Acknowledgements

Thomson, Richard

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Acknowledgements

Richard Thomson

The Troubled Republic: Visual Culture and Social Debate in France, 1889–1900

~The germ of this book goes back a long way, probably thirty years to a January evening at Pear Tree Cottage and being swept up by Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years. Starting work on Toulouse-Lautrec as a tyro art historian over twenty-five years ago I was struck by the fact that, apart from some of its major avant-garde figures, the 1890s in...

Author

Richard Thomson

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00162.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-19663

Acknowledgements

The germ of this book goes back a long way, probably thirty years to a January evening at Pear Tree Cottage and being swept up by Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years. Starting work on Toulouse-Lautrec as a tyro art historian over twenty-five years ago I was struck by the fact that, apart from some of its major avant-garde figures, the 1890s in France has been an extraordinarily neglected decade in the history of art. It still seems to me that the literature tends to treat the work of a Monet or a Cézanne in that decade as part of the seamless continuity of their careers rather than as rooted in a particular moment in history. Equally, by that modernist account we still know and care very little about ‘peripheral’ figures such as Cottet and Carrière whose work was in fact a vital contribution to the art of the decade and deeply sited in contemporary debates. When working on the Monet to Matisse exhibition while on a Guest Scholarship at the Getty Museum in 1993, I began gathering information on the 1890s from a wide range of sources. That catalogue, published by the National Gallery of Scotland in 1994, has much material on landscape painting during the 1890s, which explains why that important theme is not featured in the present book.

I am extremely grateful for a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust which in 1995–6 enabled me to lay the foundations of research for this present book. I would like to express my warm thanks also to the Arts and Humanities Research Board for Research Leave in the Spring Term of 2001, during which a great deal of the writing was done. During its extended gestation the project has undergone a number of changes. It began as a comparison of Nancy and Toulouse at the end of the nineteenth century, taking two contrasting cities as case studies. This material I have published elsewhere. While the present book is a study of ways in which visual culture inter-related with historical processes and social problems during the 1890s, as work progressed I became increasingly interested in artistic style and social formation, and in how and why the avant-garde went through a relatively docile period during that decade in contrast to the competition and innovation of the 1880s and 1900s. That will be the subject of my next book.

I should like to acknowledge the helpful support of staff at the following libraries: the University of Edinburgh Library; the John Rylands University Library and Deans-gate Libraries in Manchester; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the Service de Documentation at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and in particular to Dominique Lobstein and Monique Nonne; the Library of the National Gallery of Scotland and Penny Carter; the National Library of Scotland; the Witt and Conway Libraries of the Courtauld Institute, London; the Library of the J. Paul Getty Centre, Malibu: and the Library of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Jersey.

My debts of gratitude in the study of this field are extensive. Thanks must first go to Dennis Cate, for sharing his remarkable knowledge of the underbelly of the 1890s and for his collecting instincts, so demonstrable at the Zimmerli. Under the aegis of the Visual Arts Research Institute, Edinburgh, over the last few years I have chaired a Research Seminar on France in the 1890s, and I should like to express my gratitude to my stimulating colleagues: Dario Gamboni, Neil McWilliam, Sîan Reynolds, Juliet Simpson and Belinda Thomson. In January 2001 Alain Schnapp, Philippe Sénéchal and Pierre Wat kindly invited me to lecture at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris, and arranged for me to see otherwise inaccessible works. I had fine colleagues – Claire Frèches-Thory and Anne Roquebert – while working on one Lautrec exhibition – and Mary Weaver Chapin and Dennis Cate – while working on another. Throughout France and elsewhere I have been kindly received by museum curators, private collectors and dealers – too numerous to mention – who have shown me works in their keeping. On these missions Matt Braddock did much of the driving.

For their help with pictures, ideas, arguments and the little bits of business that make up a book (except for the errors which are mine alone) I thank Lucile Audouy, Juliet Wilson Bareau, Laurence des Cars, Elizabeth Childs, Michael Clarke, Holly Clayson, Evelyne Cohen, Lizzie Cowling, Douglas Druick, the late Peter Ferriday, Frances Fowle, Pauline Gibb, Gloria Groom, June Hargrove, Cornelia Homburg, John House, Samuel Josefowitz, James Kearns, Richard Kendall, John Klein, Maurice Larkin, Patricia Leighten, John Leighton, Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, François Lespinasse, James McMillan, Alain Pougetout, Rodolphe Rapetti, Jim Rule, Marie-Pierre Salé, Herbert Schimmel, Peter Sharratt, Mary Anne Stevens, Peter Zegers and others I have obtusely neglected to mention. This is also perhaps an appropriate moment to thank those who taught me a generation ago: the late Francis Haskell, T. J. Clark, John Golding and Alan Bowness.

At Yale I have benefited greatly from the readers’ useful comments, Laura Bolick’s diligent pursuit of the illustrations and Katherine Ridler’s tactful editing, and remain dazzled by the patience, good humour and intelligent taste of Gillian Malpass.

Belinda has shared it all with a scholar’s love and a wife’s criticism, and vice versa.

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