PMA Highlights: Gustave Le Gray, "The Brig"
By Andrew J Eschelbacher. This article is featured in The Collection: Highlights from the Portland Museum of Art
Describing his greatest professional ambition, Gustave Le Gray wrote, “I wish that photography, instead of falling within the domain of industry, of commerce, will be included among the arts. That is its only, true place.”
Gustave Le Gray (France, 1820 – 1884), The Brig (Brig in Moonlight), 1856, albumen print from wet collodion negatives, 12 3/8 x 15 3/4 inches. Museum purchase with support from the Susan Donnell Konkel Memorial Fund and the Freddy and Regina Homburger Endowment for Acquisitions, 2013.6. Image courtesy Pillar Digital Imaging.
The Brig is a technological and aesthetic testament to this effort and the potential of the photographic medium. In the work, a solitary ship floats quietly on the vast ocean, as the reflection of water and sky produces an ethereal quality in the clouds that hang hauntingly. The Romantic image exemplifies the period’s interest in rendering nature’s sublime expanse, which was normally the domain of painters. Rather than using the more conventional medium, however, Le Gray used a photographic process that captured similar artistic sensibilities, but allowed him to create a reproducible and technologically inventive image.
Le Gray began his career as a painter before turning to photography in the late 1840s. He quickly became an innovating force, bringing William Henry Fox Talbot’s paper-negative process to France (see cat. 14). Soon thereafter, he adopted a new photographic technique that used large glass-plate negatives. The glass plates combined with the chemistry of albumen prints to produce an exceptionally clear and detailed image that was also more stable than Talbot’s salted paper prints. Moreover, glass-plate negatives allowed photographers to work on a much larger scale than before, making landscape views like The Brig possible. The solidity of the glass plate also proved important, as it allowed artists to make many more reproductions than the paper negative offered.
The Brig became a well-known and celebrated image in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Le Gray produced hundreds of versions of it. Although he captured this scene on a single-plate negative, he later refined his technique for subsequent harbor pictures by using two negatives. In the double-plate system, Le Gray created one view of the sky and one of the water. He then aligned the two negative plates together before exposing them for the positive print. The combination produced an even clearer view of the seascape atmosphere. Despite achieving major artistic success, the artist faced severe financial difficulties in the late 1850s, eventually fleeing France—and his debts—in 1860. After visits to Italy, Malta, and Lebanon, Le Gray settled in Egypt, where he spent the last two decades of his life.