Place St-Sulpice, Paris

Unidentified photographer

1840s

An ink print made from an etched daguerreotype (the Fizeau process) showing Place Saint‑Sulpice in Paris, produced to translate a single photographic capture into a reproducible image of the city.

You first notice the silvery, almost engraved quality—the rows of mansard roofs and windowed façades emerging from a smoky, tarnished field, with a church tower on the right and soft smudges at the edges that make the scene feel both precise and dreamlike.

Made in the 1840s, this work sits at photography’s beginnings, illustrating early efforts to convert unique daguerreotypes into printed images and to record modern urban life with a new, camera-based realism that still echoes painterly aesthetics.

Palette

Exhibitions

French Photographs: Daguerre to Atget

1945

Roots of French Photography

1949

Photographs Before Surrealism

1968

French Paintings from the Molyneux Collection

1952