Lot 40: EUGÈNE CUVELIER 1837-1900

'ROUTE À BRIQUET'

measurements note
10 by 13¼ in. (25.4 by 33.7 cm.)

salt print, numbered '253' by the photographer in the negative, mounted, titled in an unidentified hand in pencil on the mount, 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. 253

NOTE

The salt print in this lot is one of two prints from this negative in the collection. The other, either an albumen print or a coated salt print, is alternatively titled Route à l'Allée aux Vaches à la Route à Briquet (Lot 41). Route à Briquet runs roughly north-south in the western part of the forest of Fontainebleau. Beginning in the Bas-Brèau section of the forest, it extends northward until it becomes the Route à Farcy. While it is listed in Felix Herbert's invaluable Dictionnaire historique et artistique de la Forêt de Fontainebleau (Fontainebleau: Maurice Bourges, 1903), the source of its name is not given. The French photographer Alfred Briquet (active 1850s - 1900) photographed in Fontainebleau in the 1850s, and there is the possibility, although slim, that the road was named for him. For more information on Briquet, see Jacobson, Étude d'Après Nature, p. 33, and Challe and Marbot, Les Photographes de Barbizon, p. 80.

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