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subtlety in light and fi neness in details characterize
his photographs.
Le Blondel’s photographs make up a rich and con-
sistent collection of about 700 original works visible in
private and public places in France and abroad. The ma-
jority can be found in Lille and the North of France with
650 “vintage” works (423 paper prints and negatives,
227 glass plates of 36cm x 26cm size). The most sig-
nifi cant collection is that of Lille’s public library, which
owns 180 salt-paper and albumen prints such as portraits
as well as varied views. Most importantly, the collection
contains three big albums with views of Lille containing
about a hundred albumen original prints—the album
made for 1878’s World Fair being one of these. The
North’s Historical Committee is in possession of the
glass-plate negatives for these albums, which are now
kept in the North’s Record Offi ce. The rest is divided be-
tween various institutions in Lille (Museums, Diocesan
Archives) and Roubaix’s public library which holds two
albums dating from 1882 (64 print papers). In Paris, the
Bibliothèque Nationale and Orsay Museum own a few
daguerreotypes and about forty print papers.
So, as to retrace the studio’s history; Lille’s public
Library displayed 170 photographs in Lille’s Palace of
Fine Arts from September 16th to December 18th 2005
in an exhibition called “Le Blondel—A Photographic
View of Lille in the 19th Century,” which led to the
publication of a scientifi c catalogue.
Isabelle Duquenne
Biography
Alphonse-Bon Le Blondel was born into a six-child
family of clockmakers on April 19, 1814, in Bréhal, a
small town in Normandy near Granville. After training
as a painter, he learnt photography with Paris’s da-
guerreotypists from 1840–1841. In 1842 he worked as
an itinerant photographer in the North of France before
he founded one of Lille’s fi rst professional studios at
twenty-fi ve, Rue de Paris in 1845. From 1855 he de-
veloped ‘Le Blondel Brothers’ company which lasted
until 1892. In 1859 the studio grew larger and moved to
1, Pont de Roubaix/Rue du Cirque. With the help of his
wife Angélique-Aimée Daviette (1800–1871), a fellow
photographer, two branches were successively opened in
Lille in 1866 and 1869. Being an excellent portraitist, Le
Blondel compelled recognition as a specialist of urban
views. He produced a topographical series of Lille and
its great transformations in the 1870’s.
He died in Lille on May 12, 1875.
Exhibitions
1853, Dunkirk, Magasin de la Marine (F)
1855, World Fair, Paris (F)
1856, Brussels (B)
1857, French Society of Photography, Paris (F)
1857, 4th Industrial Arts Exhibition, Brussels (B)
1859, French Society of Photography, Paris (F)
1861, French Society of Photography, Paris (F)
1865, Courtrai (B)
1867, World Fair, Paris (F)
1877, Le Havre (F)
1878, World Fair, Paris (F)
See also: Daguerreotype; Calotype and Talbotype;
Blanquart-Évrard, Louis-Désiré; Lacan, Ernest; and
Bibliothèque Nationale.Further Reading
Le Blondel, un regard photographique sur Lille au XIXe siècle,
Ghent: Snoeck Publisher, Ville de Lille, 2005.LE GRAY, GUSTAVE (1820–1882)
French photographer, artist, inventor, and writer
Like many early photographers, Gustave Le Gray’s
artistic background was in painting, a fact that, as with
his contemporaries, infl uenced his direction, his vision
and the composition of his fi nest photographs. A student
in the Paris ateliers of François-Edouard Picot and Paul
Delaroche in the early 1840s, surprisingly only one
example of his accomplishment in drawing or painting
has so far been identifi ed—a photographic copy dated
1854 of a drawn portrait of the painter Bénédict Mas-
son. This absence of surviving work is despite Le Gray
having set himself up as a working painter in Paris be-
fore 1847—the year in which he took up the new art of
photography—and records up to 1848 which describe
his contributions to various exhibitions in the city. He
continued to advertise his services as a painter of minia-
tures well into the 1850s, by which time he was already
acknowledged as an authority on photography.
Le Gray became aware of photography in the mid-
1840s, and was immediately intrigued by it. By his own
recollection, his fi rst engagement with the medium was
with the daguerreotype, probably under the guidance of
François Arago, and by 1847–48 he was sitting for the
camera of Henri le Secq, who was experimenting with
a post-waxed paper negative process, probably based
on Fox Talbot’s calotype. Le Secq’s studies of him,
casually dressed and posed as the young artist, have a
vitality and a confi dence which were already becoming
characteristics of early French photography. It is likely
that Le Gray had met Le Secq and Charles Nègre while
studying in Delaroche’s studio.
The enthusiasm with which Le Gray embraced the
art of photography, and his early grasp of its chemical
intricacies, can be gauged by the fact that within a year