Portraits of the Hoyle Family

The beginnings of photography in Peru can be traced to 1842, the year in which Maximiliano Danti, the first in a series of travelling daguerreotype photographers who would work in the country, arrived in Lima. Despite existing documentary references, in practice little is known about the work of these photographers. The few pieces that have come down to us rarely provide any exact identification, which makes these pieces difficult to date and attribute precisely. Although their cost was high at the time, they represented a prelude to the later democratization of the portrait, a genre that would no longer be the privilege of the few, but would be accessible to a wider public. This is one of the most important daguerreotypes preserved by the MALI. In one of the faces the image of the married couple John Hoyle and Josefina Moreno de Hoyle can be recognized. The seven children born to the couple appear on the back of the piece.