Postcard Cirque de Gavarnie with Grande Cascade, Pyrenees, Yvon La Douce France

French postcard from the nineteen-twenties or thirties showing a black-and-white phototype of the Cirque de Gavarnie in the French Pyrenees. The image shows the characteristic semi-circular rocky amphitheatre with the Grande Cascade plunging as a narrow white streak down the full height of the cirque wall, from a shared basin on the Spanish side of the Mont Perdu massif. On the high ridges lie snowfields still present in summer. In the lower left, the wide valley floor with a path leading toward the cirque; in the lower right, a profiled rock outcrop that marks the photographer's vantage point. In the lower right of the image, the signature "Yvon". Remarkably, the caption on the verso states "Le Col d'Aubisque", while the image unmistakably shows the Cirque de Gavarnie with the Grande Cascade; this mention is almost certainly a printing error in the series pagination. On the verso, "LA DOUCE FRANCE - LES PYRENEES - Le Col d'Aubisque" with number 11, and the publisher's indication "Les Editions d'Art Yvon, 14 rue de Bretagne, Paris, Fabrication Française, Reproduction interdite." The verso is unwritten and unposted, with a divided back. The card is in good condition.

The Cirque de Gavarnie is a natural amphitheatre of about three kilometres diameter and four hundred and fifty metres height, carved by glacial action into the limestone and marble walls of the central Pyrenees. The Grande Cascade, with a drop of four hundred and twenty-two metres, is the highest waterfall in France and is fed by meltwater from a high mountain lake on the Spanish side of the border ridge, which flows through a natural underground connection to the French side. The cirque was described in the nineteenth century by Victor Hugo as "the colosseum of nature" and was inscribed together with the Mont Perdu on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1997. Pierre Yves Petit, under the pseudonym Yvon (1886-1969), was among the most important French photographer-publishers of the interwar period and is known worldwide for his pictorialist landscapes in the La Douce France series. His Pyrenees series, of which this card forms part, systematically documented the principal mountain passes, cirques and high-mountain landscapes in a subdued black-and-white aesthetic that consciously drew on the photographic conventions of the late nineteenth century.