View from the Window at Le Gras

It was created by French inventor Nicéphore Niépce sometime between 1826 and 1827[a] in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, and shows parts of the buildings and surrounding countryside of his estate, Le Gras [fr], as seen from a high window.

Niépce wrote and submitted a paper but was unwilling to reveal any specific details in it, so the Royal Society rejected it based on a rule that prohibited presentations about undisclosed secret processes.

They had an expert at the Kodak Research Laboratory make a modern photographic copy, but it proved extremely difficult to produce an adequate representation of all that could be seen when inspecting the actual plate.

Helmut Gernsheim heavily retouched[broken anchor] one of the copy prints to clean it up and make the scene more comprehensible, and until the late 1970s he allowed only that enhanced version to be published.

It became apparent that at some point in time after the copying in 1952, the plate was disfigured and acquired bumps near three of its corners, which caused light to reflect in ways that interfered with the visibility of those areas and of the image as a whole.

[16] They confirmed that the image consists of bitumen and that the metal plate is pewter (tin alloyed with lead, as well as trace amounts of iron, copper, and nickel).