Antique Gutta Percha Daguerreotype Portrait. Opens to reveal a photograph of a young girl sitting in front of a painted background, clutching a small purse. A gutta percha daguerreotype is an antique photograph in a hinged case made from gutta percha, a thermoplastic-like substance derived from a Malaysian rubber tree, that was created in the 1860s to complement the daguerreotype photographic process. 

Size: 3 1/2 x 3 3/4 x 1 in. 

#4528 . 

Daguerreotype was the first publicly available photographic process, widely used during the 1840s and 1850s and so prevalent that the word “Daguerreotype” also refers to an image created through this process. Invented by Louis Daguerre and introduced worldwide in 1839, the daguerreotype was almost completely superseded by 1856 with new, less expensive processes, such as tintypes and ambrotypes (collodion process), that yield more readily viewable images. There has been a revival of the daguerreotype since the late 20th Century by a small number of photographers interested in making artistic use of early photographic processes. To make the image, a daguerreotypist polished a sheet of silver-plated copper to a mirror finish, then treated it with fumes that made its surface light-sensitive. This was exposed in a camera for as long as was judged to be necessary, which could be as little as a few seconds for brightly sunlit subjects or much longer with less intense lighting. Fuming it with mercury vapor made the resulting latent image on it visible, and its sensitivity to light was removed by liquid chemical treatment. After rinsing and drying it, the daguerreotype would then be sealed behind glass in a protective enclosure to keep it from being marred, as the surface was very susceptible to scratching and dust. Since the Renaissance era artists and inventors had searched for a mechanical method of capturing visual scenes. Using the camera obscura, artists would manually trace what they saw, or use the optical image as a basis for solving the problems of perspective and parallax, and deciding color values. A camera obscura optically reduces a real scene in three-dimensional space to a flat rendition in two dimensions. In the early 17th Century, the Italian physician and chemist Angelo Sala wrote that powdered silver nitrate was blackened by the sun, but did not find any practical application of the phenomenon. The discovery and commercial availability of the halogens iodine, bromine, and chlorine meant that silver photographic processes that rely on the reduction of silver iodide, silver bromide and silver chloride to metallic silver became feasible. The daguerreotype is one of these processes, but was not the first, as Nicéphore Niépce had experimented with paper silver chloride negatives, while Thomas Wedgwood’s experiments were with silver nitrate. In 1829 French artist and chemist Louis Daguerre, when obtaining a camera obscura for his work on theatrical scene painting from the optician Chevalier, was put into contact with Niépce, who had already managed to make a record of an image from a camera obscura using the process he invented: heliography. After Niépce’s death in 1833, his son, Isidore, inherited rights in the contract and a new version was drawn up between Daguerre and Isidore. Isidore signed the document admitting that the old process had been improved to the limits that were possible, and that a new process that would bear Daguerre’s name alone was 60 to 80 times as rapid as the old asphalt (bitumen) one his father had invented. This was the daguerreotype process that used iodized silvered plates and was developed with mercury fumes which soon took the world by storm. A few first-generation daguerreotypists refused to entirely abandon their old medium when they started making the new, cheaper, easier to view but comparatively drab ambrotypes and tintypes. Historically minded photographers of subsequent generations, often fascinated by daguerreotypes, sometimes experimented with making their own or even revived the process commercially as a “retro” portraiture option for their clients. These eccentric late uses were extremely unusual and surviving examples reliably dated to between the 1860s and the 1960s are now exceedingly rare.