Save
Save chapter to my Bookmarks
Cite
Cite this chapter
Print this chapter
Share
Share a link to this chapter
Free
Description: Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism
In 1911 the Russian periodical Staryé Gody published an unillustrated advertisement for the November issue of the Paris-based arts periodical L’art et les artistes. L’art et les artistes advertisement, Staryé Gody...
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00198.008
View chapters with similar subject tags
5. Making an Art-Historical Empire: French Histories of Impressionism in Translation
Alexis Clark
In 1911 the Russian periodical Staryé Gody published an unillustrated advertisement for the November issue of the Paris-based arts periodical L’art et les artistes.1 L’art et les artistes advertisement, Staryé Gody (July–December 1911): n.p. Printed immediately below this visually uncompelling notice was an advertisement for London-based Burlington Magazine (fig. 1). Although the Burlington ran its copy entirely in English, these advertisements for the Paris- and London-based arts periodicals were both printed in French—unsurprisingly so, since the contents of Staryé Gody consisted of articles translated from French into Russian. That the editors of both L’art et les artistes and Burlington Magazine elected to advertise in the Russian periodical would seem to signal that they did not expect their circulation or their readership to be restricted by geography or, importantly, language. In turn, the editors of Staryé Gody assumed that readers were interested in foreign art or art-historical inquiry and that many were fluent in (at least) French, English, and, of course, Russian.
~
Description: Advertisement for L'Art et les artistes by Unknown
Fig. 1. Advertisement for L’art et les artistes, printed in Staryé Gody (November 1911): n.p.
Where the Burlington ad outlined only perfunctory information about subscriptions, L’art et les artistes included a paragraph of close-set type highlighting its forthcoming issue. Notably, this dense advertisement synopsized the first of four articles entitled “La peinture française” written by Léonce Bénédite. “La peinture française” appeared as part of an article series whose authors each traced the history of one national school of painting in Europe or the United States. In the last pages of his fourth and final article, Bénédite summarized French impressionism as a castigated art made more acceptable under the brush of Jules Bastien-Lepage and fellow naturalists.2 Léonce Bénédite, “La peinture française” (fourth article), L’art et les artistes 14 (March 1912): 225–40. In this last article, which Bénédite dedicated to nineteenth-century art, impressionism would be limited to two pages in which he named the protagonists and offered what would become an increasingly standardized definition. With impressionism, naturalism, and what followed in the early twentieth century, Bénédite concluded that painting had returned to a French national tradition.3 L’art et les artistes also ran an advertisement for this series in the Italian La Rivista d’arte (September–December 1910): n.p. Incidentally, in La Rivista d’arte, the ad for L’art et les artistes appeared on the same page as an advert for Staryé Gody.
While French impressionism would be only summarily discussed in Bénédite’s final article, he had championed this art and its place in the history of art from his post as curator of the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. A temporary depot for the collection and display of paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings, and objets d’art by living artists, the Luxembourg transferred these works to the Musée du Louvre or one of the many provincial museums throughout France following the death of an artist. From 1892, when he assumed the curatorship, to his own death in 1925, Bénédite lobbied for expanded representation of the French impressionists and their international acolytes at the museum.4 Sara Tas, “Between Patriotism and Internationalism: Contemporary Art at the Musée du Luxembourg in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Collections 27, no. 2 (July 2015): 227–40. Perhaps most memorably, early in his administration, the Luxembourg accepted but also refused several French impressionist paintings and pastels bequeathed by artist and collector Gustave Caillebotte. Arguments for and against accepting the Caillebotte Bequest pertained not only to its installation at the museum but its inscription of French impressionism into a published state-sponsored history of art.5 There has been extensive research into negotiations between Caillebotte’s executors and Beaux-arts bureaucrats. See Marie Berhaut, Caillebotte: Sa vie et son œuvre, Fondation Wildenstein (Paris: Bibliotèque des arts, 1978); Marie Berhaut, “Le Legs Caillebotte: Verités et contre-verités,” Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de l’art français (1983): 209–23; and Pierre Vaisse, “Le Legs Caillebotte: Annexe: Documents,” Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de l’art française (1983): 201–8. See especially Pierre Vaisse, Deux façons d’écrire l’histoire (Paris: Éditions Orphrys, 2014). Over the subsequent decades, Bénédite continued to acquire examples of French impressionism for the Luxembourg—for instance, four of Claude Monet’s Cathedrals bequeathed by Isaac de Camondo could be admired on its walls after 1911. As demonstrated by the essays throughout this anthology, the Luxembourg educated artists from around the world, who toured its corridors to study its collection of French impressionism.
