Daguerreotype 1/4 Pl Attractive Couple Antique

The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process.

Dag photography was considered an Art form.  As a matter of fact, Dag studios were considered Art Galleries and Photographers were referred to as Artists, as evident where Dags had the studio labels they would be imprinted with a sigmature for example, "J. J. OUTLEY, ARTIST, ST. LOUIS"  

And anyone who has collected Dags can tell you high quality, high contrast Dags like what we recently acquired are of the utmost rarity as probably more then 90% of Dags were low quality and/or have since suffered from environmental deterioration.  

The History of Photography:  Where it all started, with a Brilliant Inventor.

The Daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process (1839-1860) in the history of photography. Named after the inventor, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, each daguerreotype is a unique image on a silvered copper plate.   After the Dag introduced the world to the first photograph,  it would be followed by two other 19tn century photographic enhancements, namely the Ambrotype around 1860 and then the Tintype.   But, it all started with the Daguerreotype and this historical significance is what makes Dags some of the most valuable and collectible in the genre of Historical Photography. 

The daguerreotype process made it possible to capture the image seen inside a camera obscura and preserve it as an object. It was the first practical photographic process and ushered in a new age of pictorial possibility. The process was invented in 1837 by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851).

In contrast to photographic paper, a daguerreotype is not flexible and is rather heavy.The daguerreotype is accurate, detailed and sharp. It has a mirror-like surface and is very fragile. Since the metal plate is extremely vulnerable, most daguerreotypes are presented in a special housing. Different types of housings existed: an open model, a folding case, jewelry…

Numerous portrait studio’s opened their doors from 1840 onward. Daguerreotypes were very expensive, so only the wealthy could afford to have their portrait taken. Even though the portrait was the most popular subject, the daguerreotype was used to record many other images such as topographic and documentary subjects, antiquities, still lives, natural phenomena and remarkable events.
European daguerreotypes are scarce. They are scattered in institutional and private collections all over the world. Many aspects of the daguerreotype still need to be discovered. They can help us to understand the impact of photography on Europe’s social and cultural history.   

Daguerre (1787–1851) and the Invention of Photography:

On January 7, 1839, members of the French Académie des Sciences were shown products of an invention that would forever change the nature of visual representation: photography. The astonishingly precise pictures they saw were the work of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), a Romantic painter and printmaker most famous until then as the proprietor of the Diorama, a popular Parisian spectacle featuring theatrical painting and lighting effects. Each daguerreotype (as Daguerre dubbed his invention) was a one-of-a-kind image on a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper.

Daguerre’s invention did not spring to life fully grown, although in 1839 it may have seemed that way. In fact, Daguerre had been searching since the mid-1820s for a means to capture the fleeting images he saw in his camera obscura, a draftsman’s aid consisting of a wood box with a lens at one end that threw an image onto a frosted sheet of glass at the other. In 1829, he had formed a partnership with Nicéphore Niépce, who had been working on the same problem—how to make a permanent image using light and chemistry—and who had achieved primitive but real results as early as 1826. By the time Niépce died in 1833, the partners had yet to come up with a practical, reliable process.

Read more about this most fascinating invention of photography Below:
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dagu/hd_dagu.htm

http://www.photographyhistoryfacts.com/photography-inventors/louis-daguerre/

Who was the first President to be photographed?

The one-of-a-kind dagurreotype of Adams is intrinsically significant to both American history and to the history of photography. In March 1843, Adams visited Haas' Washington, D.C., studio for a portrait sitting, becoming the first U.S. President to have his likeness captured through the new medium of photography.   This Adams dag sold at auction in October 2017 for $360,000. 
I guess if someone is driven to pay $12.6 Million for a Mickey Mantle rookie card last year, $360K doesn’t sound like much for a 180 year old major historical photo like the first president ever photographed.  

Note: Cvtreasures stamp Not on original