Philippe Benoist

Philippe Benoist (b. Geneva, 1813; active Paris through c. 1879) was a draughtsman and lithographer who trained under Louis Daguerre — the inventor of the daguerreotype — and made his career producing large-scale topographic and architectural views of European cities. He was among the first practitioners in France to use photography as an explicit aid to lithographic drawing, a working method acknowledged on the title page of his most celebrated project, Paris dans sa Splendeur (1861), where the drawings and lithographs are credited to Benoist avec l’aide de la photographie. That publication, a comprehensive lithographic documentation of Haussmann-era Paris, established Benoist as the foremost practitioner of the architectural panorama in mid-nineteenth century France. His earlier work includes Vues d’Italie et de Sicile (1848) and collaborations with the leading Parisian print houses of the period. The Crimean Peninsula view of 1855, on which he collaborated with Cicéri, belongs to the same tradition of large-scale topographic lithography applied to a subject of immediate public consequence.