What Bénedite accomplished extended beyond what paintings hung (or did not hang) at this museum. Beginning with his first book, published in 1895 in the midst of contestation around the Caillebotte Bequest, Bénédite’s publications detailed the importance of impressionism to artists inside and outside France.6 These are but some of the selected books by Léonce Bénédite: Le musée national du Luxembourg: Catalogue raisonné et illustré des peintures, sculptures, dessins, gravures en médailles et sur pierres fines et objets d’art divers des écoles contemporaines (Paris: Motteroz, 1900); La peinture au XIXème siècle: D’après les chefs-d’oeuvre des maîtres et les meilleurs tableaux des principaux artistes (Paris: Flammarion, 1909); Great Painters of the Nineteenth Century and Their Paintings (London: Isaac Pitman, 1910); Le musée du Luxembourg: Les peintures (Paris: Librarie Renouard, 1912). In addition to these surveys of the Luxembourg and its paintings, Bénédite published several artist monographs, books, and articles on sculptures, reviews of the Paris salons, and numerous articles on the arts. His books circulated in multiple editions and as translations: for instance, La peinture au XIXème siècle (1909) and its English-language translation, The Great Painters of the Nineteenth Century and Their Paintings (1910). Such a fulsomely illustrated and translated book, coupled with its abridgement in the “La peinture française” articles, expanded his readership as well as the influence of his and, by extension, the Luxembourg’s, history of nineteenth-century art. In short, his books acted as Musées imaginaires, introducing a world of readers to the Luxembourg’s collection of paintings by the French impressionists and international plein-airistes.7 The notion of a “Musée imaginaire” was first developed by André Malraux. For a recent history of this concept, see Walter Grasskamp, The Book on the Floor: André Malraux and the Imaginary Museum, trans. Fiona Elliott (Los Angeles: Getty, 2016).
However, Bénédite’s books and articles were neither unique in their international circulation nor in their discussion of the connections between the French impressionists and artists from across Europe and the United States. Before World War I, selected publications by many French art writers were available as original imprints, updated editions, and translations. This essay surveys published histories of French impressionism that were written in French, translated into English, and internationally distributed. It thereby underscores the centrality of publishing to globalizing impressionism. From the early 1900s until the interwar period, books and articles by many reputed French auteurs, including Théodore Duret and Camille Mauclair, also discussed Monet and his artist-compatriots with an attention to the international reception of French impressionism and the international adaptation of impressionism. An art-critical ally and friend of the French impressionists, Duret wrote a history of French impressionism, numerous articles published in multiple languages, and a monograph on Édouard Manet.8 Théodore Duret, Histoire des peintres impressionnistes (Paris: H. Floury, 1906); Théodore Duret, Histoire d’Edouard Manet et de son oeuvre (Paris: H. Floury, 1902). After World War I, Duret also published a monograph on Renoir. Before beating a retreat to more reactionary politics and aesthetics, Mauclair similarly promoted this art in articles and books.9 Mauclair’s shifting political alliances and artistic sympathies were often mired in incoherence and contradiction, making them too complicated to fully address here. See Michael Marlais, Conservative Echoes in Fin de siècle Parisian Art Criticism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). For a more recent discussion of Mauclair’s political leanings, see Emilie Anne-Yvonne Luse, “Erasing the Avant-Gardes: Anti-Modernism in French Art History, Criticism, and Education, 1920–1944” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2019). See also Katia Papandreopoulou, “Camille Mauclair (1870–1945) critique et historien de l’art. Une leçon de nationalisme pictural” (PhD diss., Université Paris I–Sorbonne, 2013). As with Bénédite’s synopsized and translated accounts, Duret’s Manet and his Histoire des peintres impressionnistes would be translated into English to become Manet and the French Impressionists; Mauclair’s L’impressionnisme: Son histoire, son esthétique, ses maîtres would also be translated and printed in alternate formats, including a compact “pocket-sized booklet.”10 Mauclair's The French Impressionists was advertised in the March 1903 issue of The Publisher. It was listed as part of the "Popular Library of Art" series. Camille Mauclair, L’impressionnisme. Son histoire, son esthétique, ses maîtres (Paris: Librairie de l’art ancien et moderne, 1904). Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. Such condensed or otherwise altered book formats permitted more readers to see and study French impressionism, though expanded access to this art could come at a cost: the quality of reproductions and paper stock—elements of publishing crucial to seeing impressionist painting—suffered at the bottom of the book market.
