Biography provided by the Patrick Montgomery Collection (Archive Farms)
 
Giacomo Caneva (1813-1865), born in Padua, was trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice as a vedutista, a painter of perspective city views. He moved to Rome in 1838 and became part of the circle of Italian, French, and British artists who exchanged ideas about their photographic work at informal meetings at the Caffè Greco, in the Piazza di Spagna. As early as 1845, he appeared on the café’s ledger as “Painter-Photographer,” having learned the daguerreotype process before mastering paper negatives. Caneva’s views of Roman monuments, classic sculpture and figure studies of Italian peasants catered to the tastes of the artists that lived near the French Academy at the Villa Medici. In 1859 he traveled to China and India in the employ of an Italian silk manufacturer to document the search for new sources of silkworms.