No images? Click here

The first image revealed by Nicéphore Niépce

Jeune fille à la quenouille (The Spinner). Photo-etching, 1825

On January 12, 1826, Colonel David Niépce showed the Paris opticians Vincent Chevalier and his son Charles the Jeune fille à la quenouille. The next day, according to Isidore Niépce, Daguerre heard of it; a few days later he wrote to Nicéphore.

The object was a photo-etching.

Atelier 41 presents this very object at Paris Photo, Stand D50.

France celebrated the centenary of photography in 1939 for Daguerre, and its sesquicentenary in 1989, while the Société française de photographie had organized a centenary for Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône in 1925. For years, England, Brazil and Germany have also claimed the invention, in the name of William Henry Fox Talbot, Hercule Florence or Johann Heinrich Schulze.

The official bicentenary stretches over thirteen months, from September 1, 2026, to September 30, 2027, just long enough to cover both 1826 and 1827 without having to choose.¹

Atelier 41 enters the debate with a piece of evidence: an original photo-etching by Nicéphore Niépce from 1825, one of the three earliest surviving objects to bear witness to a photographic process. It is also the first image by Niépce known to have been shown outside Chalon.

The invention keeps its share of mystery. Its history, and the twists of its public disclosure from 1839 onward, have no less. Today a reasonable reading emerges: photography was born of the patient work of a rather solitary man, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, during the brightest days of the years 1824 to 1827.

Nicéphore Niépce, Letter to his cousin Du Bard de Curley, 30 December 1821. Stand D50

What Nicéphore Niépce announced in 1824

Niépce was working on his great idea, among other astonishing inventions. His first experiments date from March 1816, after his elder brother Claude left, first for Paris, then for England in 1817. The elder Niépce had taken charge of developing the Pyréolophore, the first internal combustion engine in history; but the British patent of 1817 credits the original idea to his younger brother Joseph Nicéphore.²

To invent photography, Nicéphore had to solve problems of optics and chemistry at the same time. He alternated his experiments and concentrated first on a slower and more reliable process: what Niépce would soon call héliographie, and what would later be called photogravure: etching by means of light. A thin ground of bitumen of Judea, spread on a metal plate, hardened where sunlight struck it. A solvent then dissolved only the soft bitumen, the part light had not hardened, laying the metal bare there; acid then etched the bare metal into grooves that would hold the ink. The hardened ground was then cleaned off, and the plate could be inked and printed on paper.

By 1824 the principle was established; the etching was not yet. On June 13, Nicéphore wrote that he could “graver” (his word for fixing the image made by light) “on red copper as on stone”.

On September 16, 1824, he wrote to Claude: “you may, from today, regard as a thing demonstrated and incontestable the success of the application of my processes to views, whether on stone or on glass.”³

The year 1824 left no work that has come down to us. The first surviving objects that bear witness to the invention date from 1825.

Nicéphore Niépce, The Horse and its Driver, 1825. Courtesy Bibliothèque Nationale de France

The three prints of 1825

Only three material witnesses of the first successful trials are known: three impressions on paper from 1825, one printed from one copper plate, two from another.

The Horse and its Driver, printed from a copper plate etched in August 1825, was spotted by André Jammes among Niépce’s correspondence with his cousin Du Bard de Curley, in the catalogue of the Brussels bookseller Tristan Schwilden. It entered the Bibliothèque nationale de France by pre-emption at the 2002 auction of the Jammes collection.⁴ The source print for the Horse goes back to a Dutch etching by Dirk van der Stoop (1651), copied by the Chevalier de Claussin around 1800.

The other two were printed from a single plate,⁵ itself also made by light alone from an existing print, a heliograph: a young woman spinning with a distaff, seated by a window, a small dog at her feet. The source print of the Jeune fille has not yet been identified; it is one of the riddles still to be solved.⁶

Both prints of the Jeune fille à la quenouille belong to the same collector; only one bears an inscription, and it is the one presented by Atelier 41.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Jeune fille à la quenouille (The Spinner). Photo-etching on paper from a copper plate, the image formed by light in a ground of bitumen of Judea, then etched with acid, autumn 1825; printed in Dijon, November–December 1825. Image 132×107 mm, sheet 178×144 mm. Laid down on an old mount inscribed in ink in the hand of Isidore Niépce: « Première épreuve héliographique sur étain (1825) par Nicéphore Niépce / hommage de l’auteur à son parent le Colonel Niépce » [First heliographic print on pewter (1825) by Nicéphore Niépce / homage of the author to his
relative Colonel Niépce]. In addition, a pencil annotation in the margin reads “1825”. The inscription says “pewter”; the plate was copper (see annex).⁷