ART AND LANGUAGE
News of the Société anonyme des peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs broke in the anglophone world in 1874, when The Academy ran a perfunctory notice of the group’s formation.11 “Postscript,” Academy (January 31, 1874): 132, cited in Ruth Berson, The New Painting, Impressionism, 1874–1886: Documentation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 1:9. Following this announcement, in 1876 exhibition reviews written first in English or translated from the French began to be printed in British and U.S. outlets. In Britain, readers could peruse reviews by French art writers including Philippe Burty, whose column had originally been written in English, and Stéphane Mallarmé, whose comparatively lengthy discussion had been translated from the French. Across the Atlantic, those in the United States could learn about French impressionism in a New York Tribune review by the American expatriate novelist and critic Henry James. Whereas James’s article appeared in a widely circulating daily newspaper, Burty and Mallarmé published in specialist arts periodicals. These latter outlets meant that Burty and Mallarmé wrote to a presumably informed and interested audience.12 Henry James, “Parisian Festivity,” New York Tribune, May 13, 1876, 2, cited in Impressionists in England: The Critical Reception, ed. Kate Flint (London: Routledge, 1984), 37–38; Philippe Burty, “Fine Art: The Exhibition of the ‘Intransigeants,’” Academy (April 15, 1876): 363–64, cited in Berson, New Painting, 1:64–66; Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Impressionists and Edouard Manet,” trans. George T. Robinson, Art Monthly Review and Photographic Portfolio 1, no. 9 (September 30, 1876): 117–22, cited in Berson, New Painting, 1:91–97. Subscriptions to the New York Tribune have been estimated at eighty thousand by the end of the 1870s. See Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, The International Distribution of the News: The Associated Press, Press Association, and Reuters, 1848–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 46.
In The Academy, Burty took readers room by room, work by selected work, through the 1876 exhibition. His review presumed that Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley were “well enough known for it to be unnecessary . . . to speak at any length here of their method.”13 Burty, “Fine Art,” 65. Burty reminded his anglophone/British/London readers—these constituencies were not entirely synonymous—that Edgar Degas had been previously introduced to “the London public at M. Deschamps’ exhibition.” (This was actually the 1872 New Bond Street Gallery exhibition coordinated by Paul Durand-Ruel with assistance from Deschamps).14 Burty, “Fine Art,” 65–66. At the time of the 1872 exhibition, Charles W. Deschamps had served as secretary for the New Bond Street gallery. In the Art Monthly Review and Photographic Portfolio, Mallarmé similarly refused to include “any preamble whatsoever, without even a word of explanation to the reader.” In a sweeping discussion of the 1876 Société anonyme, he instead picked out works that supported his analysis of Manet’s painting of the atmospheric enveloppe. Both drew attention to these artists' adaptation of established painterly traditions from other countries. Where Burty drew connections between Degas and Flemish art, Mallarmé described Manet as balancing his originality against his study of the “old masters of the north and south.”15 Mallarmé, “Impressionists and Edouard Manet,” 92–93, 95.
