Technique used by photographic pioneer Gustave Le Gray revealed after 150 years
Publication date: 18 November 2025 - 15:00
A major new study provides fresh insights into how the French photographic pioneer Gustave Le Gray created his famous seascapes in the 1850s. The Rijksmuseum commissioned photographer and expert Christian Klant to investigate Le Gray’s innovative techniques reproduce them in practice. His years of research have shed new light on Le Gray’s methods, which had remained largely unexplained.
One of the first to specialise in the photographic seascape genre, Le Gray became widely known across Europe for his large-scale images of coasts and seascapes. On 27 November 2025, Klant will present his findings for the first time in a lecture at the Rijksmuseum.
The research was made possible in part by the Theo Appeldoorn Seascape Fund/Rijksmuseum .
Seascapes by Gustave Le Gray
Le Gray travelled from the Normandy coast to the Mediterranean, setting up his large camera and mobile darkroom on cliffs and beaches to photograph directly into the sun, capturing dramatic cloudscapes, sparkling reflections and distant ships. Le Gray’s pioneering photographic techniques, such as his use of large wet collodion plate negatives, enabled him to render dramatic cloud formations and breaking waves with short exposure times – something that was extremely difficult with the photographic materials commonly used at the time.
Research
Much has been written about Le Gray and his work over the past 170 years, yet many of his technical methods had remained largely unexplained to this day. It has long been speculated, for instance, that his prints were montages of multiple negatives. The donation in 2019 of a Le Gray seascape to the Rijksmuseum provided the opportunity to begin research into his work. The study aimed to replicate the photographic effects exclusively using the original recipes and techniques that Le Gray himself had at his disposal. Only in this way could Christian Klant, a specialist in historical wet-collodion negative processes, reconstruct how the famous photographer must have worked.
Over the past four years, Christian Klant has worked on the project in collaboration with the Rijksmuseum’s photographic restoration studio, consulting original texts and prints from several collections, including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Original prints and negatives are, for Klant, like books: when ‘read,’ they offer insights into the photographer’s techniques and methods.
Klant carried out several experiments with large, self-made negatives and an enormous camera. He carried the camera, a mobile darkroom and hundreds of litres of water along the beaches of the Netherlands – the water was essential, since the plates had to stay wet throughout exposure and development. But the greatest challenge of all, according to Klant, was being in the right place at the right time: the light had to be perfect, and if dramatic clouds appeared in the sky, he could only hope they would also appear on the developed negatives and prints. Among Klant’s findings is that, besides creating montages using multiple negatives, Le Gray most likely photographed using a special 19th-century lens.
Follow-up
At the end of November, alongside the lecture, an expert meeting will be held to discuss the results of this research project in light of the new findings. The results of Klant’s project will be published in the near future.
