Gustav Le Gray Photographer
by James Scarborough
This show of 100 of Gustav Le Gray’s photographs that date from the 1850’s to 1867, originated at the Bibliotheque nationale de France. Both shows demonstrate the ambit of Le Gray’s virtuosity. One third of the photographs shown at the Getty have been pulled from the Getty’s own collection. The show is arranged chronologically and thematically headed: 1) Portraiture and the Studio. 2) Mission Heliographique, 1851, and Forest of Fountainbleu, 1852. 3) The Camp at Chalons, 1857 and Seascapes 1856 & 1857. And 4) Paris, 1859, Sicily 1860, Egypt 1862 — 1884.
The life of Gustav Le Gray could be pulled from a novel of his Gallic contemporary, the exotic climes novelist (can you say Paul Gauguin?) Pierre Lotti. His father a successful businessman, Le Gray eschewed an apprenticeship in the law and studied with history painter Paul Delaroche in Paris. The next year he walked to Rome, where he discovered photography. He also married the daughter of his landlord. Returning to Paris in 1847, he studied the chemistry of photography, during which time he made daguerreotypes, while not giving up painting. Inquisitive, innovative, a problem solver, he contributed two major discoveries to the early history of photography. He found that applying wax to negatives improved the clarity of the photographs. He later enhanced a photo’s quality with his invention of collodion-on-glass negatives. He wrote a much reprinted manual of photography. The French government commissioned him to photograph all the medieval and Renaissance architectural monuments in France. He took a series of photographs in Fountainbleu whose aesthetic related to Corot and the Barbizon school in which he actually sought to show the atmosphere that surrounded rocks and trees. He took his signature photographs of seascapes that brought him great fame and commercial success in France, England, and Scotland. He documented the training camp of Napoleon III, whom he had earlier met. These images were to highlight the prowess of the French military after their victory in the Crimean War.
Up until now, the late 1850’s, his life was respectable. Commercially successful. Like a lot of where-are-they-now? artists of the East Village in the Eighties. He had a fashionable studio that served as an unofficial academy of photography, with all its attendant emphasis on technique and composition and aesthetic. Then his troubles began. The financial backers of his studio hounded him after his sales slumped. He took celebrated photographs of Paris, perhaps to satisfy the claims of his creditors. In 1860, he fled France and joined Alexandre Dumas on a cruise. In Sicily they met Giuseppe Garibaldi leading the revolution against the Bourbon monarchy. Le Gray took photographs all the while, including a famous portrait of Garibaldi. Abandoned by Dumas over some spat, he made his way to Lebanon, where he photographed the civic unrest there and on to Egypt where, in 1861, be became the drawing master for the children of the ruling family. On a trip along the Nile with the young princes, he photographed the ancient monuments along the river. He died in the company of a very young Greek woman who had born him a bastard child.
