Gustave Le Gray: 11 works

'Painter-turned-photographer Gustave Le Gray is best known for his landscape photographs of the forest of Fontainebleau in France. The elegantly twisting branches are the primary emphasis of this photograph, but in the background at left is a subtle testament to Le Gray's own work: the wagon he used to transport his photographic equipment.'

'This portrait, likely showing the composer Frédéric Brisson, was either made by Gustave Le Gray, the central figure in French photography of the late 1840s and 1850s, his protégé Auguste Mestral, or someone in their circle at the home of Mestral.'

'Gustave Le Gray favored such fleeting moments, scenes that existed only long enough to be photographed.'

'Of the many studies Gustave Le Gray made in Fontainebleau, a popular destination for artists and vacationing Parisians in the mid-nineteenth century, this photograph is the nearest to a portrait.'

'In this composition, he opted to let the sea and land dominate.'

'The French Emperor Napoleon III commissioned Gustave Le Gray to "record the principal scenes taken from each of the camps of the Guard, and portraits of the officers, generals and superiors, French and foreign, who had traveled to the camp."'

'He positioned his camera to eliminate all reference to the shoreline, which gives the illusion that the photographer was on the water with the vessels.'

'Le Gray arrived in Lebanon shortly after his temperamental friend, the great writer Alexandre Dumas, on whose luxury yacht he had been traveling, abandoned him on the island of Malta. Le Gray then traveled to Beirut, where he made photographs for a French newspaper interested in the effects of civic unrest there.'

'Giuseppe Garibaldi stared into Gustave Le Gray's lens with the kind of piercing look that called men to arms-a fitting gaze for a revolutionary commander who demanded that the Italian people "Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue."'

'Gustave Le Gray was not the first photographer to make images of Egypt's Hypostyle Hall in Karnak--his former student John Beasly Greene was there over a decade before him--but his images are by far the most dramatic.'