Architectural Study

The present work was painted by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype. Though now best-known as one of the fathers of photography, Daguerre was also a Romantic painter and printmaker, most famous before his invention as the proprietor of the Diorama, a popular Parisian spectacle featuring theatrical painting and lighting effects. Daguerre had begun his experiments in the 1820s as a way to fix the fleeting image of the camera obscura permanently to a surface, but was not able to do so reliably until 1838–he presented his invention to the Académie des Sciences in January of 1839.

This work dates from approximately the same period of his career and is one of only a small number of surviving paintings by the artist–the majority of his painted work was destroyed in a fire shortly before his death. According to the sale catalogue when the work was sold in 1994, the work formerly bore a label on the reverse of Alphonse Giroux, Daguerre’s camera maker.