‘RIVER’ : ART REVIEW : An Unprecedented Photo : Camille Silvy’s 1858 ‘River Scene, France’ was pivotal to the development of modern art--which is why the J. Paul Getty Museum has devoted an entire show to it.

If it’s not exactly common, neither is it unprecedented for a museum to construct a small show around a single significant painting, usually one in its own permanent collection. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has done it, for example with Jean-Simeon Chardin’s “Soap Bubbles” (c. 1733-34), and Washington’s National Gallery of Art is about to do it, with John Singleton Copley’s 1778 “Watson and the Shark” (the show opens Jan. 17).

Presenting preparatory studies, different versions of the painting, related works by the artist and art by influential teachers and peers, this kind of exhibition offers an opportunity to examine in depth an important work of art, to understand how and why it was made and in what cultural context the artist’s vision was given form.

That said, a question arises: Has any museum, anywhere, ever given the same exhaustive, highly focused treatment, not to a single painting, but to a single photograph?

It’s hard to think of one. In fact, if the J. Paul Getty Museum is correct in its assertion, the answer is no. The Getty’s current offering, “Silvy’s ‘River Scene, France’: The Story of a Photograph” is a first.

The photograph under examination will likely be new to all but the specialist, while the photographer who made it is, albeit widely admired, not one quickly regarded as occupying the very highest rung among the pantheon of the medium’s pioneers. Still, this show convincingly examines its singular subject for a purpose: Camille Silvy and his 1858 “River Scene, France” emerge as pivotal to the development of modern art in the second half of the 19th Century.

The show has been organized for the Getty by guest curator Mark Haworth-Booth, who is curator of photographs at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The V & A owns one of only four known prints of “River Scene, France”; the Getty owns another, acquired two years ago.

One of the two remaining prints is in the collection of Paris’ Societe Francaise de Photographie, which showed the photograph to great acclaim at the landmark 1859 Salon. The other is in the Musee Municipal du Chateau Saint-Jean, in the town of Nogent-le-Rotrou. About an hour’s drive west of Chartres, Nogent-le-Rotrou is where Silvy was born, and it’s the site of the photograph.

Juxtaposed in the Getty’s exhibition, these four prints are quite different from one another. Some dissimilarities are obvious. The V & A print is rectangular with chamfered corners, the other three are oval. Coloration varies widely, ranging from warm golden tones in one to deep purplish hues in another. The Nogent-le-Rotrou print is in poor physical condition, the Getty’s is excellent.

Closer perusal reveals more subtle-- and surprising--distinctions. The Paris print is bright and open, the darker V & A print more dramatic. Crisp reflections in the water, showing tall poplars on the riverbank, mark the Getty and the Paris prints, but they’re largely subsumed in the more opaque river of the V & A version.

Most mysteriously of all, broad clouds sweep across the sky in all four photographs--but they’re not in exactly the same place in any two pictures. Their shapes are identical, but their coloration, intensity, atmosphere and even placement in the sky is variable. Obviously, Camille Silvy was manipulating his negatives in the darkroom, experimenting with different effects.

“River Scene, France” is an albumen print made from wet collodion-on-glass negatives. Immediately before exposure of the scene before his camera, the photographer coated a glass plate with cellulose dissolved in ether and alcohol, and then sensitized the emulsion with potassium iodide and silver nitrate. He had to work quickly, exposing and developing the negative before the wet plate dried.

To print from the glass negative, paper was coated with albumen (from egg white) and salt, then light-sensitized with silver nitrate. A complicated recipe, this early photographic process had as many variables in outcome as the most delicate souffle.

One consistent problem was that collodion emulsion was highly sensitive to blue light. Inevitably the sky would be overexposed in landscape negatives, showing up on the print as a flat plane of white.

The solution: Make two negatives, one of the landscape, one of an underexposed sky, and print them together, just as if they had been united in nature.

Ironically, this clever if deceptive procedure was devised to enhance the appearance of naturalism, which was emerging in mid-century France as art’s highest value. In the excellent catalogue that accompanies the Getty show, Haworth-Booth scrutinizes numerous “falsifications” employed by Silvy, all used to construct a convincing illusion.

Comparing the different effects of the four prints, he demonstrates how, in the most extreme case, the artist even scratched and drew on the negative in order to enhance the illusion of naturalism in the finished picture.

