Gustave le Gray (1820-1884)

Aliases: Jean-Baptiste-Gustave Le Gray

Professions: Painter; Photographer

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  Gustave LE GRAY (1820-1884) Bateaux quittant le

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  Gustave LE GRAY (1820-1882) Souvenirs du camp de Châlons au Lt Colonel d'Eggs, 1857 62 tirages albuminés montés sur carton.

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  Gustave Le Gray

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  Gustave LE GRAY (1820-1884) - Grande Vague

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Gustave le Gray Biography

(b Villiers-le-Bel, Seine-et-Oise, 30 Aug 1820; d Cairo, 30 July 1884). French photographer, painter and teacher. He studied painting with Paul Delaroche until 1843. A study trip to Switzerland and Italy, financed by his parents, followed, but it was cut short by an untimely marriage in 1844, his sudden return to his family’s home and the subsequent birth of two children in 1845 and 1846. Skilled in painting as an experimenter with pigments, he was attracted to the experimental side of the new paper negative processes available in France after 1847 and plunged into photography, probably to finance the burdens of the family life newly thrust upon him. His treatise, Traité pratique de photographie sur papier et sur verre (1850), outlined his own variant of the dry waxed paper negative process using thinner paper, as well as a recipe for collodion on glass negatives rivalling that of the English inventor Frederick Scott Archer (see PHOTOGRAPHY, §I). A further modification to the waxed paper nagative process was announced in 1851. Le Gray quickly gained a reputation as a brilliant and intuitive photography teacher and gave lessons from a factory building at the Barrière de Clichy in north-west Paris to many painters, including other students of Delaroche such as Henri Le Secq and Charles Nègre, and to countless amateurs who professed later that they could not remember anything Le Gray had taught them, except that they learnt to love photography.

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