Gustave Le Gray

SOLAR EFFECT IN THE

CLOUDS – OCEAN

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GUSTAVE LE GRAY

Genre Landscape

Date 1856

Location Normandy, France

Format Albumen print

“The English artist John Constable wrote that skies were ‘the chief organ of sentient’ in landscape painting. This through was shared by early photographs, but landscapes were were at first beyond their technical capabilities. Early photographic emulsions were not equally sensitive to all parts of the spectrum; a negative correctly exposed for the landscape left the sky badly overexposed. Most photographer avoided the problem by painting out the sky on their negatives, giving a perfectly blank and even sky in the final print. However, another, far more difficult, technique was to make the final print by combining two separate negatives – one exposed properly for the landscape, the other for the sky. This was the approach adopted with enormous technical and aesthetic success by Gustave Le Gray (1820-84).

Like many early photographers, Le Gray trained initially as a painter. Although he was also a portraitist and an architectural photographer, his seascapes are his greatest achievement. They are sometimes mistaken for moonlit studies, but Le Gray achieved this effect by pointing his camera in the direction of the sun during daylight. When they were exhibited in 1857, Le Gray’s seascapes received rapturous praise. One reviewer wrote: ‘We stop with astonishment before M. Le Gray’s ‘Sea and Sky”, the most successful seizure of water and cloud yet attempted. The effect is the simplest conceivable. There is a plain, unbroken praire of open sea, lined and ripped with myriad smiling trails of minute undulations, dark and sombrous and profoundly calm, over the dead below – smooth as a tombstone’.”(CH)

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