THE ROYAL COLLECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY
When photography emerged during the reign of Isabella II, the new art soon became an important part of the royal collections. Portraits, records of artistic heritage, major public works, cultural events, natural disasters, and a rich series of views – not only of European capitals but also of many countries of the Near and Far East – are some of the subjects that make up the best of these photographic holdings.
Names such as Charles Clifford, Jean Laurent, Ángel Alonso Martínez, José Martínez Sánchez, the Infante Sebastián Gabriel de Borbón, the Napoleon Photographic Company, Pedro Martínez de Hebert, Enrique Facio, Ludwik Tarszeński (Count of Lipa), Jules David, André Disdéri, José Muñoz y Gaviria (Viscount of San Javier), Louis Vernay (Count of Vernay), William Atkinson, José Spreafico, Altobelli & Mollins, and the Bonfils brothers, among others, attest to the importance of Patrimonio Nacional’s photographic collection.
BIOGRAPHY OF GUSTAVE LE GRAY
The following year he set up his first studio in the French capital with the intention of becoming a professional photographer. He opened his laboratory to the public and took on students keen to gain firsthand experience of photographic practice. In 1850 he published his first manual on the subject, A Practical Treatise on Photography, upon Paper and Glass, followed by another two until 1854. Together with Auguste Mestral, Édouard Baldus, Henri Le Secq, and Hippolyte Bayard, he was chosen by the French Historic Monuments Committee to carry out photographic surveys of the country’s architectural heritage – the Mission Héliographique – in 1851. He combined his experiments and teaching with important commissions, such as documenting the Salons held from 1851 to 1853 for Philippe de Chennevières, and immortalising Prince Louis-Napoléon, the son of Napoleon III and Eugénie de Montijo He made other portraits too, but his most interesting photographs are his views of the forests at Fontainebleau. His move to number 35 on the Boulevard des Capucines in 1855 ushered in his most brilliant period. His seascapes taken between 1856 and 1857 on the Normandy and Mediterranean coasts marked the height of his career. In 1857 the Emperor commissioned him to record the military exercises carried out at Châlons- sur-Marne and the subsequent encounter between the French and English fleets at Brest and Cherbourg. These new series are equally attractive and interesting examples of journalism as the previous ones.
Despite Le Gray’s success, his poor management of the business forced him to close it down in February 1860. A string of family tragedies spurred him to abandon his home and depart for the Near East together with Alexandre Dumas the elder to document the latter’s trip to Sicily and the Mediterranean. This fresh opportunity, which seemed to offer the photographer hopes of a glorious comeback, led to a chain of unforeseen circumstances that hastened his downfall. He did an extraordinary report on the ruins and barricades in Palermo, and in Alexandria he broke off his arrangement with the writer. He settled in Egypt as drawing master to the Governor’s children and continued to take photographs until his death in 1884.
THE SEASCAPES SERIES
Gustave Le Gray asserted the artistic value of photography, earning the greatest admiration and recognition for his series of marine views produced between 1856 and 1857. Fifteen prints make up this exquisite collection of seascapes taken in different sessions, the first ones on the Atlantic coast of Upper Normandy, near the port of Le Havre, and the second group in the Mediterranean port of Sète and nearby coastal areas. A master in the handling of light in all its nuances, Le Gray experimented with its technical possibilities, determined to address the challenge of capturing the sea. The considerably shorter exposure time required by the revolutionary wet collodion technique encouraged him to explore instantaneous photography. Nature became his main testing ground in this endeavour. The impossibility of recording the sea and the sky simultaneously without sacrificing definition led him to combine two negatives – one for the clouds and another for the sea’s surface – joining them at the horizon line, which was powerfully emphasised.
Le Gray’s landmark series of seascapes was first shown in Manchester in the1857 exhibition Art Treasures of the United Kingdom. It achieved unanimous recognition as it represented photography’s foray into the most famous English painting genre exemplified by J. M. William Turner, whose work was well known in France. In his day Marc-Antoine Gaudin, art critic of La Lumièremagazine, judged its showing to be ‘the event of the year’ on account of its technical, aesthetic, and commercial achievements. It was distributed in the form of an album entitled Seascapes, which was hailed as an icon of photography’s golden age.
