Jean-Baptiste Gustave Le Gray (French: [lə gʁɛ]; 30 August 1820 – 30 July 1884) was a French painter, draughtsman, sculptor, print-maker, and photographer. He has been called "the most important French photographer of the nineteenth century" because of his technical innovations, his instruction of other noted photographers, and "the extraordinary imagination he brought to picture making." He was an important contributor to the development of the wax paper negative.
Biography
Gustave Le Gray was born on 30 August 1820 in Villiers-le-Bel, Val-d'Oise. He was an only child, and his parents encouraged him to become a solicitor's clerk,[citation needed] but from a young age, he aspired to be an artist. He was originally trained as a painter, studying under François-Édouard Picot and Paul Delaroche. His parents financed a trip to Switzerland and Italy so that he could study art abroad, and he lived in Italy between 1843-1846 and painted portraits and scenes of the countryside. In 1844, he met and married Palmira Maddalena Gertrude Leonardi (born 23 March 1823), a laundress who he had six children with, although only two survived into adulthood.
Le Gray exhibited his paintings at the salon in 1848 and 1853. He then crossed over to photography in the early years of its development.e made his first daguerreotypes by 1847. His early photographs included portraits; scenes of nature such as Fontainebleau Forest; and buildings such as châteaux of the Loire Valley.
He taught photography to students such as Charles Nègre, Henri Le Secq, Nadar, Olympe Aguado, and Maxime Du Camp. In 1851, he became one of the first five photographers hired for the Missions Héliographiques to document French monuments and buildings. In that same year, he helped found the Société Héliographique, the "first photographic organization in the world." Le Gray published a treatise on photography, which went through four editions, in 1850, 1851, 1852, and 1854.
In 1855, Le Gray opened a "lavishly furnished" studio. At that time, becoming progressively the official photographer of Napoleon III, he became a successful portraitist. His most famous work dates from this period, 1856 to 1858, especially his seascapes. The studio was a fancy place, but in spite of his artistic success, his business was a financial failure: the business was poorly managed and ran into debts. He therefore "closed his studio, abandoned his wife and children, and fled the country to escape his creditors."
He began to tour the Mediterranean in 1860 with the writer Alexandre Dumas, père. They encountered Giuseppe Garibaldi during the trip and Le Gray photographed Garibaldi and Palermo. His striking pictures of Giuseppe Garibaldi and Palermo under Sicilian bombardment became as instantly famous throughout Europe. Dumas abandoned Le Gray and the other travelers in Malta and joined the revolutionary forces as a result of a personal conflict. Le Gray went to Lebanon, then Syria where he covered the movements of the French army for a magazine in 1861. Injured, he remained there before heading to Egypt. In Alexandria he photographed Henri d'Artois and the future Edward VII of the United Kingdom, and wrote to Nadar while sending him pictures. In 1862, his wife Leonardi returned to Rome, requesting and receiving 150 francs for financial assistance. In 1863, Leonardi asked Le Gray to provide her with a monthly pension of 50 or 60 francs.
He established himself in Cairo in 1864; earning a modest living as a professor of drawing, while retaining a small photography shop. He sent pictures to the universal exhibition in 1867 but they did not really catch anyone's attention. He received commissions from the vice-king Ismail Pasha. From this late period there remain 50 pictures.
In 1868, a collection of photographic seascapes by Gustave Le Gray was donated by millionaire art collector Chauncy Hare Townshend to the Victoria and Albert Museum. (He had kept them in portfolios along with his watercolors, etchings and engravings; they therefore remained in excellent condition, preserved to museum standards almost since they were made.)
On 16 January 1883, he had a son with the nineteen-year-old Anaïs Candounia. Registration of their sons birth was voided due to lack of proof of Leonardi's death. Le Gray died on 30 July 1884, in Cairo. His only surviving child from his marriage to Leonardi, Alfred, was designated as his heir.
Technical innovations
His technical innovations included:
- Improvements on paper negatives, specifically waxing them before exposure "making the paper more receptive to fine detail".
- A collodion process published in 1850 but which was "theoretical at best". The invention of the wet collodion method to produce a negative on a glass plate is now credited to Frederick Scott Archer who published his process in 1851.
- Combination printing, creating seascapes by using one negative for the water and one negative for the sky.
Works
Le Gray documented French monuments on a mission for the French government with other French photographers.
