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CUVELIER, ADALBERT-AUGUSTE
(1812–1871) AND EUGÈNE-ADALBERT
(1837–1900)
French photographers, father and son
Adalbert Cuvelier was a well-to-do merchant in the
northern French city of Arras, a refi ner of vegetable oils
and sugar by profession, but also an amateur painter
and photographer. Only a few dozen of his photographs
survive (notably at the Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Paris) but these give ample evidence of the technical
profi ciency and artistic vision that won him the respect
of his fellow painters and that provided the foundation
for the photographic work of his son, Eugène. Adalbert’s
surviving photographs were made in and around Arras
in the early 1850s and include views of the town’s main
square, rustic huts, and farmyard still-lifes, as well as a
series of portraits that are unusual in their celebration
of the common man.
Because his impressive photographs have rarely been
seen, Adalbert Cuvelier is better known to art historians
for having introduced the cliché-verre process to the
painter Camille Corot, whom he befriended in April
1852, and for having printed Corot’s cliché-verre plates.
In the early 1860s, Eugène Cuvelier in turn introduced
cliché-verre to the principal painters of Barbizon, among
them Charles-François Daubigny, Paul Huet, Jean-
François Millet, and Théodore Rousseau, guided them
through the process, and printed their compositions.
Although the Cuveliers were thus the catalysts for a
brief fl owering of this hybrid technique of photographic
printmaking, only a single cliché-verre by Eugène, and
none by his father, survives. Rather, it is their extraordi-
nary photographs that had a greater aesthetic infl uence
on their fellow painters and that now constitute their
more lasting artistic legacy.
Eugène was a teenager when his father fi rst took
up photography, and he undoubtedly learned to make
pictures at his father’s side. A few photographs are in-
scribed “E.C. 1852” suggesting that Eugène was already
taking accomplished pictures by the age of fi fteen, but
these photographs appear, instead, to have been made
by Adalbert, initialed “A.C.,” and only later changed
to bear the initials of the son; perhaps the two worked
side-by-side and Eugène rightfully claimed a part of
their creation. He also studied art with the period’s two
principal painters in Arras—Constant Dutilleux and
Xavier Dourlens (although in truth, smoking, drinking,
and singing seem to have been as common in Dourlens’s
atelier as artistic instruction). Despite Cuvelier’s teen-
age ambition to be a painter, at twenty-one he described
his trade as “mécanicien” (mechanic or engineer); he
designed and built a small steamboat, a machine gun,
and small working models of a steam-driven locomobile
and a Crampton locomotive. In all these endeavors
Cuvelier worked in a time when science and art were
not opposed, and photography was the perfect medium
to merge the two.
Most of Eugène’s surviving photographs date from
the early 1860s, shortly after his marriage in March 1859
to Louise Ganne, daughter of the Barbizon innkeeper
whose establishment was a gathering place for the pre-
Impressionists. Photography appears to have been a
personal rather than a professional pursuit. Aside from
exhibitions of the Société française de photographie, in
which Cuvelier displayed views of Barbizon, Fontaineb-
leau Forest, and the environs of Arras in 1864, 1869, and
1870, he rarely exhibited his photographs. No evidence
exists that he ever sought government commissions,
operated a studio, or offered his work to the public in
published form. Finally, and perhaps most signifi cantly,
the rarity of his photographs suggests a very limited
printing of his negatives.
Uncharacteristically for a photographer working in
the 1860s, he used paper negatives and frequently made
salted paper prints—processes that his father taught him
in the early 1850s. Cuvelier must have employed these
slightly antiquated materials by design rather than by de-
fault, for collodion-on-glass negatives and commercially
prepared albumen paper (which he also used on many
occasions) were the universal norm by 1860. In choos-
ing the more diffi cult and time-consuming processes
typical of a decade earlier he was surely motivated by a
preference for their aesthetic qualities—notably the soft,
fi brous texture of paper negatives, with their tendency to
mass light and shadow, and the velvety mat surface and
appealing color range of salted paper prints.
The vast majority of Eugène Cuvelier’s photographs
were made in Fontainebleau Forest—most within an
easy walk of Barbizon. By the time he arrived in the
area, the 40,000-acre wood surrounding the Palace of
Fontainebleau—once the site of royal hunts and, more
recently, the domain of highway robbers, hermits, and
isolated woodsmen—was a destination for painters
and photographers. Instead of cataloguing its points of
interest, however, Cuvelier’s photographs capture the
experience of the forest. He more often pictured a fern-
edged path leading to the “Sully” or a lichen-covered
rock near the “Reine Blanche” than the landmark trees
themselves. Other photographs by Cuvelier show the
humble subjects popular with his painter friends—the
corner of a rustic farmyard, the streets of Barbizon,
grapevines in a garden courtyard, and after-the-hunt
still-lifes—as well as the château and gardens of nearby
Fleury. In the mid-1860s, he also made photographic
excursions in and around Arras (including Courances,
Achicourt, Fampoux, and Rivière), where the heavily
pruned trees, lakes, open fi elds, and other aspects of the
landscape afforded possibilities different from those to
be found in Fontainebleau Forest.