Eugène Cuvelier

The railway line between Paris and Lyon was opened in 1849. Much to the consternation of the painter who had already settled there, not only tourists were streaming into the village Barbizon some 60 kilometres away from Paris on the periphery of the famous forest of Fontainebleau, but also photographers. Eugène Cuvelier already belonged to the second generation of painter- photographers who sought their motifs in nature and whose photographs were sold as albums, "Etudes d'après nature" and circulated widely as study material and pictorial models for artists. In 1859, in the presence of his artists friends Millet, Rousseau and Corot, Eugène Cuvelier married Louise Ganne, the daughter of the owner of the well-known Auberge in Barbizon, and there he settled. Thus he could study the rural culture of the region and the landscape in its diverse forms of appearance, changing during the day and from one season to another. This is the first monograph on the work of Eugène Cuvelier. It contains a number of lavishly reproduced illustrations and an illustrated index of all works known to date. With this book, Daniel Challe and Henning Weidemann have achieved an important contribution to a theme which was hardly known - the French landscape photography in the second half of the 19th century.