The Brick in the moonlight circa 1856 Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) albumen print from a collodion glass negative 41.5 x 32.2 cm Condition: some folding and soiling 1 copy at Musée d'Orsay Presented at the same exhibitions on both sides of the Channel that captivated the world of photography in 1857, Marville's studies and Le Gray's famous Brick (unveiled the previous year in London) testify to two different ways of approaching the same difficulty, that of rendering skies in photography, using the new possibilities offered by the collodion process. One of its inventors, Le Gray, an outstanding technician and very active teacher, had only to proudly caption his Marine print with clouds obtained simultaneously to create sensation, even disbelief. Beyond the claimed feat of having been obtained from a single shot, this marine, taken in 1856 on the Normandy coast, imposes itself with the force of a large-scale photographic painting. Its creator, a pupil of the painter Delaroche, was steeped in the pictorial tradition, which he interpreted with a sensibility akin to that of Courbet (wide framing, radical frontality, emphasis on the horizon, etc.). This shared vision was confirmed by the spectacular series of Waves immortalized the following year on the Mediterranean coast: the fleeting nature of the motif meant that the search for the "sublime in art" involved combining two complementary negatives, one for the sea, the other for the sky.