Lot 42: EUGÈNE CUVELIER 1837-1900

ROUTE PAVÉE DE CHAILLY (VERTICAL) .

measurements note
10 by 7½ in. (25.4 by 19.1 cm.)

salt print, likely tinted, mounted, matted, 1860s

PROVENANCE

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

LITERATURE

Another print of this image:

Ulrike Gauss, Henning Weidemann, and Daniel Challe, Eugène Cuvelier (Stuttgart, 1996, in conjunction with the exhibition), no. II/5

Daniel Challe and Bernard Marbot, Les Photographes de Barbizon: La Fôret de Fontainebleau (Bibliothèque Nationale, 1991), pl. 41

NOTE

This photograph most likely owes its unconventional coloration to Cuvelier's use of pigment during the print's processing. As the photographs in this collection amply demonstrate, Cuvelier had early on achieved a technical mastery of the still-new art of photography - no small feat in an age when there was no standardization of photographic chemicals or materials, and results were forever unpredictable. Yet Cuvelier never stopped approaching the intractable medium creatively. His application of color to this image gives it a brooding quality that could not have been achieved in a conventional print. For another (differently) toned image in this collection, see Lot 43.

Gauss does not list this print in her census, but accounts for one other salt print of the image in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale. It is the Bibliothèque's print that is reproduced in the two citations listed above.