Hercule Florence

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hercule Florence (unknown photographer, 1875)
Dalmatian blue raven (1827)
Guaná (1827)
Apiacá on the Rio Arinos (1827)
Photocopy by the Florence method (ca.1839)
Hercule Florence: Colégio Carolina Florence in Campinas

Antoine Hercule Romuald Florence (born February 29, 1804 in Nice ; died March 27, 1879 in Campinas ) was a Monegasque-Brazilian painter, inventor and photography pioneer.

Life

Hercule Florence was a son of the military doctor Arnaud Florence (1749-1807) and the noble Monegasque Augustine de Vignallys. The family had lived in Monaco from 1807 and his father worked as a tax officer in Ventimiglia . Florence went on a journey to Antwerp . In 1823 he was hired on the French warship Marie Thérèze and took part in the blockade of Barcelona . The ship sailed from Toulon to Brazil in February 1824 , which had declared itself independent from Portugal in 1822. On May 1, 1824, he demurred in Rio de Janeiro because he had found work in a shirt shop. He then worked in the printing house of Pierre Plancher, who was to publish the Jornal do Commercio from 1827 . There he acquired knowledge of cartography . In 1825 he applied to a newspaper advertisement with which Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff , Consul General of the Russian Empire in Brazil, was looking for personnel for an inland expedition, and was hired. Since the draftsman Johann Moritz Rugendas had separated from Langsdorff, the Frenchman Adrien Taunay (1803-28) was chosen as the first draftsman. 1825 they sailed to the staging area of the company after Santos and undertook with other scientists wandering around the coastal region below the Serra do Mar . In Porto Feliz he was the guest of the politician Francisco Álvares Machado (1791–1846), where he met his future wife, Maria Angélica Álvares Machado e Vasconcellos.

In June 1826 the expedition reached the Sertão and until 1829 traveled, mainly on rivers, in the provinces of São Paulo , Mato Grosso and Pará . In addition to his maps, drawings and watercolors, Florence developed a system for recording birdsong and other animal sounds during the expedition , which he called "zoophonia". The expedition crew was decimated by accidents and illness when they returned to Rio on March 13, 1829.

Florence had kept an 84-page expedition diary that remained with his friend Félix Taunay (1795–1881), brother of Adrien. His son, the historian Alfredo d'Escragnolle Taunay, had it translated from French into Portuguese and printed in 1875. Florence wrote his travelogue Voyage fluvial du Tietê à l'Amazone until 1849, but the manuscript was not printed until 1977.

On January 4, 1830, he married Maria Machado and moved with her to Vila de São Carlos (later Campinas), whose 7,000 inhabitants, including 4,000 slaves, lived on sugar cane , whose processed products were overland to São Paulo, 130 km away, and from there to Santos. Florence ran a printing and publishing house in the village and offered himself as a portrait painter in the region. He and his wife had thirteen children. After her death in 1850, in 1854 he married the teacher Carolina Krug (1828–1913), daughter of the sculptor and democrat Johann Heinrich Krug, who emigrated from Kassel in 1852 for political reasons . With her he had 7 other children. In 1855 Florence made his only trip to Europe. In 1858 Johann Jakob von Tschudi visited him on the farm he had acquired in 1856 . Carolina founded a girls 'school for the children of German immigrants in 1863, which was moved to Jundiai after Hercules' death .

Florence was active as an inventor and trader. In order to make his more than 200 drawings from the expedition ready for printing, he tried to replace the laborious processes of wood engraving and copperplate engraving with simpler techniques and invented a system of mimeography , which he called polygraphia . His technical advances soon allowed him to tackle multi-color printing and even print counterfeit-proof banknotes .

