Lot 41: EUGÈNE CUVELIER 1837-1900

'ROUTE DE L'ALLÉE AUX VACHES À LA ROUTE À BRIQUET'

measurements note
10 by 13½ in. (25.4 by 34.3 cm.)

albumen print or coated salt print, numbered '253' by the photographer in the negative, mounted, titled in an unidentified hand 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

This is one of two prints from this negative in the collection. The other, a salt print simply titled Route à Briquet, is present as Lot 40. The slight sheen visible on the surface of the photograph offered here could indicate that it is an albumen print, or a salt print with some type of coating.

The title of this photograph suggests that the road pictured is the Allée des Vaches, or cow path, near the Route à Briquet. As Greg M. Thomas recounts in Art and Ecology in 19υth-Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseu (Princeton University Press, 2000), during the time that Fontainebleau was actively used as a royal hunting ground, residents of the surrounding area were allowed grazing rights within the forest to compensate for the damage that hunts sometimes caused to private property. The rules governing the extent of these grazing rights changed over the years; during Cuvelier's time in the forest, residents were allowed to graze cows and pigs -- but not sheep -- in certain designated areas (ibid., pp. 154-55).

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