[Gilbert Stuart's Portrait of George Washington]

This daguerreotype is a copy of an original oil portrait painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1796. A commission by William Gingham of Philadelphia, the painting entered the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1811. Reversed laterally, the daguerreotype presents only the sitter's head, not his whole body as seen in the painting. Stuart's virtuosity, combined with the enlargement effect, suggests that the unknown photographer had stepped back in time and arranged a sitting with the nation's first president-forty-two years dead before the medium's birth.
Invented by Louis Daguerre (1798-1851), the daguerreo-type was the world's first photographic process, which spread rapidly around the world after its public presentation in Paris in 1839. Exposed in a camera obscura and developed in mercury vapors, each highly polished, silvered copper plate is a unique photograph that, viewed in proper light, exhibits extraordinary detail and three-dimensionality. The era of the daguerreotype in America lasted until about 1860, when photographs on paper became more popular.