It was the eagle-eye of the late American landscape photographer Ansel Adams that pointed out to Haworth-Booth some convincing pictorial evidence that Silvy had used at least two negatives, not one, to make the photograph. The cluster of tall poplars just to the left of center pierces the sky; if you look closely, you’ll see that the tree tops are subtly darker than their lower trunks, with the dividing line between darker and lighter coincident with the division between sky and landscape. That’s because the darker area was exposed twice--once to print the landscape negative, once for the sky negative.

In addition to Adams, the curator called on a wide array of expert opinions in his examination of this image. It’s a sometimes surprising group.

For the leisurely figures gathered on the shore at the edge of the open field at the right, and for those in the boat and on the landing at the edge of town on the left, he went to the costume curator at the Musee de la Mode et du Costume in Paris. By analyzing their period clothing, she was able to demonstrate that the figures on the left were likely members of the rural bourgeoisie, those on the right probably of the working class.

Haworth-Booth makes a convincing assumption that these people are probably residents relaxing, not tourists visiting the town. An 1861 river painting by Jean-Baptiste-Louis Moullin, included in the exhibition, focuses on a hilltop chateau and a graceful church near the place depicted by Silvy’s photograph. Such picturesque monuments, which would attract tourists, have been pointedly excluded from Silvy’s landscape.

What time of year does the photograph show? Botanists who examined it concluded that the field at right shows newly mowed hay--placing the season as summer, and probably July--and even determined that the hay was cut by machine, not by hand. That’s significant, because the convulsive upheavals of the 1850s were fueled significantly by the rapid industrialization of France--profound alterations in social life that would soon register in revolutionary works of modern art.

Getty researchers using X-ray fluorescence also found mercury in one of the four images, an unusual ingredient for albumen prints made with the wet collodion process. It might mean Silvy was experimenting with materials, in order to alter the pictorial effect in a manner that would be responsive to rapidly changing artistic styles. He was just 24 when he made the picture, and his ambition to be a successful artist was immense.

Among the scientific advances accompanying industrialization were technological breakthroughs in the making of lenses. A specialist in camera apparatuses at London’s Royal Photographic Society has pinpointed two types of lenses new to the 1850s, which would have resulted in several effects specific to Silvy’s photograph.

Plainly, Silvy’s picture is more than just an attractive landscape view. “River Scene, France” demonstrates two types of pleasant leisure activity--bourgeois and working class--that revolve around the natural dividing line between town and country. His compelling image holds in harmonious balance a culture actually in the throes of furious flux.

Technologically created, the scene is normalized by the artist’s skillful manipulation of his medium, which endows the scene with a convincing illusionism. All is right with the France created in Silvy’s scenic view. Its reflection of life is presented as being as natural and true as the reflection of land and sky in the placid water of a flowing river.

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The Getty show surrounds the four prints of “River Scene, France” with two paintings, including an 1868 Barbizon-school canvas of a river bank by Charles-Francois Daubigny; a variety of contemporaneous river views by other photographers, including Silvy’s teacher, Count Aguado; eight color-prints by the artist Stephen Shore, who was commissioned by the museum in 1990 to photograph the original, vastly changed site; and several other examples of Silvy’s own work, including the carte de visite (or “calling card”) portraits he made during nearly a decade as a fashionable photographer in London, before his 1868 retirement from camera work.

(Employing a studio staff of 40, Silvy astonishingly turned out more than 7,000 portraits of mostly British nobility during those years, which led Cecil Beaton to later describe him as “the Gainsborough of commercial photography.”)

Aside from the pleasures of individual works, this is a show whose full appreciation demands assiduous perusal of the compact and very readable catalogue. Otherwise, it’s difficult to decipher. More important, though, as an apparent first in the realm of museum exhibitions analyzing a single photograph, it quietly asserts the wisdom of giving the same scrutiny to camera images as is more commonly afforded to individual paintings.

The value of the enterprise is adroitly demonstrated by the photograph chosen for inaugural examination: Silvy’s “River Scene, France” turns out to have anticipated by a decade a mode of seeing that was a foundation for Impressionist painting. For the Getty--a museum with a collection that numbers well in excess of 60,000 photographs, and whose holdings have made Los Angeles an almost unparalleled center for photographic study--the subtle precedent is apt.

J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, through Feb. 28. Parking reservations required: (310) 458-2003. Closed Mondays.