The photographs were immediately framed individually and displayed in the Royal Palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso. They remained there until it was decided to keep them in the General Archives of the Palace together with the rest of the photographic holdings. To present them to the public, their original simple half-round frames crafted by artisan Antonio Girón have been recovered.
This prized set is recorded as arriving at the Royal Library on 16 March 1859 in a ‘scarlet velvet portfolio with photographic views of a seaport’.
This exhibition shows fifteen albumen prints from Gustave Le Gray’s famous series of Seascapes. The set came to the Royal Household in 1859, during the reign of Isabella II, and is preserved in the General Archives of the Palace.
View of the Mediterranean with Mount Agde in the Distance
1857. Albumen print
The image shows a cloudy sky and calm sea with nothing to distract the viewer’s attention away from nature. The photographer’s technical mastery and aesthetic concerns led him to expose two separate negatives, one for the clouds and another for the sea, to overcome the differences in light. He then combined them in a single print, joining them at the horizon line. The resulting rich contrasts between areas of light and shade achieve the desired artistic effect.
This pioneering laboratory invention carried out on an image of nature should be understood in the context of the exchange of influence then taking place between photography and painting. Gustave Le Gray’s training at the studio of Paul Delaroche explains why he analyses the sea in various states of calmness and roughness and the changing nature of skies from a painterly perspective. His approach to seascapes clearly influenced painters such as Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet, and Edgar Degas.
The Steamer Said Moored at the Port of Sète
1857. Albumen print
To mark the opening of the railway line from Bordeaux to Sète on 2 April 1857, Gustave Le Gray travelled to the port of Sète to take photographs for the engravers at Le Monde illustré to use as models. On 23 May 1857 this new weekly published an engraving by William F. Measom and Louis Le Breton based faithfully on the visual record provided by Le Gray.
Visible on the left of the scene is the jetty, and in the background are the Mont Saint-Clair and Fort Richelieu. The steamer Said, built in Sète possibly for the Viceroy of Egypt, Mohamed Said Pasha, stands out in the foreground. Following in the wake of the seascapes painted for years by Dutch, German, French, and English artists, this view is powerfully imbued with the calm and Romantic light of Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Seasons’ series (1835) and the aesthetic of Johan Christian Dahl, the father of Norwegian landscape painting and the first of the great Romantic painters.
Vessels Moored at the Port of Sète
1857. Albumen print
The importance of the town of Sète as a commercial port explains why it enjoyed pride of place in the history of French photography thanks to the daguerreotype taken in 1846 by the pioneering Claude Choiselat and Stanislas Rattel.
The interrupted reference to the town frames the scene, which is dominated by the boats, their masts upright and rigging lowered, silhouetted against a sky with subtle silvery-grey tones above a calm sea. The image is an interesting documentary testament: firstly, it bears witness to some of the practices used in naval construction to prevent seaweed and molluscs from becoming attached to the wooden hulls; and secondly the former appearance of the church of Saint-Louis can be made out in the distance.
The Jetty at Saint-Louis, Sète
1857. Albumen print
This view of the port of Sète is centred on the jetty at Saint-Louis, above which the Fort Saint-Pierre stands out in the background. The fortress was built in 1740 to defend Sète from the regular attacks of foreign fleets and retained its military function until the end of the Second World War. The immense stillness of the empty port space and the smooth, calm waters of the jetty dominate the scene.
The engravers of Le Monde illustré also used this image to document the opening of the new railway line in 1857. Le Gray’s photograph became an illustration that followed the rules and conventions for images of this kind, making it more attractive and legible to viewers.
Sunset at Sea, Against the Light
1856−57. Albumen print
The photographer used laboratory techniques to create this picture, joining different negatives at the horizon line. Viewers are confronted by the sea and the sky with its menacing clouds lit by the sun’s rays. The light effect was achieved by pointing the camera at the sun during exposure.
