View of Ste-Adrese Beach with the Dumont Baths (1856): Art, History and Details

View of Ste-Adrese Beach with the Dumont Baths (1856) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820–1884).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

One of the pioneering masters of French landscape photography, Gustave Le Gray shows us the bathing establishments and tourist hotels that dominated the waterfront of this town on the coast of Normandy. Monet focused instead on the more picturesque and timeless beach and fishing boats. Le Gray’s image is distinctly rooted in the present—that is, the present of 1856—in a way that seems shockingly modern.

Object facts

• Title: View of Ste-Adrese Beach with the Dumont Baths
• Date: 1856
• Creator attribution: Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820–1884)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print from collodion negative
• Dimensions: Image: 30.8 x 39.1 cm (12 1/8 x 15 3/8 in.); Paper: 30.8 x 39.1 cm (12 1/8 x 15 3/8 in.)
• Collection: PH - French 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2022.35

A detail from the museum

Claude Monet painted this same beach, but his works avoid precisely what Gustave Le Gray’s camera reveals.

Collection credit

Gift of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.