Le Gray, Gustave (1820-84), major mid-19th-century French photographer. Planning originally to be a painter, he frequented the studio of Paul Delaroche, where he met Henri Le Secq and Charles Nègre. He evidently took up photography in Rome (1844-7). But it was after his return to Paris that he became committed to it, practising the daguerreotype and, above all, from 1848, the calotype, which Blanquart-Évrard was then trying to popularize in France. He worked with Olivier Mestral and Le Secq, and attracted the attention of Léon de Laborde, a curator at the Louvre, who introduced him to official and artistic circles. In 1850-1 Le Gray pioneered two major innovations: waxing photographic paper before sensitization, and—it seems independently of Bingham and Archer—using collodion on glass. These researches, published in four works 1850-4, and Le Gray's mastery of photographic technique, made him a leader of the young generation of French calotypists. In 1849 he opened a studio, where he did his own work, executed commissions, and gave lessons. His pupils included Maxime Du Camp, Léon de Laborde, the Aguado brothers, Adrien Tournachon, and John Beasley Greene. In 1851 he was one of the five photographers chosen for the Mission Héliographique, and on a three-month journey through Touraine and Aquitaine experimented with the waxed-paper technique, making over 600 negatives.
Le Gray distinguished himself especially by the care he took with his salted-paper prints, using a personal technique to create an infinite variety of nuances. He co-founded the Société Héliographique in 1851, then the Société Française de Photographie in 1854. He did portraits, landscapes (views of Fontainebleau), architecture, and urban scenes. From 1855 he ran a large studio on the Boulevard des Capucines, supported financially by the de Briges family. This meant accepting commercial constraints that he had hitherto avoided, favouring wet-plate photography, and attempting to reconcile the demands of art and productivity. His acclaimed seascapes, done between 1856 and 1858 on the Norman, Breton, and Mediterranean coasts, combined technical virtuosity (instantaneity, combination printing) with beauty of composition. He also made portraits of the empress (1856), a reportage on the new military camp at Châlons-sur-Marne (1857), tree studies near Fontainebleau, romantic views of Paris (1859), and numerous studio portraits (Victor Cousin, Alexandre Dumas).
In 1860, financial and personal difficulties forced him to leave Paris on a Mediterranean cruise with Dumas. He made calotypes of the aftermath of Garibaldi's capture of Palermo (June-July 1860) that appeared as engravings in the French press. After quarrelling with Dumas he travelled to Lebanon (views of Beirut, the ruins of Baalbek), then Alexandria, where he executed commissions for rich travellers like the comte de Chambord and the prince of Wales. In 1864 he settled in Cairo, becoming drawing master of the children of Khedive Ismail Pasha, and in state military schools. Commissions from the khedive in 1866 (camels loaded with military equipment) and 1867 (a trip up the Nile with the khedive's sons) enabled him to create works exceptional in their quantity, inventiveness, and subtlety. By the late 1860s Le Gray was forgotten in France; the importance of his work, and his visionary belief in the future of photography, did not begin to be appreciated until the 1980s.
Bibliography
- Janis, E. P., The Photography of Gustave Le Gray (1987).
- Aubenas, S., et al., Gustave Le Gray: 1820-1884 (2002)