The print, the note, the colonel

The note postdates the inventor’s death in 1833. It records a fact confirmed by the family’s accounts: this particular print is the one Niépce gave to his relative, Colonel David Niépce. Appointed lieutenant du roi on the Île de Ré on December 14, 1825, the colonel left Burgundy on January 8, 1826, taking with him heliographic prints entrusted to him by Nicéphore.

On January 12, according to the account the colonel himself gave Victor Fouque, who was preparing a history of the invention, he called on the opticians Chevalier, quai de l’Horloge, Niépce’s suppliers since the summer of 1825, and showed them the Jeune fille à la quenouille. Daguerre, a client of the firm, heard of it at once, “the next day”, according to Isidore Niépce. A few days later a letter from Daguerre reached Chalon; Niépce himself, a year later, would say that Daguerre had been informed “I hardly know how”.⁸

It was thus with this image that the invention left its provincial Burgundian nest; with it began, as Niépce had foreseen, the history of photography.

In the course of 1826, Niépce moved to pewter and refined the same principle. With the help of the Parisian engraver Lemaître, who printed the plates in early 1827, he obtained the portrait of Cardinal d’Amboise, which he would take to England, or have sent there, in the autumn of 1827. The Horse, the Jeune fille and the Cardinal thus belong to one and the same process: photo-etching, printed in ink on a press.⁹

Nicéphore Niépce, Cardinal d’Amboise, pewter plate, 1826. Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum

Epilogue: London, 1839

In 1839 Niépce’s early work resurfaced in London. The first public exhibitions of photography were English, prompted by a newspaper leak, in early January 1839, of a forthcoming French initiative.

On January 25, 1839, at the Royal Institution, the chemist and physicist Michael Faraday showed more than three hundred listeners the photogenic drawings of his friend William Henry Fox Talbot (images made by laying objects or engravings on light-sensitive paper) laid out for one evening in the library among papier-mâché ornaments and samples of artificial fuel.¹⁰

Four weeks later, on February 20, 1839, the Graphic Society held its best-attended meeting since its founding: Talbot’s prints were expected. They were not sent.

What the assembly saw in their place, borrowed by Charles Wheatstone from Franz Bauer and exhibited by William Brockedon, were the objects entrusted to Bauer in November 1827 by a Frenchman, Nicéphore Niépce.¹¹ They most likely included the View from the Window at Le Gras and three photo-etched pewter plates, Cardinal d’Amboise, Christ Carrying the Cross and Moonlight (Clair de lune), as well as prints of the portrait of Cardinal d’Amboise. It was Talbot’s own friends who restored Niépce’s priority.

Despite the efforts of Daguerre and his countless supporters, there would from then on be in France too a stubborn minority (relatives, but also scientists) to defend the memory of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and his role as the true inventor.

The incunabula shown in February 1839 have survived. They are today in public collections: in England, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and in Texas, at the University of Texas at Austin.

The most famous, the View from the Window at Le Gras, regarded as the world’s first photograph from nature, will leave Austin to be shown at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône from April 26 to June 20, 2027, back in France for the first time since it was made.¹² It dates from the summer of 1827: Niépce’s letters to his brother of June 27 and July 18, 1827, describe three successful views in six weeks, made with the lenses received from the optician Chevalier in February.¹³ The French Ministry of Culture itself, in announcing the loan, now dates the plate to 1827.

Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras, 1827. Courtesy Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

Provenance of the annotated Jeune fille à la quenouille

Colonel David Niépce; probably lent by him, or by his family, to Isidore Niépce in 1839 to support the priority claim, when the inscription was added; then back in the colonel’s family, passed to his great-granddaughter Léontine Niépce and her descendants, the Perrault-Niépce family of Sennecey-le-Grand; Sotheby’s London, Photographs, sale L06430, 2006, lot 110; collection of Michael S. Sachs, United States. The print will be shown in the gilt frame in which the family kept it; on the back, the pencil address “A. Perrault-Niepce à Sennecey-le-Grand” and a “Perrault-Niepce” label, both from 1925.¹⁴

See the print on the stand

The original print can be seen on Stand D50 on Tuesday, November 10, and Wednesday, November 11, during the previews, and on Thursday, November 12, at 5 p.m., when Serge Plantureux presents on the stand the special Niépce issue of the journal Partita Doppia, “Toward a Catalogue Raisonné of the Heliographs of Nicéphore Niépce”.

