Thiers, Auvergne,

ca. 1827

In 1839 the invention of photography was announced separately by gentleman-scientist William Henry Fox Talbot, in England, and in France by artist Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre. Until that year, Daguerre was best known to the<br>public as manager of the Paris Diorama, a proto-cinematic venue where enormous landscape paintings by himself and others were unveiled before audiences, accompanied by narration and sometimes by sound and lighting effects to<br>simulate changing weather and times of day. Thiers, Auvergne is a study for a painting that debuted at the Paris Diorama from November 1827 to July 1828.<br>When it traveled to London the next year, a critic remarked that the painting exhibited “all the peculiar ingredients of the picturesque.” Daguerre was praised for his close attention to the textural effects of light and, in particular, the weathering<br>of buildings in the scene, “to the beauty of which accident and situation have contributed far more than the designs of the architect.”