Carrière aux Sables de Macherin

Eugène Cuvelier

1863 · Salted paper print from paper negative · Photographs

The granite quarries at the edge of Fontainebleau Forest, on the Arbonne plane near Macherin, provided cobblestones for the new boulevards of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s. Here, the piles of freshly cut stone look more like the ruins of a past civilization in a barren landscape beneath a foreboding sky than the building blocks of an emerging imperial capital. At the edge of the this road, quarrymen have built a shelter of rejected blocks.

Artist

Eugène Cuvelier

Date

1863

Medium

Salted paper print from paper negative

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, Harriette and Noel Levine Gift and Rogers Fund, 1996