galerie Marc Pagneux, Paris 1996

Noël-Marie Paymal, Excursions daguerriennes : vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe, 1840-1844, Paris, Rittner et Goupil, pl. 99

Vincent Jacques Louis Chevalier (1770-1841) one of the pioneers of Photography, was a French optic engineer from a known optician family for generations. He made several remarkable views of monuments in Paris using the daguerreotype, and was the one who introduced Louis Daguerre to Nicéphore Niepce.

One of the first famous daguerreotypists, the Baron Gros (Jean-Baptiste Louis) described in 1846 while comparing his results to those by Chevalier "I think it is difficult to obtain more satisfying results (...) and the views of Panthéon, Notre-Dame, etc. (...) seems to me like they are leaving nothing to desire.

Another early daguerreotypist Noel Lerebours, reproduced daguerreotypes through engravings and distributed on a larger scale these unique images. This plate was probably one of the views used by Lerebours in his Excursions Daguerriennes that is reproduced here.

Only two others similar plates are known, one is in the collection of The Museum of History of Science in Oxford and the other is known to be in a private collection in France and registered in 1988 as French National Treasure. This plate is therefore the last remaining example of the earliest daguerreotypes views of Notre-Dame.