The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (16 page)

One night in the summer of 1821, a crowd of actors, poets, philosophers, and painters arrived at his apartment well after midnight. They had all come from the final performance of a play that featured Louis’s most accomplished set—a panorama of Paris as a Roman outpost, from hilltop to river. In the spirit of the play, Louis was hosting a Roman feast.

He had transformed his terrace with a perimeter of lit sconces and garlands of cut flowers. There was a large canvas concealed against the half-wall that faced the markets and the street. Reclining chairs and divans were scattered around a long wooden table piled with food: wild figs, whole fish in garum, perfect rosettes of field greens. He didn’t cook so much as assemble food based on symmetry, color, and texture. He moved among his guests in a white toga and a head wreath, pouring wine. All night they called him Senator. Everyone had come from the theater via the taverns, and the talk was animated and speculative. The men spoke of politics, of Napoleon, who had died the previous month on the island of Saint Helena. “The British murdered him,” a poet declared, “I’m sure of it.” A clutch of women stood in the kitchen, debating whether actors or directors made better lovers. Louis came towards them, a smile brimming.

“Ladies, I feel a little slighted by this conversation. What about the painters of this world? Don’t we even figure a mention?”

“A man in a toga can’t be taken seriously,” one of them said.

A young actress from Amsterdam took him by the hand.

“Painters fall in with philosophers and poets—you are all too much within yourselves.”

“Nonsense,” said Louis, clenching her wrist. He turned to the others. “I’m sorry, but this woman will have to leave unless she agrees to take me as her lover…just to prove my point.”

The women laughed at this, their cheeks pink from the wine. The Dutch woman—a pale-eyed blonde in her twenties—said, “I don’t think it’s that easy, but if you’d like to paint me sometime, I’d be honored. Your talent is wasted on those beautiful scenes of Italian seacoast and crumbling Greek ruins.” Her eyes floated slowly above her wineglass. Louis thought of two tropical blue fish.

He brought her hand up to his face. “You would like me to paint you?”

“Yes,” she said.

Louis wheeled around, took a camelhair brush from a copper pan of orange paint, and dashed a heart on the back of her hand. The women applauded and the Dutch actress, her cheeks ablaze, looked down at her hand.

“That was terrible of me,” Louis said. “But I couldn’t resist seeing you in bright orange.”

The woman, trying to recompose herself, held up her hand and said, “You can wash this off now.”

“That would require some turpentine, which, unfortunately, is in my studio at the back of the apartment.”

“That sounds like a ploy,” she said.

Louis took her by the hand, and they walked down the hallway. She looked back at the other women and called, “I’m being conquered by Rome.” The women raised their glasses and went out onto the terrace. Louis opened the door to his studio and brought her inside. They stood against his drafting table, kissing. She knocked over a bottle of India ink with her painted hand. These kinds of exchanges were the extent of Louis’s romantic life. In the years since Madame Treadwell, whose stone-walled mansion he still passed, he’d never taken a lover for more than a month. These were typically women in transition or jaded about love—actresses from Prague and Budapest, girls from the garrets who’d been left behind. This woman from Amsterdam was certainly not auditioning for a husband: she took his hand now and placed it inside her dress. Louis kissed her neck and felt her body rise towards him; he was sure that they were about to make love on his drafting table. Then, as a volley of drunken laughter lifted from the terrace, Louis remembered that she was a terrible actress—an affected speaking style and a mannered set of gestures plagued her performances. He took his hand from her breast. “I fear they’re going to ask me to make one of my toasts out on the terrace. I should probably get back to my guests.”

She waited a moment before speaking. “What they say about painters is true, then.”

“I’m afraid so. We’re terrible at love.”

“Who said anything about love?” she said, adjusting her dress. “Incidentally, the front of your toga is covered in orange paint.”

He smiled, looking down. “I’m a disgrace to my profession.” He took her hand and wiped it gently with a cloth dipped in spirits. “Shall we see what debauchery is going on out there?”

“We were promised an orgy,” she said indignantly. “A Roman feast has to have an orgy.”

“Your night has been ruined,” he said, laughing. He took her arm and led her out into the hallway.

