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Unidentified Photographer

DESCRIPTIVE TITLE: Aztec Calendar, Mexico City, mounted in the side wall of the Cathedral of Mexico City [The stone Aztec calendar was later removed from the Cathedral wall]

ca. 1839
daguerreotype
whole plate, 16.5 x 21.6 cm.
Gift of Eastman Kodak Company: ex-collection Gabriel Cromer
GEH NEG: 23128
76:0168:0144

NON-GEH NUMBER: #18 (Cromer)

Buerger, Janet E. --French Daguerreotypes.-- Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. p. 34.//

EXHIBITION HISTORY:
"French Daguerreotypy", US, NY, Rochester February - June, 1977.//
"From Today Painting is Dead: Emergence of Photography During July Monarchy", US, NY, Rochester December - March 11, 1989.//

NOTES: Cataloged JB, updated 9/89, SB. Fernando Osorio Alarcon believes that these were the first photographic images of Mexico and suggests that these were made by Jean Prelier Dudoille, a French engraver living in Mexico City. It is recorded that Prelier arrived in Vera Cruz on December 3, 1839. A newspaper account dated Jan. 21, 1840 noted that Prelier had recently made several daguerreotypes in the area of the Cathedral in Mexico City as a public demonstration of the process. Osorio speculates that Cromer may have acquired the plates from Baron Louis Gros, who visited Mexico in 1852. They may have been purchased from Prelier, or from descendants that returned with the plates to France. Additionally he raises the possibility that Fanny Calderon de la Barca (1804-1882), the Scottish wife of the first Spanish envoy to independent Mexico, acquired the images as momentos of her travels in Mexico (Dec. 18, 1839 to Jan 8, 1842), or may even have been the daguerreotypist herself. Osorio Alarcon, F. "Los Daguerrotipos Mexicanos..." in "Mexico en el Tiempo, revista de Historua y Conservacion" Year 3, No. 22 (January/February 1998).

SUBJECTS:
architecture, detail
artifact, calendar / Aztec Calendar

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