THE FATHER OF PHOTOGRAPHY
[DAGUERRE.] MAYER & PIERSON [after Charles Richard MEADE.]
Carte-de-visite albumen print portrait of Louis Daguerre.
Paris, late 1860s.
Carte-de-visite (106 x 64 mm) with an oval albumen print from a glass negative, photographer’s printed credit at foot, logo on the verso; mount slightly toned but good.
In 1848 the pioneering American photographer Charles Richard Meade secured the commission for which he is now best known, a series of daguerrotypes of the medium’s founding father Louis Jaques Mandé Daguerre. The five images, known as the white-tie series to distinguish them from other portraits, were probably the best-known and most widely circulated portraits of Daguerre in his lifetime and after – copies were circulated in America by Whipple, in Britain by Mayall, and in France by Mayer & Pierson.
Pierre Louis Pierson (1822–1913) was active as a daguerreotypist from at least 1844 in connection with Mayer brothers. The studio was at its greatest prominence during the late 1850s and ’60s, with numerous royal commissions, but he was evidently not averse to circulating popular images that he had no hand in; from 1865 to 1873 he was ‘seul propriétaire’ of the firm, as stated on the verso here.
