Charles Nègre, a history painter by training, was a pioneering 19th-century French photographer. In 1859 he received government support to produce a series of fifty images of statuary in Paris's Tuileries Gardens. Although the project was never completed, Nègre did create a group of large-format glass negatives. This photograph represents one of a small number of unique prints from those negatives. The Tiber, a late 17th-century stone sculpture of the river god Tiber, is one of the garden's four water sculptures depicting water deities.