Many artists began to show an interest in meteorology in the mid-nineteenth century as a result of the new Romantic sensibility. The English painter John Constable is Le Gray’s evident precedent in the study of the clouds. Also during those years, painters and photographers of the Barbizon School worked in sync with the common aim of capturing nature. Among them was Le Gray, who shared Camille Corot’s fondness for observing his surroundings, paying full attention to the light. The masterful and dramatic handling of the light in this photograph imbues it with a poetic effect that impressed and moved Le Gray’s contemporaries, earning him international renown.
Seascape with Sailing Boat and Tugboat Leaving a Trail of Smoke
1856. Albumen print
The National Library of France locates this landscape in the Atlantic Ocean, off Normandy. The halo effect that blurs the edges of the image causes viewers to focus on the sailing ship, which is identified as a brig, a vessel with a large sail area for navigating strong winds. It is being towed by a steamship and both are moving against the wind, as indicated by the trail of smoke — an artistic exaltation of industrial progress that also characterises the output of the Barbizon School painters.
In this photograph Le Gray opts for a sky with only slight traces of clouds. The sea’s surface has a rough appearance owing to the vibrations of the water, and the silhouettes of the two vessels are very close to the horizon line. The photographer shows his fondness for capturing fleeting scenes that existed only long enough to be photographed — a recurring theme among Impressionists such as Claude Monet and Édouard Manet, and in a few works by Darío de Regoyos in Spain.
The Breaking Wave
1857. Albumen print
Like the next photograph The Great Wave, this iconic image belongs to the second group of seascapes Gustave Le Gray made in the spring of 1857 while staying at Sète for the opening of the railway line. In both prints the photographer shows us the same coastal spot near Montpellier whose choppy seas pose a challenge to photography.
The Breaking Wave, the only seascape for which Le Gray uses a vertical format, attests to his pioneering accomplishment of arresting the force of nature at the moment the waves break. In the middle distance are a small sailing boat with billowing sails and a breakwater behind which the horizon line is sharply delineated. This was where he joined the two negatives used to create this spectacular instantaneous photograph — common practice in his works, in which he pursued an aesthetic ideal by combining skies immortalised in Normandy with sea views captured in the Mediterranean, and vice versa.
The Great Wave
1857. Albumen print
As in The Breaking Wave, Le Gray portrays the coastal area near Montpellier in The Great Wave, an icon of a period in which photographers managed to overcome the challenges of the medium with spectacular artistic results. Le Gray’s success lies in his ability to capture instantaneous images of the sea in movement and seamlessly combine different negatives of the sea and the cloudy sky, as well as in the exquisite result achieved using a large format. However, his laboratory manipulation sparked criticism too.
Another salient feature is the broad tonal variety. Le Gray was the first to experiment with the gold toning technique to achieve an attractive violet shade and innovative processes based on the use of a sodium thiosulphate solution with silver salts to create extraordinarily gentle and longer lasting colour ranges. This image has a painterly quality and is essential to understanding Gustave Courbet’s marine views.
Mediterranean Coast, Sète
1857. Albumen print
This delicate sea view may have been taken at sunrise at the Mediterranean port of Sète. It shows the outline of the Fort Saint-Pierre on the right and the silhouette of the Mont Saint- Loup in Agde in the background. Le Gray took several instantaneous pictures in this location and combined them with different shots of skies — some clearer, as in this picture, and others with large clusters of menacing clouds — in the same print. They attest to his interest in the varied effects of light.
The photographer raises the horizon line above the lower third of the picture in order to guide the viewer’s gaze towards the foreground rocks against which the waves are breaking. The spectator’s attention is then immediately drawn to the sea’s iridescent surface, a reflection of the solar effect. Le Gray’s ability to capture these delicate images was praised and commented on by critics of the period.
The Sun’s Reflection on the Sea
1856. Albumen print
In this splendid landscape Le Gray captures the effect of sunlight on the dark sea and its shore, creating an artistic contrast. His fascination with the phenomenon of the tides of the Normandy coast led him to raise the horizon line almost to the centre in order to show the detail of the vast shore covered in seaweed and enlivened with horses and a passer-by in a two-wheeled cart. The ocean is likewise dotted with several sailing boats. The influence of this photograph by Le Gray is easily recognisable in Claude Monet’s La Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide.