Press contact

Atelier 41, Senigallia,fotografia

High-resolution images on request.

Annexes

Glossary

Heliography: the name Niépce would give to his images formed by light on a ground of bitumen of Judea. Two applications: unique plates made in the camera obscura (the letters mention several, of which only one has survived, the View from the Window at Le Gras); and plates prepared for printing, of which some ten survive that were perhaps never printed. Three printed subjects have come down to us: the Horse, the Jeune fille and the Cardinal (see the special issue of Partita Doppia).

Photo-etching: a print made from a plate etched after an image formed by light.

Etch: to attack the metal with acid where light has not hardened the ground. Before the acid bath, a solvent dissolves only this soft, unhardened ground and lays the metal bare; the hardened ground stays on and resists the acid. The grooves thus made hold the ink and allow printing on paper. The hardened ground is removed afterwards. Source: Niépce, Notice sur l’héliographie, sent to Daguerre on December 5, 1829, published by Daguerre in Historique et description des procédés du daguerréotype et du diorama, 1839 (solvent: one part essential oil of lavender to ten parts white petroleum, by volume).

Print: the image printed in ink on paper from the plate. This is the object presented here.

Copper / pewter: the metal of the plate, which dates the object: copper in 1825, pewter afterwards. Niépce’s letters say « étain »; the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Harry Ransom Center catalogue these plates as pewter. Niépce would go on to use various alloys, then silver-plated copper in 1828. When he joined forces with Daguerre in December 1829, he had already tried many supports: stone, glass, copper, pewter, alloys, silver-plated copper.

The printing plate of the Jeune fille was copper

The inscription beneath the print says « sur étain », on pewter. Niépce’s surviving letters say “on copper”, and the date rests on them. In 1825 Niépce was etching copper: he was awaiting his metal plates in June, etched the horse in August, announced on October 25 that he would “have two or three copies of prints printed”, and on January 14, 1826, that he had “had a few proofs of [his] etchings on copper printed in Dijon”, which “do not have the desired sharpness and correctness”.

These “etchings on copper” are the summer plates: the Horse, the view made with it in August and, in all likelihood, the Jeune fille, whose plate no letter dates.

Each can have yielded only a handful of prints. That three survived is a small miracle. The prints of the Horse and the Jeune fille were made at the same time; nothing allows us to say which of the three came first. Neither copper plate has been found; nor have the source prints, made translucent by Niépce.

On March 12, 1826, sending a print of the Horse to their cousin Alexandre Du Bard de Curley, Isidore Niépce passes on the judgement of his father Nicéphore: he notes that the print is “weak in colour” because “the copper was not etched deeply enough”. Sending the Horse to the cousin is consistent with entrusting the Jeune fille to the colonel, to be shown to the opticians.

The trials on pewter await the documented arrival of pewter plates in spring 1826, ordered for the camera obscura; and Lemaître wrote on January 22, 1827, that he had “never yet etched pewter with acid”.¹⁵ A print shown in Paris in January 1826 thus comes from a copper plate.

The handwritten note on the mount, probably written around 1839–1841, is right about the date and wrong about the metal. There is another such case: the label of the Petit paysage at the Chalon museum, which says “zinc” for a pewter plate.

In Isidore’s defence, he had left his father’s house for good in 1822, first for the army, then through his marriage in 1825. He was therefore not a direct witness of the heliographic trials between 1824 and 1829.

The Dijon printer, identified at last

Around 1866, Victor Fouque was still asking Isidore about the Dijon printer his father had used: “Who is this friend of Carbillet?” The correspondence never names him. But the history of lithography in Dijon is well documented. Peignot and Girault described its beginnings as early as 1818–1819; the Dictionnaire des imprimeurs-lithographes of the École nationale des chartes follows its practitioners: Mairet left Dijon in 1821, Berthaux-Durand around 1826–1827.

