Hércules Florence

Antoine Hercule Romuald Florence (1804 – March 27, 1879) was a French-Brazilian painter and inventor, known as the isolate inventor of photography in Brazil, three years before Daguerre (but six years after Nicéphore Niépce), using the matrix negative/positive, still in use. According to Kossoy, who examined Florence's notes, he referred to his process, in French, as photographie in 1834, at least four years before John Herschel coined the English word photography.

Hercules Florence was born on February 29, 1804 in Nice, France, the son of Arnaud Florence (1749–1807), a tax collector, and Augustine de Vignolis, a minor noblewoman. As a child he manifested interest for drawing and the sciences, as well as for the voyages of the great explorers to the New World and already as a 14-year-old boy he worked as a calligrapher and draftsman in Monaco, where his parents had been living since 1807.

After a period of wandering and working on board of warships and merchant ships, Hércules Florence set sail to Brazil as a crew member of the French warship Marie Thérèze, arriving in the port of Rio de Janeiro on May 1, 1824, two years after the declaration of independence from Portugal. He was already an accomplished draftsman and painter with considerable talent and many scientific interests, particularly in the natural sciences and ethnography. Soon after his arrival, he got a job in a women's fashion store and then as a lithographer in a bookstore and printing shop, owned by his compatriot Pierre Plancher.

Florence's life changed dramatically when he decided to respond to a newspaper advertisement put by Baron von Langsdorff (1773–1852), the consul general of the Russian Empire in Brazil, a German-born physician and naturalist who was organizing on behalf of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences a scientific expedition to the Amazon. He was hired as an illustrator and topographic draftsman, together with German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–58) and the young French illustrator Adrien Taunay (1803–28). In the year of 1825 they travelled by sea from Rio to the village of Santos. While they waited for the set day of departure to the Amazon, Florence and other members of the scientific expedition spent their days exploring the coastal lowland areas, such as Cubatão, and the high-rising plateau beyond the imposing Serra do Mar: they visited the towns of São Paulo, Juqueri, Jundiai, Itu and Campinas. In Porto Feliz, the town by the Tietê River, located 80 km northwest of São Paulo, where the departure would take place, Florence was hosted for a while by surgeon and politician Francisco Álvares Machado e Vasconcellos (1791–1846).

...
Wikipedia