{
"data": {
"id": 154252,
"accession_number": "1988.64",
"share_license_status": "CC0",
"tombstone": "Pathway in the Forest of Fontainebleau, 1849\u201352. Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820\u20131884). Salted paper print from waxed paper negative; image: 19.1 x 26.5 cm (7 1/2 x 10 7/16 in.); matted: 40.6 x 50.8 cm (16 x 20 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Norman O. Stone and Ella A. Stone Memorial Fund, 1988.64",
"current_location": null,
"title": "Pathway in the Forest of Fontainebleau",
"creation_date": "1849\u201352",
"creation_date_earliest": 1849,
"creation_date_latest": 1852,
"artists_tags": [
"male"
],
"culture": [
"France, 19th century"
],
"technique": "salted paper print from waxed paper negative",
"support_materials": [],
"department": "Photography",
"collection": "PH - French 19th Century",
"type": "Photograph",
"measurements": "Image: 19.1 x 26.5 cm (7 1/2 x 10 7/16 in.); Matted: 40.6 x 50.8 cm (16 x 20 in.)",
"dimensions": {
"image": {
"height": 0.191,
"height_inch": 7,
"height_inch_fraction": 0.5,
"width": 0.265,
"width_inch": 10,
"width_inch_fraction": 0.4375
},
"matted": {
"height": 0.406,
"height_inch": 16,
"height_inch_fraction": 0.0,
"width": 0.508,
"width_inch": 20,
"width_inch_fraction": 0.0
}
},
"state_of_the_work": null,
"edition_of_the_work": null,
"copyright": null,
"inscriptions": [
{
"inscription": "Written in black ink on recto: \"Gustave Le Gray [signed]\"",
"inscription_translation": null,
"inscription_remark": null,
"sortorder": null
},
{
"inscription": "written in pencil on verso: \"CW.56 / STL / 125\"",
"inscription_translation": null,
"inscription_remark": null,
"sortorder": null
}
],
"exhibitions": {
"current": [
{
"id": 310246,
"title": "The Year in Review for 1988",
"description": "The Year in Review for 1988. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (March 1-May 14, 1989).",
"opening_date": "1989-03-01T05:00:00"
},
{
"id": 186948,
"title": "Pioneers of Landscape Photography from the Museum's Collection",
"description": "Pioneers of Landscape Photography from the Museum's Collection. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (August 12, 2000-January 3, 2001).",
"opening_date": "2000-08-12T00:00:00"
},
{
"id": 178867,
"title": "Drawn with Light: Pioneering French Photography from the Cleveland Museum of Art",
"description": "Drawn with Light: Pioneering French Photography from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 26-June 16, 2005).",
"opening_date": "2005-02-26T00:00:00"
},
{
"id": 197576,
"title": "France at the Dawn of Photography",
"description": "France at the Dawn of Photography. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (October 4, 2009-January 24, 2010).",
"opening_date": "2009-10-04T00:00:00"
}
],
"legacy": [
{
"description": "Paper and Light: The Calotype in France and Great Britain, 1839-1870. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (September 24-November 21, 1982).",
"opening_date": "1982-09-24T00:00:00"
},
{
"description": "Gustave Le Gray, 1820-1884. Galeries Mansart and Mazarine, Richelieu, France (March 19-June 16, 2002); The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA (July 9-September 29, 2002).",
"opening_date": "2002-03-19T00:00:00"
},
{
"description": "The World Seen Anew: English and French Photographs of the 1850s. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (June 29-August 26, 1990). Gallery D.",
"opening_date": "1990-06-29T00:00:00"
}
]
},
"provenance": [
{
"description": "Charles Henry Miller [1842-1922], New York, NY",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": null,
"sortorder": 1
},
{
"description": "Paul Cava [1949-], Philadelphia, PA",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": null,
"sortorder": 2
},
{
"description": "David Mancini",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": null,
"sortorder": 3
},
{
"description": "(Charles Isaacs Photographs, Inc., New York, NY)",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "?-1988",
"sortorder": 4
},
{
"description": "The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "September 22, 1988",
"sortorder": 5
}
],
"find_spot": null,
"related_works": [],
"former_accession_numbers": [],
"did_you_know": null,
"description": "One of the most inventive and influential French photographers of the 1850s, Le Gray was widely known for his landmark studies taken in the Forest of Fontainbleau, near Paris, from about 1849 to 1857. The photographs share a kinship with the work of the Barbizon painters, such as Corot, Daubigny, and Millet, who also worked there. Le Gray skillfully overcame technical problems to master the photographing of greenery and dark areas and to exploit the visual effects of light and atmosphere. In this enchanting scene, the viewer is drawn almost magnetically into a carriage trail surrounded by a dense archway of trees with sparkling sunlight filtering through the leaves.",
"external_resources": {
"wikidata": [
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q60763593"
],
"internet_archive": [
"https://archive.org/details/clevelandart-1988.64-pathway-in-the-fores"
]
},
"citations": [
{
"citation": "Brettell, Richard R. Paper and Light: The Calotype in France and Great Britain, 1839-1870. Boston: D.R. Godine, 1984.",
"page_number": "p. 9, repr. p. 9.",
"url": ""
},
{
"citation": "\"The Year in Review for 1988.\" The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 76, no. 2 (1989)",
"page_number": "p. 70, no. 64, repr. p. 60.",
"url": "http://www.jstor.org/stable/25160061."
