Cloudy Sky, Mediterranean Sea
1857
Medium
Albumen print, No. 16 from the album "Vistas del Mar"
Dimensions
Image/paper: 30.9 × 41.8 cm (12 3/16 × 16 1/2 in.); Album page: 50.8 × 64.2 cm (20 × 25 5/16 in.)
Classification
albumen silver print
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
126485
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Trained in Paris as an academic painter, Gustave Le Gray gained renown for his revolutionary process of photographing seascapes. Because of technical limitations, photography could not satisfactorily depict sky and sea simultaneously; in a single image, the sky would appear washed-out, while the water looked too dark. Le Gray resolved this shortcoming by combining two negatives (one for sea and one for sky) made at different exposure times. Although this solution represented a manipulation of ph...
About the Artist
Gustave Le Gray · 1820–1884
Gustave Le Gray, born on August 30, 1820, in Villiers-le-Bel near Paris to a prosperous merchant family, pursued his artistic ambitions against his parents' wishes for a legal career. As an only child, he trained as a painter in the studios of François-Édouard Picot and Paul Delaroche at the École des Beaux-Arts, exhibiting at the Paris Salons in 1848 and 1853. In 1844, he married Palmira Leonardi...