Church at Auvers (1855): Art, History and Details

Church at Auvers (1855) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Édouard Baldus (French, 1813–1889).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Baldus’s prodigious and compelling documentation of French historic buildings earned him recognition as one of the first great French architectural photographers. This image of Notre-Dame at Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, is from a sequence of 50 views of the railroad stations and principal sites along the route between Boulogne-sur-Mer and Paris. This Gothic-style village church was once a chapel for a manor house that has since disappeared. Almost 35 years after Baldus’s composition, and only a short time before his own suicide, Vincent van Gogh painted a large, bold canvas of the church’s apse and bell tower.

Object facts

• Title: Church at Auvers
• Date: 1855
• Creator attribution: Édouard Baldus (French, 1813–1889)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: salted paper print from waxed paper negative
• Dimensions: Image: 33.4 x 43.7 cm (13 1/8 x 17 3/16 in.); Matted: 55.9 x 66 cm (22 x 26 in.)
• Collection: PH - French 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1992.120

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. "The Year in Review for 1992." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 2 (1993): 38-79.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E Hinson. Catalogue of Photography. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.