| In 1839 the French government publicly announced L. J. Daguerre's process for permanently fixing the image of the camera obscura. While artists throughout the world were affected by the new medium, the daguerreotype played a particularly important role in the experience of American painters. Not only did this early form of photography find its most receptive audience in America, but its most loyal patrons as well. During the 1840s and 50s when Europeans approved the more "painterly" paper calotype prints, Americans held firm in their preference for the pictures made on polished silver plates. The peculiar properties of the daguerreotype process created a unique kind of vision unprecedented for its miraculous detail and subtle tonal gradations. Placing a high premium on a pictorial language grounded in fact, Americans found the daguerreotype wonderfully lacking in "false artistic effects.";Less attention has been given to the daguerreotype as a conditioning agent in the experience of the landscape painter. Yet the daguerreotype view, representing a complete break with artistic convention, may have been far more accessible and inspiring to the artist than we have previously acknowledged. Indeed, these glowing, miniaturized worlds created through the action of light may account for the character and appearance of the stylistic phenomenon called Luminism. The distinguishing features of early luminist landscapes are strinkingly similar to the visual properties of scenes created by the daguerreotype process. Circumstances surrounding the early luminist paintings of Fitz Hugh Lane, George Caleb Bingham, and William Sidney Mount also support the proposition that the origins of the luminist mode can be found in the inherently luminist character of daguerreotype images.;Native artists could not ignore the widespread challenge to compete with the "truthfulness of nature painting itself." In response to this pressure, American painters were significantly influenced both technically and philosophically by the images produced on the silvered plates. Scholars have frequently pointed to a pedestrian realism in the portraiture of the period as a conspicuous sign of the camera's intrusion. Other period tendencies in painted portraiture, as well, were generated by the new instructor. |
