Noël Paymal Lerebours
French photographer and camera maker (1807–1873)
Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours (16 February 1807 – 23 July 1873) was a French optician and daguerreotypist. He is best known today for his Excursions Daguerriennes, books of views of the world's monuments, based on early photographs redrawn by hand as Aquatint engravings.
Early life
Lerebours was born in Paris of an unknown father. His mother, Marie Jeanne Françoise Paymal, a seamstress from Vitry-sur-Marne, worked in Rue Froidmanteau, Tuileries, Paris. She married Jean Lerebours, an optician, who adopted the child on 11 June 1836. On the death of his adoptive father, Lerebours took over the optician's shop in the Place du Pont-Neuf and formed a partnership with Marc Secretan in 1845, the firm being known as Lerebours et Secretan. As well as producing high quality lenses and glasses for astronomical observatories, during the years 1840-1850 Lerebours was equally interested in improving daguerreotype photography.
Career
In the autumn of 1839, Lerebours used his skill in optics to manufacture and sell a sliding box whole-plate camera, copied from the instruction manual for Daguerre's pioneering instrument.
Lerebours noted in 1842 that in just two months he had taken 1500 portraits. Among these were daguerreotypes of the King, Louis-Philippe of France and Queen Amélie, in June or July 1842.
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This entry incorporates text from “Noël Paymal Lerebours” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.