},
{
"citation": "Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E Hinson. Catalogue of Photography. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: P. 221",
"url": ""
},
{
"citation": "Aubenas, Sylvie, Gustave Le Gray, and Gordon Baldwin. Gustave Le Gray, 1820-1884. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002.",
"page_number": "Catalogue no. 267, p. 230.",
"url": ""
}
],
"url": "https://clevelandart.org/art/1988.64",
"images": {
"annotation": null,
"web": {
"url": "https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1988.64/1988.64_web.jpg",
"width": "1236",
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"print": {
"url": "https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1988.64/1988.64_print.jpg",
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},
"alternate_images": [],
"creditline": "Norman O. Stone and Ella A. Stone Memorial Fund",
"image_credit": null,
"sketchfab_id": null,
"sketchfab_url": null,
"gallery_donor_text": null,
"athena_id": 154252,
"creators": [
{
"id": 568,
"description": "Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820\u20131884)",
"extent": null,
"qualifier": null,
"role": "artist",
"biography": "Gustave Le Gray French, 1820-1884\r\n\r\nA master both technically and aesthetically, Gustave Le Gray (born in Villiers-le-Bel) was one of the most important figures in 19th-century French photography, bringing to the medium artistic integrity and visual imagination. Le Gray, trained as a painter, was exhibiting his work in the Paris Salons in the late 1840s and early 1850s when he became interested in photography. Along with Henri Le Secq and Charles N\u00e8gre, he was a student of Paul Delaroche, a painter of considerable reputation and ability who was one of the first to grasp the importance of photography.\r\n\tIn 1851 Le Gray announced his invention of a waxed paper negative, a significant improvement over earlier paper methods that was later adopted by Louis de Clercq, Dr. August Jakob Lorent, and others. That same year the Commission des Monuments historiques named him as one of five photographers of the Mission h\u00e9liographique, for which he produced well-known studies of army maneuvers at Chalons. Le Gray also worked with Fran\u00e7ois Arago, the scientist and champion of Louis-Jacques-Mand\u00e9 Daguerre, and later proposed a new method of toning prints, among other innovations.\r\n\tLe Gray was perhaps most admired for the effects he achieved with water and sky. To capture the subtle qualities of cloud patterns in some of his seascapes, he employed two negatives to produce the final image. His commissioned studies of historic monuments are classic examples of early architectural photography. In the early 1850s he worked in the Barbizon tradition at Fontainebleau and, in 1860, documented the uprising against Fran\u00e7ois II in Palermo. He was a founding member of the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 h\u00e9liographique and the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 fran\u00e7aise de photographie. Despite his influence and artistic success, Le Gray left Paris in 1865 to become a professor of design at the \u00c9cole Polytechnique in Cairo. He died in Egypt. T.W.F.",
"name_in_original_language": null,
"birth_year": "1820",
"death_year": "1884",
"use_in_caption": true,
"include_extent": false,
"weight": 1
}
],
"legal_status": "accessioned",
"accession_date": "1988-09-22T00:00:00",
"sortable_date": 1849,
"date_added_to_oa": null,
"date_text": "1849\u201352",
"collapse_artists": false,
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"record_type": "object",
"conservation_statement": null,
"has_conservation_images": false,
"cover_accession_number": null,
"is_nazi_era_provenance": false,
"impression": null,
"alternate_titles": [],
"is_highlight": false,
"updated_at": "2026-06-24 11:19:26.700000"
}
}