LE GRAY GUSTAVE (1820 1882) Brig on the Water

Sale 2124 - Lot 6

Price Realized: $ 31,200

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 25,000 - $ 35,000

LE GRAY, GUSTAVE (1820-1882)
"Brig on the Water." Large-format albumen print, 12 1/2x16 1/2 inches (31.8x42 cm.), with Le Gray's stamped signature at the lower right corner of print recto, his partial blind stamp and the numeric notation "4," in pencil, on mount recto; professionally mounted to an archival secondary support mount. 1856

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Additional Details

Hans P. Kraus, Jr.; by agent to C. W. Sahlman.

A World History of Photography, 109.

The Photography of Gustave Le Gray, frontispiece.

The Tampa Museum of Art, "At Anchor and Underway: Images from a Tampa Collection," 1992.

Gustave Le Gray, whose most admired works are his seascapes, merged photography's technical advances with a painter's aesthetic vision. He photographed maritime subjects at the Normandy coast, Sainte-Adresse and Le Havre, and Mediterranean coast, for about four years.

An iconic image is "Brig on the Water." According to Eugenia Parry Janis, "The 'contre-jour' [backlighted] effect and the passing gleam of light on the water produced by a momentary opening in the clouds aroused the wonder and envy of all photographers who saw this picture at the many exhibitions in which it was subsequently shown. The 'moonlight' effect . . . was due to the necessary under-exposure." Throughout his lifetime, LeGray utilized space eloquently, providing a sense of intimacy and grandeur.

In 1850, at the age of thirty, Le Gray advertised himself as a miniature painter who had trained with Paul Delaroche. However, the artist was in the process of a career change. A few years prior, Le Gray began focusing his attention on photographic science and was prepared to write his first treatise on the subject. He kept experimenting with a range of color possibilities utilizing variations of tone and fixing during the printing process. He used both waxed paper and collodion throughout his life depending on the subject matter, but maritime subjects, with their ever-changing qualities of water and light needed wet collodion, which created a theatrical effect depicting the dreamy quality of the endless sea.

Despite his obvious talents, by the late 1850s, Le Gray was in debt. He abandoned his family and in 1860 he boarded a private pleasure boat on its way to Egypt. Aboard was Alexandre Dumas, and the photographer, in his forties, happily joined men half his age traveling to Palermo where he met with Girabaldi, who at that time was struggling to unify Italy. He became the official photographer of the trip and sent back pictures of the destruction in Palermo to Paris.

By 1857 he worked mostly for the court making portraits of notables and documenting the daily goings on of Napoleon III's largest military camps outside Paris around Châlons-sur-Marne. After many adventures and much travel, he ended up in Cairo where he remained until his death.