The Sky’s the Limit for Gustave le Gray

A picturesque portrait of an Italian street musician or a startlingly modern view of French cavalry maneuvers might attract today’s audience to Gustave le Gray’s photographs, but in his day it was the skies that compelled attention.

“When Le Gray made these seascapes, they astounded the world. No one had seen skies in 19th-Century photographs--or at least not skies like this,” said Gordon Baldwin, who has organized the first West Coast show of Le Gray’s work, at the J. Paul Getty Museum until Aug. 28. The long exposures required to reveal details in dark areas of early photographs often washed out skies so that they appeared as plain expanses of space.

Some of Le Gray’s own skies are empty--and often effectively so--but those that made him famous are luminous orchestrations of billowing clouds that dramatize quiet seascapes. In “Brig on Water,” one of the most celebrated photographic images of the 19th Century, a romantic swath of sky displays itself in full regalia while a tiny boat glides through a crisp ribbon of water.

Le Gray accomplished this feat with a single negative, but he often needed two--one for the sky, another for the water. “We don’t know how he combined them. He may have masked over one area while printing another, or he may have sandwiched negatives,” Baldwin speculated.

There’s no question that Le Gray constructed landscapes of separate components to achieve artistic effects. A recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York included three different photographs that all have the same sky, Baldwin noted. Le Gray also introduced waxed-paper negatives in 1850, improving the calotype process, and was among the first to use collodion emulsions. In addition to his technical achievements, he was author of “A Practical Treatise on Photography” and a founder of the first photography association.

In an exhibition brochure Baldwin likens the trajectory of Le Gray’s photographic career to a comet that took off in the 1840s, glowed brilliantly in the mid-1850s and disappeared at the end of 1860. Le Gray (1820-1882) first ventured into the arts as a painter, but none of his paintings have survived. His photographs, on the other hand, are among the prized possessions of the Getty.

In addition to seascapes, the 30 images in the exhibition include rather stiff, vignetted portraits; strikingly modern landscapes done in the forest at Fontainebleau (a favorite haunt of the Barbizon painters), a sharply detailed shot of the Louvre and a photo of Aime Millet’s drawing of the Mona Lisa.

Many of his pictures were done for art’s sake, but the largest group on display is commissioned work depicting Napolean III’s sprawling military camp at Chalons-sur-Marne. An astonishing panorama composed of six sequential pictures plus more intimate scenes presents a fascinating view of French military life in the mid-19th-Century.

If nothing else, it’s a civilized spectacle. Oil lamps and neat shrubs line roads along the practice fields, while a pavilion for band concerts sits off in the distance. Officers furnished their tents with elegant portable furniture complete with striped cushions. Their lunch was served on picnic tables spread with white cloths and set with crystal wine glasses. North African soldiers didn’t have it quite so fancy, but they appear to have enjoyed the camaraderie of homespun entertainment. Le Gray’s camera saw what the emperor probably wanted him to see--a romantic view of the military as an orderly, stratified, cultured society.

In addition to offering intriguing insights into military sociology and history, these pictures are often striking artworks. None more so than two shots of cavalry maneuvers that restrict action to horizontal stripes in vast abstract landscapes.

A photo of Roman ruins in Lebanon and another of an ancient temple in Egypt are the exhibition’s only clues to Le Gray’s strange disappearance from Paris. Apparently he left his family and financially troubled studio to take a Mediterranean cruise with writer Alexandre Dumas. According to Baldwin, Le Gray joined Dumas on a brand-new yacht, but when Dumas suddenly decided to turn the vacation into an effort to aid Giuseppe Garibaldi’s attempt to overthrow the Neapolitan Bourbons in Sicily, Le Gray left--or was abandoned--on Cyprus. He made his way to Lebanon and, finally, Egypt, where he lived in obscurity until 1882.

That much is known, but Baldwin hopes to uncover more information about Le Gray’s last years during an upcoming trip to Egypt. “I don’t expect to find photographs, though that would be wonderful,” he said. “But I’ll certainly go to the French church and cemetery and look around. He was a curious character.”