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

Malcolm Daniel, Eugène Cuvelier, Photographer in the Circle of Corot (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 10 (this print)

Another print of this image:

Ulrike Gauss, Henning Weidemann, and Daniel Challe, Eugène Cuvelier (Stuttgart, 1996, in conjunction with the exhibition), no. 111, and p. 101

This photograph is notable for being the only image by Eugène Cuvelier within the collection to clearly depict a human figure.  Cuvelier rarely included people in his images, and the only exceptions within his extant work, aside from the present photograph, are negative number 78, showing two obscured seated figures atop a rock formation, and negative number 149, of a blurred figure seated in a field.  By comparison, the figure in the photograph offered here is clearly defined; with his striped shirt, scarf, and beret, he is classically French. 

This photograph was made in the rocky Gorges de Franchard, at the western edge of the forest.  Like the nearby sandy area of Macherin, Franchard offered artists very different subject matter from the lush foliage of Fontainebleau's interior, and is depicted in numerous paintings by the Barbizon group.  Cuvelier's photograph has an antecedent in Camille Corot's painting, 'Artist Walking Among Boulders, Fontainebleau,' completed in the late 1820s or early 1830s (Bouret, The Barbizon School and 19^th Century French Landscape Painting, p. 84, cat. 84).  Two decades after Corot made this painting, the photographer Charles Marville photographed Corot and the painter Narcisse Diaz de la Peña in a rocky setting, likely Franchard (André Jammes and Eugenia Parry Janis, The Art of the French Calotype, pl. 64).

Gauss accounts for two salt prints from this negative: the present print and one other.