In 1651, Dutch artist Dirk Stoop created A Boy Leads a Horse to the Water, a detailed etching that captures the quiet naturalism of the Dutch Golden Age. Nearly two centuries later, French inventor Nicéphore Niépce chose this engraving to conduct his groundbreaking experiments with heliography, the earliest photographic process whcih Bitumen of Judea on a pewter plate that hardened under sunlight while unexposed areas could be dissolved away, leaving an etchable image. In 1825, Niépce produced the earliest surviving light-fixed reproduction of this print, now regarded as the world’s oldest photogravure and preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Though Niépce did not live to perfect his heliography process, his nephew Claude Félix Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor, in partnership with copper engraver Augustin François Lemaître, later advanced the method, laying the foundation for modern photogravure. This modest image of a boy and horse thus became a turning point in the history of visual culture, bridging printmaking with the birth of photography.

Heliographic engraving after a copy from the beginning of the 19th century by Chevalier Ignace Joseph de Claussin of the etching by Dirck van der Stoop (1651). 1