In November–December 1825, Dijon thus had only one lithographic printer in business: Berthaux-Durand, a land-survey engineer, who had set up his press with two workmen trained in Vienna. It is therefore logical that it was at his premises that Niépce’s copper plates were printed.¹⁶ And the announcement of his departure from Dijon may well have encouraged Niépce to turn to a Parisian professional, Lemaître.

Notes

Quotations from French sources are given in our translation.

1. 1925 centenary: prompted by Georges Potonniée (Histoire de la découverte de la photographie, 1925), who based his dating of the invention on the portrait of Pope Pius VII copied on glass, since broken, whose story remains uncertain in its dates (1822–1824). The 1939 centenary and the 1989 sesquicentenary were based on 1839. Gernsheim imposed 1826, then came round to 1827 (1982). Florence: Campinas, 1833; Schulze: Halle, 1727. Official calendar: bicentenairephotographie.culture.gouv.fr

2. First experiments: Niépce to Claude, March 21-May 19, 1816 (MNN). On the division of tasks when Claude left for London: Niépce to Du Bard de Curley, November 26, 1824 (BnF). Letters patent of George III for Scotland, 1817, granted to “Josephus Claude Niepce of Frith Street Soho Square” for “certain improvements in the means of propelling Boats and other vessels“: “in consequentia communicationis illi factae per Fratrem ejus Josephum Nicephore Niepce illo peregrino existente”; on the back: “Carta Dom. Josephi Claude Niepce ejus Inventionis infra memoratae -1817” (collection Maison Nicéphore Niépce, Saint-Loup-de-Varennes).

3. Niépce to Claude, June 13 and September 16, 1824 (ASR; Bonnet-Marignier, letter 382 for June 13). The acid fails to bite: October 8, 1824.

4. Niépce to Claude, August 7, 1825 (ASR): “I am etching on copper at this moment a horse with its driver.” Sent to Du Bard de Curley: Isidore Niépce to Du Bard de Curley, March 12, 1826 (BnF), “a trial of my father’s etchings”. Sotheby’s sale, March 21, 2002; André Jammes collection; BnF, Estampes, RESERVE BOITE FOL-Z-14 (22,A).

5. Comparison of the two prints from photographs: coinciding plate accidents (diagonals crossing the skirt and the floor, a mark near the face, a ring on the floor, registration on the plate edges; polarity of the diagonals; absence of Lemaître’s circles in the corners). Second impression: J.-L. Marignier, Niépce. L’invention de la photographie, 1999, p. 213.

6. Source print: the photo-etching must read in the same direction as the original (contact copy, then printing). Lead: La Fileuse by Jean-Antoine Pinchon (1772–1850), Salon of 1824, no. 1556; we thank the Bibliothèque nationale de France for its research. The source print cannot come from Du Bard de Curley’s parcel of August 1826 (n. 9). The owner’s call for identification: note by M. S. Sachs, The Classic, January 2025.

7. Transcription from the object and the 2006 Sotheby’s catalogue note (which marks three sic: “Premiere”, “Nièpce” ×2). Calibration of Isidore’s datings: label on the back of a Cardinal printed by Lemaître in 1827, reading “1824”; label of the Chalon Petit paysage, “1825” with a retouched digit.

8. The colonel’s appointment: Bonnet-Marignier, app. XVI. Accounts of the visit: V. Fouque, La Vérité sur l’invention de la photographie, 1867, pp. 117–118, from the colonel, who told him the story “several times” (p. 120); Fouque also has the colonel buy a camera obscura, which Chevalier had shipped on January 5 and which reached Le Gras on the 13th (Niépce to Du Bard de Curley, January 14, 1826, BnF). Isidore Niépce, Historique de la découverte improprement nommée daguerréotype, 1841, pp. 19–20. Charles Chevalier, Guide du photographe, 1854, part 3, “Souvenirs historiques”, pp. 19–22, in the presence of the Comte de Mandelot, Henri-Camille-Sophie Bataille (1753–1827); see Niépce to Lemaître, January 17, 1827 (ASR; Bonnet-Marignier 404, n. 7). Chevalier as supplier: Vincent Chevalier to Niépce, November 8 and December 7, 1825 (ASR; Bonnet-Marignier 394, 395). Daguerre’s letter, written “in the course of January” 1826: Niépce to Lemaître, February 2, 1827, postscript (ASR; Bonnet-Marignier 406, pp. 751–753, editor’s n. 2: Daguerre informed by Chevalier, whose client he was); Niépce’s reply of January 25, 1826, lost (ibid., n. 4; Niépce to Daguerre, February 2, 1827, Bonnet-Marignier 407: “I received yesterday your answer to my letter of January 25, 1826”). A year later Daguerre was still asking Niépce to “send him a print” (Bonnet-Marignier 406): he had therefore never seen one.