Around 1832 he began with the support of the local pharmacist and later botanist Joaquim Correia de Melo (1816–1877) with experiments to fix projections of a camera obscura , which he called photographia . In 1833 they coated paper with silver nitrate , a process that Thomas Wedgwood published in 1802. Unlike Wedgwood, they managed to fix the photograph . His invention, recorded in the Livre d'Annotations et de Premier Matériaux , could not be published, let alone patented, being isolated far from the economic and political centers and from the journal and scientific business of the time; the font was published 150 years later by the Brazilian photographer Boris Kossoy .

Fonts (selection)

  • Livre d'Annotations et de Premier Matériaux . 1832
  • Voyage fluvial du Tietê à l'Amazone: par les provinces brésiliennes de Saint-Paul, Mato Grosso et Grao Para: un peintre de l'expédition Langsdorff découvre le Brésil, 1825 - 1829 . Besançon: La Lanterne Magique, 2013
    • Viagem fluvial do Tietê ao Amazonas de 1825 a 1829 . Translation Francisco Álvares Machado and Vasconcellos Florence. São Paulo: Editora Cultrix, 1977
  • Ensaio sobre a impressão das notas de banco por um processo totalmente inimitável, precedido por algumas observações sobre a gravura das mesmas notas, eo modo de se conhecer as que são falsas . Campinas: Tipografia de Costa Silveira, 1841.
  • Jacques ME Vielliard (Ed.): A Zoophonia de Hercule Florence . Cuiabá: Editora da Universidade de Mato Grosso, 1993 [ Revista Trimensal do Instituto Histórico Geographico e Ethnographico do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: BL Garnier, tomo XXXIX, parte segunda, 1876, pp. 321–336]
  • Mario Carelli (ed.): A descoberta da Amazônia: os diários do naturalista Hercule Florence . São Paulo: Marca d'Agua, 1995.

literature

  • Boris Kossoy: Hercule Florence a descoberta isolada da fotografia no Brasil . São Paulo: Faculdade de Comunicação Social Anhembi, 1977, expanded new editions in 1980 and 2006
    • Boris Kossoy: Hercule Florence. The independent discovery of photography in Brazil . Translation of Marlen Eckl. Vienna: LIT, 2015
  • Boris Kossoy: Hercules Florence: An inventor of photography . In: Photohistory III , The Photographic Historical Society symposium. 1976, pp. 24-32
  • Dieter Strauss: The green baron: Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, the Humboldt of Brazil, and his expedition from Rio de Janeiro to the Amazon 1822–1829. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2012, ISBN 978-363-16365-2-7
  • Thierry Belhassen: Hercule Florence: a história extraordinária do aventureiro francês do século 19 que enfrentou a morte ea loucura no coração selvagem do Brasil, apaixonou-se pela sensualidade do país e de suas mulheres e inventou a fotografia . Cotia, SP: Ed. Overdrive, 1994
  • William Luret: Les trois vies d'Hercule Florence . Novel. Paris: Lattès, 2001
  • Karl von den Steinen : Indian sketches by Hercule Florence . In: Globus. Braunschweig, Volume 75, 1899, No. 1, pp. 5-9, No. 2, pp. 30-35 ( online ).
  • Marie-Claire Beaud u. a. (Ed.): Hercule Florence. Le Nouveau Robinson . Exhibition catalog. Nouveau musée national de Monaco , 2017
  • Arilda Inês Miranda Ribeiro: MESTRES E ALUNAS NO SÉCULO XIX: o Colégio Florence de Campinas , Cadernos Pagu (3) 1994, pp. 229-249

Web links

Commons : Hercule Florence  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ on Aimé-Adrien Taunay see pt: Aimé-Adrien Taunay
  2. ↑ Tschudi cites political and economic reasons for emigration
  3. ↑ a b Carolina Krug Florence at Campinas de outrora
  4. ↑ on Joaquim Correia de Melo see pt: Joaquim Correia de Melo
personal data
SURNAME Florence, Hercule
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Florence, Antoine Hercule Romuald (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Franco-Brazilian painter, inventor and photography pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH February 29, 1804
PLACE OF BIRTH Nice
DATE OF DEATH March 27, 1879
Place of death Campinas