page_title: Hércules Florence
section_title: The great expedition
hierarchical_section_title: Hércules Florence / The great expedition
caption_attribution_description: English: Sugarcane mill in SÃ£o Carlos, SÃ£o Paulo, Brazil. Watercolor by HÃ©rcules Florence, 1840.
context_page_description: Antoine Hercule Romuald Florence was a Monegasque-Brazilian painter and inventor, known as the isolate inventor of photography in Brazil, three years before Daguerre, using the matrix negative/positive, still in use. According to Kossoy, who examined Florence's notes, he referred to his process, in French, as photographie in 1834, at least four years before John Herschel coined the English word photography.
context_section_description: Florence's life changed dramatically when he decided to respond to a newspaper advertisement put by Baron von Langsdorff (1773–1852), the consul general of the Russian Empire in Brazil, a German-born physician and naturalist who was organizing on behalf of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences a scientific expedition to the Amazon. He was hired as an illustrator and topographic draftsman, together with German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–1858) and the young French illustrator Adrien Taunay (1803–1828). In the year of 1825 they travelled by sea from Rio to the village of Santos. Florence eventually published his memoirs of the expedition in Voyage fluvial du Tieté à l'Amazone.
caption: Sugar cane mill in São Carlos, 1840
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