Image: the public-domain reference file. Your print is a hand-made interpretation of it, produced at the studio in Platinum-palladium — its matter and tonality are its own.
Gustave Le Gray · c. 1856-1857
Boats Leaving the Port of Le Havre
- Year
- c. 1856-1857
- Original process
- Albumen silver print from wet-collodion glass negative
- Held at
- Bibliothèque nationale de France
Key facts
- Edition
- Signed and numbered limited edition
- Authenticity
- Official certificate of authenticity
- Chemistry
- Non-toxic process (Vision Picturale recipes)
- Year
- c. 1856-1857
- Original held at
- Bibliothèque nationale de France
- Public domain
- Since 1955 (CPI L.123-1)
- Printer
- Maison Picturale — Paris 20e studio
- Lead time
- Hand-made · 3 to 5 weeks
Maison Picturale reinterpretation in platinum-palladium
About this work
From Le Gray's 1856-1857 Normandy seascape series — sailing ships departing the busy Atlantic port of Le Havre at the moment when the Channel ports were France's gateway to industrial steam. Jean-Baptiste Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884), former painting student of Paul Delaroche and inventor of the dry waxed-paper negative in 1851 — the faster, more transparent alternative to Talbot's calotype — had by Le Havre moved to albumen prints from wet-collodion glass negatives, and was systematically combining two exposures (one for sea, one for sky) to render both with full tonal detail. This plate (BnF, Gallica) belongs to the experimental marine series of 1856-1858 (Brick on Water, Great Wave at Sète, Mediterranean Sea — Sète, Solar Effect Clouds — Ocean) in which Le Gray became the first photographer to push past the inherent sensitivity limits of silver salts. He was at the same time photographer to Napoleon III — who commissioned the Camp de Châlons series of 1857 — and ran a school for amateur photographers whose pupils included Maxime Du Camp, Léon de Laborde and the Marquis de Bréval. Financial collapse drove him into exile in 1860; he followed Garibaldi to Italy and ended his career in Egypt, dying at Cairo in 1884. Maison Picturale process transposition: the historical albumen-from-collodion route is not currently in the MP catalogue. The closest non-toxic contemporary equivalent for this image is a Vandyke print on 640 g/m² cotton paper — a reformulated iron-silver process of the salted-paper family — produced after a digital composite of two source exposures, conserving Le Gray's sea-plus-sky logic.
Reference file : Gallica BnF / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
Procédé Transposition
Print like Gustave Le Gray today — without the toxics.
Each Maison Picturale print is a material reinterpretation of the image. Three readings of the same work — the original, its closest transposition, and a creative transposition into another procédé.
Noble metals — platinum and palladium — on 640 gsm cotton paper. The longest tonal range in all analog photography.
MP procédé — reformulated non-toxic chemistry, signed by Tristan Sidem and Raphaël Lebas de Lacour.
View the procédéHistory of the process
The platinotype was invented in 1873 by the British engineer William Willis, who patented the process that same year under the name Platinotype Process. In 1879 Willis founded the Platinotype Company, which sold platinum-sensitised papers across Europe for several decades. Palladium was introduced in the early twentieth century as an economical variant, giving nothing away on tonal quality.
Platinum-palladium quickly became the process of choice for the masters of fine-art photography. Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Alvin Langdon Coburn and Frederick H. Evans made it their signature process, and their original prints held at the Royal Photographic Society in London, at George Eastman House in Rochester and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York still testify to platinum's tonal perfection. Stieglitz wrote that platinum offered a wider scale of greys than any other process.
Our approach
Every platinum-palladium print made at the studio at 1 passage Dagorno is a unique piece in a very limited edition, intended for serious collectors and institutions. The cost of platinum and palladium salts — noble metals whose prices follow the financial markets — makes this our premium process. Each print is prepared, sensitised and developed by hand by our master printers.
Our 640 gsm 100% cotton satin watercolour paper suits platinum-palladium particularly well: its pure cotton fibre, free of optical brighteners and alkaline additives, lets the metal salts embed deep in the paper, and its satin surface fully reveals the process's unique warm tonality and exceptional tonal scale.
Inside our studio
1 Passage Dagorno, Paris 20e. Each print is hand-crafted by Tristan Sidem and Raphaël Lebas de Lacour, using Vision Picturale's reformulated non-toxic chemistry. Limited edition, signed and numbered.
Commission this print
- Hand-printed and signed by Tristan Sidem & Raphaël Lebas de Lacour
- Reformulated non-toxic chemistry (Vision Picturale recipes)
- Limited edition, numbered, certificate of authenticity
- 1 Passage Dagorno studio, Paris 20e
- Delivery 3 to 5 weeks · ships worldwide from France
Formats and prices
- ProcédéPlatinum-palladium
- Coquille44 × 56 cm200 €
- Jésus56 × 76 cm400 €
- Grand Aigle76 × 112 cm600 €
- Univers100 × 140 cm1 200 €
Firm prices: they follow from the procédé and the paper format, as on our Process pages. 100% cotton paper, 640 gsm, deckled edges. Which formats are offered depends on the resolution of the reference file we hold for this work.
Contemporary print after a work in the public domain (CPI L.123-1, 70 years post-mortem). Hand-crafted reinterpretation by Maison Picturale's master printers — this is not an original vintage by the master. The mention 'after [Master]' is systematic on the print and on the certificate of authenticity.