If Burty and Mallárme were right to assume their readers’ awareness of impressionism, that foreknowledge likely came from widely distributed French-language newspapers such as Le Figaro or L’événement with wide distribution. French and American impressionists depicted the consumption of these newspapers by French and non-French readers alike. Paul Cézanne portrayed his father pouring over L’événement, which, in subsequent decades, offered robust reporting on the impressionist exhibitions; and Mary Cassatt painted her bespectacled, bilingual mother absorbed in the front page of Le Figaro (figs. 2, 3). Purchased at stands and kiosks, this last daily carried news of French impressionism throughout the anglophone and, of course, francophone world. Indeed, this paper reported on all but two (the 1877 and 1886) of the eight Impressionist Exhibitions.
~
Description: The Artist's Father, Reading L'Événement by Cézanne, Paul
Fig. 2. Paul Cézanne, The Artist’s Father, Reading L’événement, 1866. Oil on canvas, 198.5 × 119.3 cm (78 1/8 × 46 15/16 in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.
~
Description: Reading Le Figaro by Cassatt, Mary
Fig. 3. Mary Cassatt, Reading “Le Figaro, 1877–78. Oil on canvas, 101 × 81.3 cm (39 3/4 × 32 in.). Private collection.
In the subsequent three decades, articles on French impressionism flooded the British and English-language periodical markets. Kate Flint has documented the development of an increasingly sophisticated yet still somewhat “patchy” field of art writers in Britain in the 1890s and 1900s interested in impressionism: most notably, D. S. MacColl, George Moore, and Wynford Dewhurst were among those who reported on impressionism in their columns.16 Flint, Impressionists in England. Flint has documented how Durand-Ruel’s New Bond Street gallery, where Monet and others displayed their work, received some attention from the English press, including the Times in 1873 and 1874. Interestingly, with few notable exceptions—for instance, Henry James—most of the early reviews of the impressionists and their exhibitions were anonymous. As French impressionism began to receive more attention in the local press, turn-of-the-century writers in Britain were often at odds about its relation to and effect on the British national school of painting. Artist-turned-writer Dewhurst dedicated his book Impressionist Painting, Its Genesis and Development, to Monet and trumpeted that “we are all Impressionists.” Yet others expressed deep anxiety about the possible Frenchification of the British national school.17 Julie Coddell, “From English School to British School: Modernism, Revisionism, and National Culture in the Writings of M. H. Spielmann,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 14, no. 2 (Summer 2015), https://bit.ly/30yCrDD. Wynford Dewhurst, “Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 56, no. 2887 (March 20, 1908): 482. Perhaps rightly so. Duret declared via his translator, Frank Rutter—now more remembered for his own art criticism than his translation of others’ criticism—that James McNeill Whistler, the American expatriate, London resident, and associate of Monet and his French artist-compatriots, was an “American en-Frenchised.”18 Théodore Duret, Whistler, trans. Frank Rutter (London: Grant Richards, 1917), 98. For readers interested in maintaining the independence of the British national school, this “en-Frenchisement”—presumably meant to be a witty play on “enfranchisement”—threatened to extend to British artists who came into contact with impressionism through Whistler, British artists who trekked to France (like Dewhurst), and British artists who followed the example of impressionism discussed and reproduced on the printed page.
