View from the Study Window (Point de vue du Gras à Saint-Loup de Varennes), by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. Niépce had attempted since 1816, using various materials, to capture images with a home-made camera obscura pointed out of his study window. But in the summer of 1827 he was able to use a more advanced instrument with a double convex lens that he had bought in Paris the previous February. In it he exposed a pewter plate thinly coated with bitumen of Judea apparently for c. 2-3 days, after which the dark portions of the image where the bitumen had remained soft were rinsed away with a mixture of turpentine and lavender oil. The result was laterally reversed image measuring 16.5 × 19.7 cm (6 1/2 × 7 3/4 in) that appeared positive when viewed obliquely.
At the end of his unsuccessful visit to London in 1827-8, Niépce gave this and other examples of his work to the botanist Francis Bauer, who noted on the back of the plate, ‘Monsieur Niépce's first successful experiment of fixing permanently the Image of Nature.’ After Bauer's death in 1841 it passed through various hands, eventually reaching Henry Baden Pritchard, the editor of Photographic News. On 15 February 1952, after over half a century of obscurity, it was rediscovered in a trunk owned by Pritchard's son by Helmut and Alison Gernsheim. Helmut wrote afterwards, ‘I had reached the goal of my research and held the foundation stone of photography in my hand.’ However, the plate was so hard to read that P. B. Watt of the Kodak Research Laboratory, Harrow, was asked to photograph it. He did so with great difficulty, and produced what Gernsheim described as ‘a travesty of the truth’. Gernsheim himself then laboriously touched up a print with watercolour, publishing it in his Origins of Photography (1952) as ‘the world's first photograph’; as such, it subsequently reappeared in countless other publications. In 1964 Niépce's original plate went with the rest of the Gernsheim Collection to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin.
Although Niépce's other surviving ‘heliographic’ works, his contact-printed copies of engravings, were probably earlier than View from the Study Window, the latter may well be the first surviving camera image. Another, Table Set for a Meal, on glass and known only from reproductions, was destroyed in 1909. Whether it either pre-dated View from the Study Window or was made by Niépce is unascertainable.
— Robin Lenman
See also invention of photography.Bibliography
- Batchen, G., Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997).
- Koetzle, H.-M.,
Photo Icons: The Story behind the Pictures ,1 (2002)
