Eugène Cuvelier artwork – Sotheby's 2007

Lot description

'FRANCHARD' (FIGURE ON ROCK FORMATION) measurements note 7¾ by 10¼ in. (19.7 by 26 cm.) salt print, numbered '111' by the photographer in the negative, mounted, titled in an unidentified hand in pencil on the mount, matted, 1863 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 EXHIBITED New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eugène Cuvelier, Photographer in the Circle of Corot, October 1996 - January 1997 LITERATURE 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 NOTE 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 19υth 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.