Jules Lion

Jules Lion was born in France around 1810 (some records suggest as early as 1806) and rose to prominence first as a lithographer in Paris, where he exhibited at the annual salons from 1831 to 1836 and won recognition for portraits of notable figures. In 1836 or early 1837 he crossed the Atlantic to New Orleans, drawn into the city's vibrant bilingual print culture, and became one of the most accomplished portrait lithographers of the American South.

His enduring fame rests on a single historic act. Returning to France in 1839, Lion encountered the newly unveiled daguerreotype process of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. Back in New Orleans that autumn, he made daguerreian views of the city's landmarks, and on March 15, 1840, he mounted the first public exhibition of daguerreotypes in New Orleans — establishing the American South's first commercial daguerreotype practice and helping introduce photography to the nation only shortly after New York.

By 1843, costly equipment and fierce competition pushed him back to lithography, where he flourished as a master of the medium and as a teacher of art. He produced portraits across southern Louisiana and became one of the earliest Americans to draw a lithograph directly from a daguerreotype. He worked and taught until his death in New Orleans on January 9, 1866.

Lion's very identity remains a matter of honest scholarly debate: documented in some city directories as a free man of color yet unmarked by racial designation in most civic and church records, he stands at a crossroads of memory. Whatever the full truth of his lineage, his artistry opened a new way of seeing, and for that his hand is honored still.