Some pictures, no painting and not quite a thousand words.

History, like many things, can be a bit repetitive. I'm not making a profound statement about historical patterns or some such but when it comes to the visual and the arts many of us believe we have seen pretty much all there is to see. It doesn't have to be history! Films, books, music, we sometimes think there can't be much more. But you'd be surprised. How many of us who know and revere The Duke of Wellington see him as anything other than a painting? I certainly did for many years, until I saw the image below. 

It is quite remarkable. There is actually a photograph of Wellington. To be accurate, the image is actually a daguerreotype. Commercially, this was the first successful photographic process. The daguerreotype above was made in 1844 by Antoine Claudet and although quite grainy and faded, the shark-like demeanour and ruthless determination that carried the Allied armies to victory at Waterloo in 1815 is evident in the eyes of the ageing 'Iron Duke.' An outstanding piece of the past. The first successful daguerreotype was made in 1837 by Louis Daguerre, the French artist and chemist after whom the process was named. It was not until spring the next year, in 1838, that the first photographic image of a person was captured. And here it is. 

Boulevard du Temple, Paris. Spring, 1838. On the pavement at bottom left can be seen a man having his boots cleaned by a shoe-shine boy. Every other person on the street was either too far away or moving too quickly for Daguerre's process to capture them. Whoever these characters are, little did they know that they were to be the first of many to have their picture taken. After this success, Daguerre and his disciples went on to make studies of countless people. Wellington was not the only figure of great historical renown to have been immortalised by the daguerreotype. This next image is the first authenticated shot of one of the most famous figures in U.S. history, Abraham Lincoln. 

Sans beard and round hat, he cuts an unusual figure and one almost has to look again to see that it is in fact the honest old president himself. This daguerreotype dates from 1846 and has been attributed to Nicholas H. Shephard of Illinois. Lincoln was, at this time, a U.S. Congressman elect. Perhaps due to their age, the daguerreotype bleeds an eerie quality on occasions. They are our first untainted glimpses of the past, unsullied by the artist's brush or chronicler's pen. This study of Edgar Allan Poe a year before his untimely death in 1849 is stunningly frank and raw.

Consumed with grief in the wake of his wife's death in 1847, the face is moulded by the demons that plagued his mind and enabled him to be the unrivaled master of mystery and the macabre. Such visual accompaniment to history offers the subject a human angle, one with which we can immediately identify. A set of eyes into which we may gaze, and who stare back at us through the centuries. (Ok, so Wellington is staring to the side but you get my deep and meaningful point, right?)