Eugène Cuvelier 1837-1900

The collection of John Chandler Bancroft, Middletown, Rhode Island

Gustave J. S. White Co., Auctioneers, Newport, Rhode Island, 1989

Acquired from the above by a New England antiques dealer

To the present owners, 1989

Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Eugène Cuvelier oder Die Legende vom Wald, March - May 1997

Cuvelier did not shy away from showing man's destructive effect upon the forest of Fontainebleau.  In this photograph, several mature trees have been felled to make way for a road in the northern part of the forest.  Throughout the 1800s, a wide variety of timber was harvested from Fontainebleau, and this deforestation was a cause for alarm to artists, as was the scarring of the landscape caused by extensive quarrying of granite for cobblestones.  The artist Théodore Rousseau was perhaps the loudest and most effective of the forest's defenders, and his painting, Tree Felling at Ile de Croissy (The Massacre of the Innocents) (Michel Schulman, Théodore Rousseau 1812 - 1867: Catalogue Raisonné de l'Oeuvre Peint, no. 278), started in 1847 but not completed, treats subject matter similar to the photograph offered here.  It was through Rousseau's efforts that significant portions of the forest were exempted from logging.  These preserves, including the old growth forests of Bas-Bréau, and the Gorges d'Apremont, remained in effect until World War II (Greg M. Thomas, Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Theodore Rousseau, p. 177).

Gauss does not account for this image, made from negative number 278, in her census.