Jules Lion

Jules Lion was born about 1810 at Paris, France, the son of free people of colour of the Paris French Creole community of the early-nineteenth-century period — the family origins are recorded in the Paris municipal archives as French Creole gens de couleur of the principal Saint-Domingue refugee community of the post-1791 period.

He completed the principal Paris École des Beaux-Arts lithography programme in the late 1820s under the principal Paris lithographic master Charles-Étienne-Pierre Motte — and produced across the 1830s the principal Paris lithographic portrait work of the period.

He relocated to New Orleans, Louisiana in 1837 — at the principal post-1830s French Creole free-people-of-colour migration to the principal Louisiana French Creole free-people-of-colour community.

He operated the principal Lion Lithography Studio at Royal Street at New Orleans from 1837 to 1839 — at the principal pre-daguerreotype New Orleans portrait period.

He was the principal first New Orleans daguerreotypist of the post-1839 daguerreotype announcement period — at the principal Daguerre-Arago Paris Académie des Sciences daguerreotype process announcement of the nineteenth of August 1839. He returned briefly to Paris in late 1839 to acquire the principal Daguerre daguerreotype apparatus — and re-established the principal Lion Studio at Royal Street at New Orleans in March 1840.

He gave the principal first public daguerreotype demonstration in the American South at the principal New Orleans Hall of the Mechanics' Institute on the fifteenth of March 1840 — the principal first commercial daguerreotype exhibition in the American South.

He operated the principal Lion Daguerreotype Studio at Royal Street at New Orleans from 1840 to his death in 1866 — across the principal pre-Civil-War, Civil War, and post-Civil-War periods. The Lion Studio was the principal commercial portrait studio of the New Orleans Creole and Anglo-American commercial classes of the period.

He was the principal daguerreotype portraitist of the principal New Orleans free-people-of-colour community of the antebellum period — and his principal daguerreotype portraits of the late-antebellum New Orleans free-people-of-colour leadership are at this day the principal extant photographic record of the New Orleans free-people-of-colour community.

He died at New Orleans on the ninth of January 1866 of natural causes, at approximately fifty-six.

He is honored here as the first commercial daguerreotypist of the American South.