René Le Bègue

René Le Bègue French, 1857-1914

René Le Bègue was an amateur photographer in Paris who specialized in studies of women, especially nudes. His work, done principally in the gum bichromate process, had an artistic orientation. Amateurs, he wrote, through "personal intervention" in their prints, could lift photography toward art, overcoming the "mechanical and servile" way in which the lens copies nature.

Le Bègue's images were widely published and shown. He was a founder of the Photo Club of Paris, participating in its first exhibition, and was the first French photographer admitted to the Linked Ring. Le Bègue frequently worked with his uncle, Paul Bergon (1863-1912), and their careers are closely intertwined. He also worked with Constant Puyo and Robert Demachy, other exponents of an artistic approach to photography.

It is believed that Le Bègue stopped photographing upon the death of Bergon. His work was introduced to the United States in a 1906 group exhibition at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in New York, and through publication of two of his photographs in Camera Work that same year. T.W.F.

Text © The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2023