Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent unused condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. Note this ISBN is a Softcover. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Pools grottos dunes and scenes of legend and purported miracle focused the fervor of the crowds whose ultimate tribute was to isolate the objects of their affection and to turn them into monuments. Much of what people adored at Fontainebleau was decidedly monumental. By 1850 lovers of forest interiors had positively domesticated many mysterious and venerable parts of Fontainebleau’s massive terrain. Through guidebooks that recorded every nook and cranny the forest setting had assumed aspects of a museum. The painter with his big camera is in Fontainebleau to photograph trees but he seems to shun the “highlights.” He may venerate the ancient stands but he is not in the forest to name anything to separate oaks from chestnuts. The situation attracts him for other reasons. He has found there a sort of studio for the practice of his new art. To anyone watching him work he would have seemed to linger quite inexplicably most of the time around the trees in less important corners of leaves and brush. To the observer he would have seemed as he stared into the woods to be looking around at nothing at all. Treading over the spongy forest floor he examines a stand of new growth where slender trees interlock branches against the light (intro. fig. 1). The space pleasingly enclosed permits avenues of access and retreat to the visitor and an interplay of interior and exterior. The sun infiltrates the tracery of the trees like an intruder stealthily pressing between the obscu rities of the vine-entangled thicket. Overhead an intense glow of pale light dissolves wind-rustled leaves of new green mixed with blue from the sky into a lush luminescent canopy. Beneath this splendor the photographer moves silently about his figure a self-contained cut-out gently interfering with the sunshine that dapples the moss underfoot. (MP)