He was a successful portrait photographer, capturing figures such as Napoleon III and Edward VII. He also became famous for his seascapes, or marine. He spent 20 years in Cairo, Egypt, but there are few works from this period.
World records for most expensive photograph sold at auction, 1999–2003
In October 1999, Sotheby's sold a Le Gray albumen print "Beech Tree, Fontainebleau" for £419,500, which was a world record for the most expensive single photograph ever sold at auction, to an anonymous buyer. At the same auction, an albumen print of "The Great Wave, Sète" by Le Gray was sold for a new world record price of £507,500 or $840,370 to "the same anonymous buyer" who was later revealed to be Sheik Saud Al-Thani of Qatar. The record stood until May 2003 when Al-Thani purchased a daguerreotype by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey for £565,250 or $922,488.
Books
- A practical treatise on photography, upon paper and glass by Gustave Le Gray, (translated by Thomas Cousins) London : T. & R. Willats, 1850.
- Photographic manipulation: the waxed paper process of Gustave Le Gray by Gustave Le Gray. Translated from the French. London: George Knight and Sons, 1853.
Gustave Le Gray (Villiers-le-Bel, 30 agosto 1820 – Il Cairo, 30 luglio 1882) è stato un fotografo francese del movimento pittorialista.
Biografia
Nato al norte di Parigi, a Villiers-le-Bel, iniziò la sua carriera artistica come pittore nella capitale, si iscrisse alla scuola di belle arti e insieme a Charles Nègre, Jean-Lèon Gérôme, Roger Fenton e Henri Le Secq frequentò nel 1842 l'atelier di Paul Delaroche.
Espose nei salon parigini nel 1848 e nel 1853, ma divenne famoso in seguito al suo interessamento per la fotografia. Già nel 1848 si interesso al dagherotipo e al calotipo. Nel 1850 si interessò al procedimento del collodio su vetro, apportando anche alcuni miglioramenti, pubblicati nel suo trattato. Partecipò nel 1851 alla Mission héliographique, il cui scopo fu quello di documentare i monumenti e gli edifici francesi da salvare e restaurare.
Per ottenere l'immagine desiderata, utilizzò e mise a punto delle tecniche fotografiche per superare i limiti dei materiali del periodo. Rinomate e discusse furono le fotografie marine del 1856, riprese durante il suo soggiorno nel Mediterraneo, dove utilizzò la tecnica della "stampa combinata" per rendere al meglio il cielo e il mare. Fotografò principalmente nelle ore precedenti il tramonto, per accentuare i contorni e il volume delle nuvole. Alle sue fotografie si ispirarono alcuni pittori, tra cui Gustave Courbet, che studiarono la luce e i toni delle formazioni nuvolose.
Fu uno dei fondatori della Société héliographique e della Société française de photographie. Intorno al 1860 fu compagno di viaggio di Alexandre Dumas e si trovò a Palermo al passaggio dei Mille. Documentò la devastazione causata dell'insurrezione popolare, in vedute deserte di uomini ma piene di rovine.
Non ritornera in Francia, dopo una sosta a Malta, accetta una missione per documentare la guerre d'Oriente (Mont-Liban), viaggia verso Damasco, vive qualche mesi nei ruderi di Baalbeck poi si trasferì in Egitto, Alessandra poi Cairo dove divenne in 1863 istruttore di disegno nell'academia militare e vi morì nel 1882.
Château de Chenonceau, façade Ouest en 1851
Pavillon Mollien, 1859 Gustave Le Gray,Standing opposite a newly built pavilion of the Louvre, Gustave Le Gray made this photograph when the sun's position allowed him to best capture the details of the heavily ornamented facade, from the fluted columns on the ground level to the figurative group on the nearest gable. Paving stones lead the viewer's eye directly to the corner of the pavilion, where the sunlit facade is further highlighted beside an area blanketed in shadow. Though the extensive art collections of the Louvre had first been opened to the public in 1793, during the French Revolution, it was not until 1848 that the museum became the property of the state. Le Gray's image shows the exuberance of the architecture undertaken shortly thereafter, during the reign of Napoléon III, when large sections of the building housed government offices.
The Ramparts of Carcassonne. Photo made for Mission Héliographique. Salted paper print from paper negative. 9 1/4 x 13 1/16 in. (23.5 x 33.2). Metropolitan Museum, New York 1851
View of the Seine, Paris- 1857
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