9. Pewter plates of the Cardinal d’Amboise: parcel of engravings from Du Bard de Curley received August 9, 1826; Niépce to Du Bard de Curley, November 2, 1826 (BnF): the Cardinal “gave me prints stronger in tone”, printing “entrusted to a poor local printer”. Five pewter plates sent to Lemaître, including “a double copy of a portrait”: Niépce to Lemaître, February 2, 1827 (Bonnet-Marignier 406, n. 5). Lemaître’s prints: Lemaître to Niépce, January 22, February 7 and March 5, 1827 (ASR). The plate is catalogued by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London: Le Cardinal d’Amboise, “Heliograph on pewter (photo-etched pewter plate)”, 1826 (collections.vam.ac.uk, O1387373). Stay in England and objects entrusted to Bauer: see nn. 11 and 13.

10. Royal Institution, Friday evening meeting, January 25, 1839; L. J. Schaaf, Talbot Correspondence Project, blog Foundation of Photography. This was the Royal Institution, not the Royal Society, before which Talbot read his paper on January 31.

11. Graphic Society, meeting of February 20, 1839, minutes quoted by Schaaf (ibid.); see also History of Photography, 2000. Items sent to Bauer: Niépce to Bauer, November 19, 22 and 30, 1827 (ASR). List of objects reconstructed from the items Bauer kept until his death, later dispersed, and now at the Harry Ransom Center and the Victoria and Albert Museum (see nn. 9 and 12).

12. French Ministry of Culture press release, September 3, 2026; exhibition at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, April 26 – June 20, 2027, on loan from the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, which catalogues the plate as Niepce Heliograph, “Heliograph on pewter”, 1827 (hrc.utexas.edu/niepce-heliograph).

13. Niépce to Claude, June 27 and July 18, 1827 (ASR); order for four lenses from Chevalier, February 3, 1827 (AAS; Bonnet-Marignier 408), delivered on the 19th; on the “field too narrow” of the 1826 trials, Niépce to Du Bard de Curley, November 2, 1826 (BnF). Niépce to Aiton, October 31, 1827: “my framed prints made on pewter”; eventful departure for England, late August 1827.

14. Loan to Isidore: Fouque 1867. Sotheby’s London, Photographs, L06430, 2006, lot 110: on the back of the frame, “A. Perrault-Niepce à Sennecey-le-Grand” and a “Perrault-Niepce” label. Current owner: Michael S. Sachs.

15. Niépce to Du Bard de Curley, June 5 and October 25, 1825, January 14 and June 16, 1826 (BnF); Niépce to Isidore, May 26, 1826 (George Eastman Museum); Lemaître to Niépce, January 22, 1827; Niépce to Lemaître, February 16, 1827, and to Daguerre, June 4, 1827: the pewter “sent for my camera obscura”, preferred “for my first trials”. “Zinc” label: Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Petit paysage.

16. Niépce to Claude, June 13, 1824; Claude to Niépce, December 8, 1825 (“the friend of M. Carbillet”); Niépce to Du Bard de Curley, January 14, 1826; Fouque to Isidore, c. 1866 (Bonnet-Marignier). Berthaux-Durand and Mairet: Dictionnaire des imprimeurs-lithographes du XIXe siècle, École nationale des chartes, entries Berthaux-Durand and Mairet; Arch. nat. F/18 1891 and 1892; G. Peignot, Essai historique sur la lithographie, 1819, pp. 25 and 41; C.-X. Girault, Détails historiques et statistiques sur le département de la Côte-d’Or, 1818, pp. 15–16; BnF authority record for Mairet (Dijon 1816–1821, then Morlaix).

Cover image, Pierre Harmant, Niépce, Correspondance 1825-1829, Rouen, 1974

La Fotografia antica è la più bella delle collezioni …

Senigallia, città della fotografia, prepara la V Biennale di Storia della Fotografia di Senigallia, estate 2027, conferenza, fiera: 18-20 giugno 2027.

Senigallia diventerà la Città delle collezioni.

Share
Tweet
Share
Forward