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

Another print of this image:

Ulrike Gauss, Henning Weidemann, and Daniel Challe, Eugène Cuvelier (Stuttgart, 1996, in conjunction with the exhibition), no. 286

While the Fontainebleau forest enjoyed a reputation as an unsullied, pristine wilderness, the area had actually been heavily managed by man for centuries before the Barbizon painters arrived in the 1800s.  Not only was it continually maintained as a royal hunting preserve, its trees had been harvested for timber, and its considerable deposits of granite had been quarried to provide cobblestones for the streets of Paris.  The image offered here, taken in the northwest portion of the forest, shows the area around a quarry, with unevenly cut blocks of granite strewn across the sand.  

Use of the forest's resources was regarded by many, including the painter Théodore Rousseau, and the forest's unofficial steward, Claude-François Denecourt, as unforgivable exploitation of a French national treasure.  Cuvelier did not avoid showing man's influence upon the forest's landscape, and, in addition to the photograph offered here, he made at least two other images of a quarry (negative numbers 50 and 115).  Evidence of logging in the forest can be seen in Lots 1, 10, and 33.

Gauss does not account for this salt print in her census, but lists two albumen prints.