VPC: Light, Shadow, and Chasing the Ghost of Augustin Le Prince

The haunting story of the Morris-Jumel Mansion’s vanished Gilded Age inventor.

On the eve of presenting the first motion picture camera to the world—2 years before Thomas Edison—its inventor, Augustin Le Prince, stepped onto the train from Dijon to Paris and vanished without a trace.Le Prince had begun his motion picture experiments in the early 1880s in Washington Heights. Concerned that Edison’s spies were monitoring his experiments, he left his family there to work in relative privacy in England. In 1888, Le Prince filmed the world’s first moving picture in a garden in Leeds.

Two years later, after his experiments had strained both his finances and his marriage, he was finally ready to present his invention to some of Gilded Age New York’s most illustrious patrons at the Morris–Jumel Mansion, securing his place in film history. First, however, he had to persuade his brother to settle their late mother’s estate to help relieve him of the crushing debts he had not dared reveal to his family. But just before sailing to New York, Le Prince boarded a train in Dijon and was never seen again.

His family and friends made concerted efforts to find him, but their searches yielded nothing. Had Le Prince chosen to disappear in order to conceal secrets he was hiding, or was something more sinister at work?

Laurel Avery, author of “Light and Shadow”, will go into depth about the research involved in retracing Le Prince’s steps before his mysterious disappearance, and the importance of getting the history right for her upcoming novel Light and Shadow. We will go from the Paris morgue, to Leeds, where the first films were shot, to Washington Heights and the Morris–Jumel Mansion, where his family waited for his planned arrival and the much anticipated showing of the first film.

About the Speaker: Laurel Avery, author of Light and Shadow, is a dress historian, founder of Edwardian Recreations, and a former museum educator at Historic Hudson Valley. A native New Yorker with a love for historical detail, she has lived in Europe for over two decades.

She spent eight years researching and writing the book, consulting with the foremost authorities on Le Prince. She traveled to France, Leeds, and New York to trace the footsteps of Le Prince from his youth to his mysterious disappearance in Paris.

Although the novel is a work of historical fiction, it is based on known facts about Le Prince’s life and work.

Laurel currently lives in the Netherlands, where she can often be spotted in Edwardian dress, soon to be accompanied by dachshunds.