Portrait of French physicist, astronomer, and mathematician Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774 – 1862) circa 1820. Lithograph by François-Séraphin Delpech (1778 – 1825).
Medium: lithograph Notes: François-Séraphin Delpech (1778 – 25 April 1825) was a French artist and lithographer. He served as an art critic for the Mercure de France during the period of the First French Empire. In 1818, he opened a printmaking studio in Paris. From 1819 onward, Delpech produced lithographic portraits of a number of leading figures of his time. Today, Delpech's works are held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France; the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and the Musée de la Révolution française. Jean-Baptiste Biot (21 April 1774 - 3 February 1862) was a French physicist, astronomer, and mathematician who co-discovered the Biot-Savart law of magnetostatics, established the reality of meteorites, made an early balloon flight, and studied the polarization of light. As a member of the French scientific establishment in the late 1830s, be was involved in the evaluation of the competing claims by Daguerre and Talbot. Arago and Biot, France's leading authorities in the field of optics, had spent the past thirty years disagreeing about the ability of optical instruments to represent the world. Photography became one more opportunity for them to disagree, and they did not shrink from the task. The debate extended beyond questions of assigning priority and apportioning credit. At its heart was the question of what the photographic surfaces showed, what relation the visible inscription bore to the real world. Arago supported the Daguerre photographic process with silver plates while Biot championed an approach with paper soaked in a silver solution as developed by Henry Fox Talbot. This was not because he thought this process produced clearer photographs, rather it was because he believed that the images captured 'chemical radiation' invisible to the eye. We should note that the idea of 'chemical radiation' was widely believed at this time.
Size: 2850px × 3550px
Photo credit: © Archive Farms. Inc / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: &, /, 19th, adult, archival, astronomer, biot, black, century, delpech, françois-éraphin, french, headshot, historical, history, jean-baptiste, lithograph, man, mathematician, photography, phtl, physicist, portrait, white
