PHILIBERT PERRAUD
French, born 1815, active 1850s
Portrait of a Nun, ca. 1850s
Daguerreotype. Frame: 4 5/8 x 4 1/2 in. (11.8 x 11.4 cm)
Gift of Arthur and Marilyn Penn, Class of 1956, Christopher Elliman, David
Elliman, and Andrea Branch, by exchange. 95.15.2
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Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre announced to the world in 1839 that it was
possible to capture and fix an image on a silver-coated, polished, copper
plate. After sensitizing the plate and exposing it to the subject for three
to thirty minutes, the image was fixed by washing in pure distilled water.
Daguerreotypes were made in several specific sizes and were immediately
encased under glass, usually in a folding frame made of wood with a thin
leather coating or an early form of thermoplastic. Just ten years later,
more than 100,000 daguerreotypes were made in Paris alone, most of them
portraits.
One of the earliest practitioners of this new art was Philibert Perraud,
born in 1815 in Macon, France. Very little is known about the artist's early
years, except that he was a cook before he learned the daguerreotype process.
Perraud ran a successful and well-known studio in Paris before going to
Italy around 1845. In a diary entry in 1847, Perraud mentions having arrived
in Athens. Shortly after arriving, he met Philippos Margaritis (1810-1892),
a Turkish-born artist who was teaching drawing at the art school in Athens.
Perraud taught Margaritis the art of daguerreotypy and the two collaborated
on a collection of daguerreotype images of the antiquities in Athens. Perraud
was back in Lyons by the early 1850s. This portrait of a nun from the 1850s
could have been made anywhere during Perraud's travels, but the address
inscribed on the reverse might have been in Lyons.
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