The Ruins of Holyrood Chapel

Fifteen years before he made the first practical photograph, Louis Daguerre was a Paris stage designer famous for the diorama, vast translucent paintings lit from behind and shifted through changing light so an audience watched a scene pass from day into dusk. He had already built a diorama of this exact subject, the moonlit ruins of Holyrood Chapel in Edinburgh, and in 1824 he carried the same effects into this canvas for the Paris Salon. A cold light rakes across broken Gothic arches and one small figure among the graves. The same fascination with how light falls led him, in 1839, to the daguerreotype and the beginnings of photography.