Beginning in 1853, Niépce de Saint-Victor and the engraver Francois-Augustin Lemaître worked to improve aspects of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s heliographic technique. The collaborative effort successfully yielded an improved technique that for the first time, allowed photographs to be translated into a printing plate. Their two principal refinements were making the bitumen of Judea more sensitive and adding an aquatint texture to hold the ink in large areas of tone. The process, however, produced images which were mostly unable to render delicacy of detail without the aid of extensive hand work. While it was clearly a photomechanical breakthrough, Niépce de Saint-Victor’s method did not last for very long, in particular because the process always required the intervention of an engraver. Its merit was that it was a pioneering method and opened the way to newer methods.

Examples of Niépce St. Victor’s Heliographs are rare.

The daughter of a Spanish noble who fought on the French side during Napoleon I’s Peninsular War in Spain, Eugénie went to Paris when Louis-Napoléon became president of the Second Republic in December 1848. They were married in January 1853 after he had become the emperor Napoleon III. This Heliograph was presented as a set with a matching portrait of Napoleon III.