Chamonix. Les Aiguilles

For Ruskin, the daguerreotype was not a substitute for the human eye, but a medium that could teach people to see more clearly.

The profile of these Alps, perhaps taken from this daguerreotype, was used by Ruskin in Modern Painters, IV (1856).

Chamonix. Les Aiguilles carries an inscription by Frederick Crawley: ‘The Aiguilles in Chamonix / Savoy / 1854 / F Crawley’.

One of the first photographic processes, the daguerreotype was named for the French artist and inventor Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, who presented the technology to the French Académie des Sciences in 1839. The remarkably sharp image is created by exposing a light-sensitive silvered copper plate in a box camera, which is developed with mercury vapour and ‘fixed’ with a salt solution. Daguerreotypes are auto-positive and therefore unique. The mirror-like surface is fragile and unstable, so images were often sealed in a protective case.

Chamonix. Les Aiguilles is one of 125 daguerreotypes in The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection, created by Ruskin and under his direction, which together form one of the most important surviving groups of early photographs in the world.

Reference no.: 1996D0073