Here the photographer uses a single negative for both sky and sea, focusing directly on the effect of the sun. The resulting image is shrouded in a circular halo that enhances its artistic appearance. As in most of his marine pictures, the horizon line is clearly marked, as a poetic element alluding to the idea of infinity. Critics recognised the influence of this series in the paintings of Gustave Courbet.
Steamboat
1856. Albumen print
In this delightful seascape the photographer creates a minimalistic composition that recalls the series of marine views begun in 1986 by the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. Both photographers choose the sea as their subject and handle it with very few elements: water, air, light, and the horizon line. The only external feature in Le Gray’s photograph is the steamboat in the centre of the scene.
The delicacy of this image reveals a photographer who is an artist at heart and intentionally imbues the seascape with huge calm. A clear sky with a slight mist blurs the horizon line at some points and unleashes the effect of the light on the calm seawaters, achieving an iridescent surface with a novel result.
Interest in the sea and reflected light are constant features of marine paintings. Pioneering photographers such as Fox Talbot, Charles Clifford, and Henry Le Secq also pointed their cameras at the water to capture the effects of light on this fascinating element of nature.
Beach at Sainte-Adresse, Normandy
1856. Albumen print
When the railway reached the coast of Normandy in the 1840s the area became a principal attraction for the first French tourists. Patrimonio Nacional preserves two of the three photographs that Gustave Le Gray took of the beach at Sainte-Adresse, a coastal district northeast of the port of Le Havre. This place, captured by his camera, fired t he public’s imagination a few years later thanks to critic Alphonse Karr and painters such as Camille Corot and Claude Monet.
Here the beach still preserves its rustic charm conveyed by the houses of the fishing village. Le Gray took photographs in this coastal spot to record the changes in its appearance caused by the tides. The first one shows the full extension of beach at Sainte- Adresse during low tide. The viewer is drawn to the visible details of daily life such as the tiny fishermen going about their tasks and the anecdotal figure who, oblivious to them, is enjoying the nature spot.
Beach at Sainte-Adresse with the Dumont Baths
1856. Albumen print
This view captures the effect of the tides and shows a greatly reduced shore as a result of the water coming in. It reflects the nineteenth-century appearance of this coastal spot in the context of the new concept of summer resorts with sea baths. An example is the Château Vert establishment, the large building with a belltower visible in the background, which opened in August 1847. Above it, on the edge of the clifftop, is the famous Pain de sucre (‘sugarloaf’) memorial inaugurated in 1852. In the foreground are the small, more modest baths after which this photograph is named.
There is an interesting social contrast between the photographs taken at Sainte Adresse. Whereas the first one presents a traditional view of the beach of what was predominantly a fishing village, with human types in characteristic working-class clothing in the second one the people strolling along the seashore attest to the newladopted form of leisure and show a more well-to-do public.
Seascape
1856. Albumen print
This seascape, taken on the coast of Normandy near Le Havre in 1856, is one of the least known pictures in the series and, like most of them, has a very simple composition. It is based on landscape lines, whith the horizon line positioned in the upper half, giving priority to the sea over the cloudless sky. A salient expressive device is the attractive effect of the light falling on the sea and the sand, which gradually fades to darkness at the edges of the print. The pioneering use of the flou (soft focus) effect, the barely perceptible silhouettes of human figures, and the horizon dotted with sailing boats lend the image an artistic appearance that is linked to the work of Caspar David Friedrich and the aesthetic of the sublime, understood as the fascination with which Le Gray succeeds in capturing the elements of nature in all their glory.
The Brig
1856. Albumen print
This delicate marine view taken at dusk from the beach at low tide, with dramatic storm clouds and contrasting light, is achieved by using two negatives. Le Gray interprets this seascape with a sensitivity similar to Gustave Courbet’s when he painted The Beach, Sunset a few years later. He chooses a lower than usual horizon line to give greater prominence to the sky. Although our attention is drawn to the elegant three masted brig, the photographer nonetheless captures the extensive seaweed-covered shore where two horses and a fishing boat can be made out.
The Brig was the first of this series of photographs that was publicly shown in his London exhibition in 1856. The large number of copies that continue to appear on the market attest to the praise it earned, though a critical sector of Victorian society objected to Le Gray’s sacrificing truthfulness to nature for the sake of commercial success.