Out on the terrace, the guests were slumped on divans and reclining chairs, eating with their hands. A cloud of cigar smoke hovered above their heads. The talk was wild and studded with moments of song and raucous laughter. The crowd turned to look at Louis, and his toga received fresh mockery and delight. Louis sat with the poets, and the Dutch woman went to find her fellow actresses. A veteran actor, a decade beyond his prime, stood in a dinner jacket with a glass of champagne and delivered a monologue to nobody in particular. The speech was full of wild flourish and rising pitch. Louis watched him, wondering if there was still a voice inside the man’s head, however faintly, that said,
Nobody is listening to me.
Louis feared becoming irrelevant, discovering that he was a boorish man standing at a party with war stories and specks of paint on his cheap shoes.

When the sun rose behind the river, the mood at the party shifted. The diatribes petered out; the veteran actor fell asleep on an ottoman. Louis tapped a spoon on a wineglass and stood before his guests. Someone called, “Quiet, the senator is making his toast.”

Louis walked in front of his covered canvas. “First,” he said, removing his head wreath, “I want to thank you all for coming. And I also want to thank you for eight wonderful years. I think we have changed the way Paris views theater. I’ve never worked with such dedicated artists. Here’s to the theater!”

They all raised their glasses and drank.

“What’s this?” a scenic painter called. “A farewell speech?”

“Actually,” Louis said, his eyes on the wreath of laurel, “it is. I’ve decided to leave the company.”

There was silence for a moment. “What will you do?” asked the woman from Amsterdam, still a little miffed.

Louis looked up. “These last few years I have been experimenting with a new kind of painting. I plan to open a gallery.”

The guests murmured. Louis turned and removed the cover from the canvas. It was a replica of the street and market scene in front of his terrace. The shadows and pools of light had been painted to match this exact time of a summer’s day. Every color—the cobalt of the river, the dun brown of the marketplace in the dawn—seemed to match perfectly. The crowd moved towards the painting, then stood comparing it to what they saw on the other side of the wall.

“It’s quite marvelous,” a theater patroness said. “How did you do it?”

“The canvas is transparent calico, and I paint the shadow and the light on two different sides. The light shining behind it gives the effect.”

A man’s voice rose above the crowd. “The angles are all wrong,” he joked.

It was Degotti, padding along in his leather slippers, a cane at his side. Louis hadn’t seen him in several years and was amazed by how old he looked. The two men embraced. Louis stared at him, unable to speak.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friends?” Degotti said.

Louis turned back to the crowd. “Friends, this is Ignace Degotti, the father of scenic painting. I apprenticed with him when I first came to Paris.”

The guests smiled and nodded; they knew the name.

Degotti, now in his eighties and a little stooped, said, “Old men get up at this hour, and you people haven’t gone to bed yet.”

The crowd laughed.

Degotti turned and looked at the painting behind him. He touched it gently with his hand. “I don’t think anyone has painted like this before. I think we can expect great things from Louis Daguerre.”

“To Daguerre!” a man called.

Everyone raised their glasses and drank.

Louis looked at the painting and felt, for the first time, an almost painful sense of pride. It had taken him a full year to paint. He had mixed the colors to match a June dawn, preserving the exact tints of the cornices and the facades and the sky on the backs of envelopes. Using a camera obscura, he had painstakingly copied the shadow lines and the trapezoids of sunshine. There were a hundred shades of yellow and blue trapped inside the painting, a thousand inflections of daylight and shadow. Without knowing it, Louis Daguerre had tried to paint a photograph.

People drained their glasses of wine and champagne. The sun was high enough to make them squint and, taking this as their cue, the guests readied to leave. Louis saw them out, shaking hands, kissing cheeks. He stood with Degotti on the front stoop. The Italian wore his age like a stylish but outmoded hat; there was something formidable and sad about it. “Let me know when your gallery opens and I’ll be sure to attend,” Degotti said. “I don’t get out much these days but will make exceptions.”

“I’d be honored. Thank you for coming.”

“I’ve been meaning to drop in for years, and when I heard you were retiring from the theater, I couldn’t resist.”

“You mean people already knew?”

