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 one hundred thousand daguerreotypes were made in Paris alone, most of them portraits.

One of the earliest practitioners of this new art was Philibert Perraud, born 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 1847 diary entry, Perraud mentions having arrived in Athens. Shortly after, 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 could have been made anywhere during Perraud’s travels, but the address inscribed on the reverse might have been in Lyons.