Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard

The recorded working language is French. Employment is recorded with École Centrale de Lille. Work by Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard is recorded in the collections of Museo del Prado, Art Institute of Chicago, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada and Ackland Art Museum. Distinctions recorded are Knight of the Legion of Honour.

• Name — Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard • Born — 2 August 1802 • Birthplace — Lille, France • Died — 28 April 1872 • Place of death — Lille, France • Known for — Albumen printing

He was born and raised in Lille where he studied chemistry with Charles Frédéric Kuhlmann and miniature painting on porcelain. After Louis Daguerre solved the problem of long exposure time and introduced the daguerreotype, a practical photographic process, to the general public in 1839, Blanquart-Evrard developed interest in photography. He studied the calotype, salt-print negative process, and in 1847 became the first person to publish on negative/positive paper photo process in France. He developed a method of bathing the paper in solutions of potassium iodide and silver nitrate rather than brushing these chemical baths on the surface. In January 1847, he presented his research on stabilizing the photo prints by floating them in the silver solution to the French Academy of Sciences.

In 1860s, Blanquart-Evrard published several influential essays and books, including, On the intervention of art in photography and La photographie: ses origines, ses progrès, ses transformations where he described the first three decades of the progress of photography and formulated important for the future development of photography as a fine art theoretical and aesthetic ideas. He is now considered as a major figure of the 1850s, a golden decade in the development of photography.