“Of course everyone knew. They say that a man cannot change his undershirt in the Latin Quarter without all of Paris knowing.”

Louis looked down at his feet.

“Good luck, Louis. Your painting has matured a great deal. You now paint exactly what you see instead of what you wish to see.”

“Goodbye,” said Louis, shaking Degotti’s hand.

Degotti walked out into the street towards a waiting carriage. The markets were coming to life; the flower stalls were being stocked with daylilies and pansies. Louis watched his old master move among the flower women, suddenly certain that he would not see him again. The man would be dead within a few months. He carried the certainty of it in his halting walk and mannerisms, a calm awareness that nothing else was expected of him. Degotti had come to say goodbye, to pass along the torch. Saddened and touched by this gesture, Louis stood in his doorway and watched the markets flood with daylight.

Louis called his gallery the Diorama. With a bank loan, he had financed a custom-made building with a rotating gallery. It housed scenic paintings of enormous proportions, rendered on transparent lawn or calico, and lit from various angles. On one side of the linen, Daguerre sketched a scene in lead. He used colors ground in oil, applied them with essence of turpentine, then concealed the brushstrokes with badger’s skin. On the other side of the linen, he applied a wash of transparent blue and sketched the desired effects of light and shadow that would be seen through the first side. The viewer saw a seamless rendition of nature, a scene of perfect shade and hue.

The first diorama was based on the Valley of Sarnen in Switzerland, where dog-toothed mountains rimmed a valley floor. The audience watched as the scene migrated through early morning into noon before an afternoon storm threatened. Louis watched a woman reach for her parasol as protection from the oncoming deluge. Later, when he rendered Holyrood Chapel, old men doffed their hats and genuflected upon entry. This was exactly the effect he wanted—a realism that was felt in the body.

But something else was emerging in his work—an emptiness that was, in part, a result of such naturalism. It was a journalist for
The Times
who mentioned this new element in the very first diorama, noting,
…in the midst of all this crowd of animation, there is a stillness, which is the stillness of the grave. The idea produced is that of a region of a world desolated; of living nature at an end; of the last day past and over.
A quarter century later, Louis Daguerre would think of these words and wonder if he’d foreseen the apocalypse all those years before.

In the first year of its operation, the Diorama earned him two hundred thousand francs, though it was not until later that he fully realized his sudden wealth. Dioramas soon opened in London and throughout Europe, all under contract with Louis. He knew on some level that fame is not the story we tell; it is the story the world tells us. And the world was telling Louis it wanted to see itself reflected in the gouache and charcoal of painted calico; that the human eye longed to trust the illusion of likeness. Render perfectly a meadow at dusk, a horizon at dawn, and people will love you for it. For giving them something they didn’t know they already had.

Louis continued to take his walks through the Paris streets in the autumn of 1823. He passed through the Arc de Triomphe, its massive shadow looming over the outdoor cafés in the late afternoon. There was money in his pockets, there were gold cuff links on his wrists. He walked with a cane and a folded newspaper under his arm. At his regular café, he sat and smoked a pipe and read of the world—the shipping news of the South, the stock reports of London, the crop yields of Provence. He found pleasure in commerce and weather. He was, in a sense, happy. He felt a part of things, not in the way he had amid the saffron fields around Orléans, but in a new way. He felt a sense of balance and order, a rush of benevolence at the curbstone.

He read the newspaper reviews of his dioramas and sometimes repeated to himself favorite adjectives and journalistic phrases. Fame was a ripple, a springhead. People selected words to describe your creations. He wondered about the empty perfection suggested by the journalist from
The Times.
Wasn’t he trying to empty all artifice from a scene? Another journalist asked why no people appeared in the dioramas and called Louis Daguerre a misanthrope.
No,
he thought,
I am connected to everything that matters.
And when he set off on his evening walks, he smiled at the faces waltzing past on the promenade and felt part of a widespread fraternal emotion—the simple pleasure of being alive in a century whose great ideas were progress and perfectability.
The reason I don’t paint people is because they move. If I were to paint an old man into the Valley of Sarnen, we might see him age and die in the light cycles of an afternoon. Nobody would pay two and a half francs for that.