Description
In 1163, Louis VII founded a new town on the Yonne, an outpost of the royal domain facing the county of Champagne; it was called Villeneuve-le-Roi until the Revolution. Its Saint-Nicolas bridge, completed in 1186, and its medieval gates still speak of this vocation as a crossing. For more than three centuries the river was also the road of timber: from the mid-sixteenth century, trains of floated logs travelled down from Clamecy to Paris, which they heated, in eleven days. It was on the Yonne, too, that the first needle dam was built, in 1834. Then came the writers and painters: Joseph Joubert lived in Villeneuve for more than thirty years and received Chateaubriand there; at the end of the century, Misia and Thadée Natanson welcomed Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton and Toulouse-Lautrec, and in 1897 Vuillard painted The Ferryman, a boat on the Yonne, now in the Musée d’Orsay.
The photograph is taken at water level, facing the perspective that the trees of both banks close towards the horizon. But the true subject fills two thirds of the image: a convective sky, heavy, theatrical, where cumulus clouds catch an almost solid white while other, heavier masses let curtains of rain hang down. Black and white gives these clouds a density of matter and turns the water, rippled by the wind, into an expanse of pewter. Gustave Le Gray combined two negatives to hold sky and water together; Constable devoted two summers to studies of the sky. The image belongs to this tradition in which the sky ceases to be a background and becomes the subject, above a river tamed for centuries and still subject to its moods.
The Water series follows the waters that made cities; the Yonne, which carried its winters’ firewood to Paris, is one of the most discreet.
