Daguerreotype of Mrs Morrow

This portrait of Mrs Morrow provides an example of one of the first successful photographic technologies: the daguerreotype. The daguerreotype process created a single positive image on a metal plate—meaning that there was no negative and no possibility for further reproduction. A daguerreotype is a unique and precious material object, and therefore quite different from the technologies of photography that we know today. 

Daguerreotype exposures took a long time, with the precise amount of time depending on the available light. Sitting for a photograph was an arduous process, as the French caricaturist Honoré Daumier has shown, which is why it is rare to find smiling faces in early photographs. 

A print published in December 1839 in Paris entitled “La Daguerreotypomanie” (Daguerreotypomania) dramatizes the excitement that ensued following the announcement of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and his partner Nicéphore Niépce’s discovery. The artist, Théodore Maurisset, visualizes streams of people lining up to get their portraits taken. The excitement surrounding the daguerreotype stemmed at least in part from its accessibility in comparison to painted portraits.  

Mrs Morrow might never have expected to have her portrait painted in her lifetime. We do not know who she was, but that her likeness survives into the present offers proof that her identity was important to someone, and worth preserving. To consider how the possibility of creating photographic portraits shaped memory and identity, compare this portrait of Mrs Morrow to chromolithographic portraits of the Emperor and Princess of Prussia, published in 1855.