Road in the Forest (1860–1863): Art, History and Details

Road in the Forest (1860–1863) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Eugène Cuvelier (French, 1837–1900).

The work and its context

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

Eugène Cuvelier was a landscape painter as well as a photographer. During the 1850s and 1860s, he photographed in an number of forests near Paris. He was also associated with the Barbizon painters, a group working in the village of Barbizon that advocated the direct study of nature. This exquisite snow scene exemplifies Cuvelier's distinguished and influential landscape work. The artist took advantage of the inherent softness of his photographic process to create an atmospheric rendering of a winter scene with a curving pathway that draws the viewer into the dense, barely defined background of foliage. Many of the trees Cuvelier recorded disappeared soon after the photographs were taken.

Object facts

• Title: Road in the Forest
• Date: 1860–1863
• Creator attribution: Eugène Cuvelier (French, 1837–1900)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: salted paper print from waxed paper negative
• Dimensions: Image: 25.8 x 19.8 cm (10 3/16 x 7 13/16 in.); Matted: 61 x 50.8 cm (24 x 20 in.)
• Collection: PH - French 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1989.29

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• 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.