Hollow Oak Tree, Fontainebleau

Close study of a hollow oak in the Forest of Fontainebleau — one of the ancient, gnarled motifs Le Gray made photographically famous alongside the Barbizon school of painters (Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, Narcisse Diaz). Jean-Baptiste Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884), trained as a painter in the studio of Paul Delaroche before turning to photography in the late 1840s, invented the dry waxed-paper negative in 1851 — a faster, sharper alternative to Talbot's calotype that allowed long exposures in the open forest without a portable darkroom. By the mid-1850s he was working in albumen prints from collodion glass negatives, the technique used here, while preserving the patient, painterly observation of Barbizon. Held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Gilman Paper Company Collection, donated from 1991), the print belongs to the same Fontainebleau campaign as the celebrated waxed-paper studies preserved at the Musée d'Orsay (PHO accessions from 1986) and at the Getty. The Fontainebleau forest was, for Le Gray, the territory in which photography proved itself capable of the same intimate landscape attention as painting. He was photographer to Napoleon III, ran a teaching school for amateurs — Maxime Du Camp, Léon de Laborde, the Marquis de Bréval — made the combined-negative marines of 1856-1858, and ended his career in Egyptian exile after his Paris studio collapsed; he died at Cairo in 1884. Maison Picturale process transposition: the original albumen-on-collodion route is not catalogued at MP. The contemporary non-toxic equivalent is the Vandyke print on 640 g/m² cotton paper — a reformulated salted-paper-family iron-silver process — which renders the warm matte tones and patient detail Le Gray sought for the venerable trees of Fontainebleau.

Reference file : Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)