Hardcover. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 416 pages, profusely illustrated. After years of research, this complete retrospective offers, as no volume before it, an assessment of Le Gray's important place in the history of photography. His work had remained largely unknown by the general public until he was rediscovered in the 1960s and was deemed by connoisseurs to be the Monet of photography. Gustave Le Gray began as a young painter in Rome, then became a fashionable portrait photographer in Paris. He received commissions from Napoleon Ill, and astonished viewers with his painterly landscapes and ravishing seascapes. Facing bankruptcy, he feld Paris with Alexandre Dumas to Palermo, travelled to the Middle East, and finally settled in Egypt, where he became drawing master to the ruler's children and continued to make photographs until his death in 1884. Le Gray's work had remained largely unknown by the general public until he was rediscovered in the 1960s.
