Gustave Le Gray Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Gustave Le Gray (1820 - 1884) Although trained as a painter, Gustave Le Gray made his mark on the emerging medium of photography. An experimenter and technical innovator, Le Gray pioneered the use of the paper negative in France and developed a wax paper negative that produced sharper prints. Read the full biography

Gustave Le Gray (1820 - 1884) Although trained as a painter, Gustave Le Gray made his mark on the emerging medium of photography. An experimenter and technical innovator, Le Gray pioneered the use of the paper negative in France and developed a wax paper negative that produced sharper prints. In 1851 he began using collodion on glass negatives, which further increased the sharpness of his images. He became one of the first five photographers, along with Édouard-Denis Baldus and Hippolyte Bayard, to work for the missions héliographiques, a government-sponsored commission to document the state of conservation of important French monuments and buildings. Le Gray is credited with teaching photography to many leading French photographers in the 1850s. In 1851 he became a founding member of the Société Héliographique, the world's first photographic organization, and later became part of the Société Française de Photographie. In 1860 Le Gray began touring the Mediterranean with the writer Alexandre Dumas, but they soon became separated on the voyage. Le Gray went to Lebanon and then to Egypt, where he became a professor of drawing and where he died in Cairo in 1884.