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

New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eugène Cuvelier, Photographer in the Circle of Corot, October 1996 - January 1997

Another print of this image:

Ulrike Gauss, Henning Weidemann, and Daniel Challe, Eugène Cuvelier (Stuttgart, 1996, in conjunction with the exhibition), no. 306, and p. 107

Daniel Challe and Bernard Marbot, Les Photographes de Barbizon: La Fôret de Fontainebleau (Bibliothèque Nationale, 1991), pl. 44

The locale pictured in the present photograph is the old-growth forest of Bas-Bréau, in the northwest corner of Fontainebleau, just north of the Gorges d'Apremont.  A short distance from the town of Barbizon, Bas-Bréau was a section of the forest especially beloved by artists, Rousseau and Corot among them, and was home to many of the forest's oldest and most impressive oak trees.  Unlike other areas of Fontainebleau that had long been cultivated and maintained, Bas-Bréau was densely treed with oak, beech, and hornbeam, and inundated with unruly undergrowth.  In his book Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau (Princeton University Press, 2000), Greg M. Thomas, to whom this catalogue entry is indebted, translates a French governmental forest report from 1853 which described Bas-Bréau as follows: 'Trees generally tall and of large dimensions; but, for the most part, in decline, having their tops dead and even broken off.  In some places, where the terrain is not as good, the oaks have very tortured growth, and only display trunks thirty-three to thirty-nine feet high, the crowns of which, deprived of the tops that have fallen from decay, are graced only with a few living branches' (p. 187).  The report went on to recommend extensive thinning. 

The natural disarray and decay of Bas-Bréau, such a cause for alarm to forest managers, was a source of inspiration to artists.  Rousseau, in particular, returned to this wildest part of Fontainebleau again and again for subject matter for his drawings and paintings.  His monumental painting Winter Forest treats the tangle of Bas-Bréau's huge and gnarled trees in an overtly dramatic way.  Cuvelier was similarly attracted to the area, but did not dramatize it in his photographs.  In the present photograph, as well as in Lot 19, Cuvelier's depiction of the forest's chaotic growth demonstrates both his quiet fascination with the natural world, and his ability to create a compelling, nearly abstract, composition which extends to the very edges of the frame.  

Gauss does not account for this salt print in her census, but lists one other salt print and an albumen print.