Moses Billings
With the development of the daguerreotype in the 1840s, the role of the portrait painter declined in general, because it was now much easier and much cheaper to have one's likeness presented in a visual format. While many portrait painters lost business in competition with the daguerreotype, Billings instead began to produce daguerreotype prints himself. It is not known exactly which prints were made by Moses Billings, as daguerreotypes were usually signed, when signed at all, along the side of the plate. Due to the traditional storing methods of daguerreotype plates, even this signature usually quickly became illegible. However, it has been generally noted, or at least hypothesized, that his daguerreotype prints showed a level of talent and artistry above that of amateur daguerreotypists. Though it is not known exactly which prints were his, it is known that he had largely abandoned the process by the 1850s. Even after he stopped making daguerreotypes, he did continue to paint people's portraits on canvas.
Paris under Louis-Philippe
Paris was the birthplace of modern photography. A process for capturing images on plates coated with light-sensitive chemicals had been discovered by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827 in rural France. After this death in 1833, the process was refined by the Paris artist and entrepreneur Louis Daguerre, who had invented the Paris Diorama. His new method of photography, called the daguerrotype, was publicly announced to a joint meeting of the French Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris on 19 August 1839. Daguerre gave the rights to the invention to the French nation, which offered them for free to any user in the world. In exchange, Daguerre received a pension from the French state. The daguerrotype became the most common method of photography during the 1840s and 1850s.