A few months ago when I was in Santander for the opening of one of my shows, I had the chance to visit an exhibition about Gustave Le Gray1, which featured his incredible series of coastal pictures shot in Normandy in the 1850s.
I had almost forgotten how beautiful Le Gray’s pictures were. His timeless masterpieces are unprecedented for the poetic effect and artistic power given to photography.
In the late 19th century, when Impressionist painters had not yet brought the beach and its mundanity to center stage, when the coast was still considered a harsh and off-limits territory, he chose the sea as the subject for his photographs, with a strikingly modern and revolutionary approach.
His coastal series was exhibited for the first time in the UK, where they received an enthusiastic response from the critics, accounting for photography’s foray into the already acclaimed genre of English painting, represented at the time by J.M. William Turner.
“What’s clearly new at the exhibition, what makes it so different from all the others before, are the astonishing Le Gray seascapes, where ships with no sail keep on sailing, where a surging sea, floating clouds, and the sun itself with its glorious rays are reproduced, Mr Le Gray’s marines are beyond comparison; they are completely unlike anything done before.”2
Le Gray’s paintings are set in Normandy in the second half of the 19th century, at the dawn of a period of great transformation of its coastal landscape. Indeed, the opening of the railroad that reached the northern coast ensured a connection to the capital city of Paris, thus initiating a process of mass tourism and industrialization that would alter the Normandy seaside landscape in the following century.
