Samuel Morse
[Inventor and artist, b. 1791, Charlestown, Massachusetts, d. 1872, New York.]

 [The daguerreotype will] banish the sketchy, slovenly daubs that pass for spirited and learned; those works which possess mere general effect without detail, because, forsooth, detail destroys general effect. Nature, in the results of Daguerre’s process, has taken the pencil into her own hands, and she shows that the minutest detail disturbs not the general repose. (1839)