Coupled with the swell of local art writers such as Dewhurst, British periodicals in the 1890s continued to run columns of translated criticism by French writers. Duret and Mauclair published in the prestigious but somewhat hidebound Art Journal. In their respective biographical studies, Duret and Mauclair extolled Degas and Manet who, while operating on the fringes of French impressionism, perpetuated the French national artistic tradition. Like Burty and Mallarmé before them, Duret and Mauclair tethered French impressionism—and notably selected the same impressionists—to national traditions, from the Flemish and the Florentine to the English, Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese. Writing on French impressionism through the lens of nation and tradition may have made it more palatable to the Art Journal editors, who were reluctant to endorse artistic experimentation, newness, or “Frenchness” in any way imperiling the British national school.19 Théodore Duret, “Edgar Degas,” Art Journal, no. 33 (July 1894): 204–8, cited in Flint, Impressionists in England, 296–301. Duret described Degas’s deft abilities for reviving “among the French school of painters a peculiarly national phase of Art, such as had previously been manifested by painters like Poussin and Ingres.” Duret continued that Ingres, who had carefully studied Raphael, and Degas “possessed a resemblance caused by their common nationality, and amidst a crowd of masters of other schools, struck a note absolutely French, such as only Frenchmen can sound. Degas, allowing for different times and other surroundings, sounds at heart the same note as they, and must be ranked as their [Raphael’s and Ingres’s] legitimate successor.” Degas’s art, he wrote, had derived “its inspiration from the sources of national tradition, tempered and modified by what has been given him of modern peculiarities by the surroundings in which he finds himself.” See also Camille Mauclair, “Edouard Manet,” Art Journal, no. 44 (September 1895): 274–79, cited in Flint, Impressionists in England, 252–60. Mauclair praised Manet’s work as “almost classic, above caviling criticism, sanctified by the beauty, the harmony, and the fascination of one of the sanest and most robust natures.” Mauclair used this article to affirm Manet’s irrefutable place in “the history of French Art. The man who thus finds to-day posthumous appreciation and success, deserved them all his life, and received little but abuse.” Elsewhere, Mauclair referred to Manet as a “genius” and “great artist.” By proclaiming impressionism to be part of the French tradition but also reliant on other national traditions, Duret and Mauclair stamped the art of Degas and Manet as simultaneously French and, with an admittedly circumscribed conception of the globe, global patrimoine—even as they relied on an English-language outlet to distribute that exhortation.
In places where the public had limited access to original works of French impressionism, articles and, especially, books such as those by Duret, Mauclair, and Bénédite could act as an introduction to this art. The necessarily abbreviated analysis of short-form articles could be unpacked in books: artists’ early years in academic studios, their roles in the foundation of the Société anonyme, biographical details, institutional and public reception, formal analysis of signal works of art (many of them reproduced across publications), and their international acolytes. Books, in their formality, expense, and repetition of images, communicated that the history and the story of French impressionism had been codified.
By the 1900s books by Bénédite, Duret, and Mauclair circulated in French, of course, and also in English translation. English had become the primary language throughout the British Empire, in the United States and its territories, and elsewhere. It followed that by the early twentieth century, English had become the global language of book publishing.20 Sandra Berman and Michael Wood, eds., Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). Access to the British and U.S. markets and their readers in metropoles and colonies thus demanded translation into English. The nascent international publishing empires that emerged in the early twentieth century capitalized on the linguistic and cultural imperialism of Great Britain and the United States. Books printed by London, Paris, or Philadelphia publishing houses exported European culture, and so impressionism, to the world.
Along with this linguistic imperialism, newly developed cheap print and reproduction technologies and a series of international agreements around copyright secured the linguistic and publishing dominance of English.21 For a discussion of late nineteenth-century reproductive processes, see Lois Olcott Price, “The Development of Photomechanical Book Illustration,” in The American Illustrated Book in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Gerald W. R. Ward (Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur, 1987), 233, 245, 250. In 1886 the Berne Convention automatically extended copyright protections to all signatory countries, including Britain, France, Germany, and Italy as well as Japan and elsewhere. In 1908, in an update of Berne, the Berlin Act transferred translation rights from publishers to authors, who were perhaps more likely to insist on the rapid translation of their books and so secure their share of the international marketplace of ideas and, of course, profits. Protections promised by Berlin strengthened authors’ rights and, quite plausibly, led them to seek the expedited translation of their books in order to retain copyright and control over their content, while also establishing their international expertise.22 Uma Suthersanen and Ysolde Gendreau, eds., A Shifting Empire: 100 Years of the Copyright Act 1911 (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2013).
These developments meant that around 1910, French authors writing in French, who published with a French press, who wished to secure international copyright, and who hoped to expand their readership to the anglophone world may have attempted to find a British publisher to swiftly translate and distribute an English-language edition of their books.23 Though it falls outside the scope of the present study, these authors also worked to secure publishers to translate and distribute their books in other European languages, including German and, to a lesser extent, Italian. This would seem to be what happened with Bénédite’s La peinture au XIXème siècle. Following its 1909 release by Flammarion, his book and its illustrated survey of the French impressionists was issued in 1910 by London-based publisher Pitman under the poorly translated title Great Painters of the Nineteenth Century and Their Paintings. As a publishing house located in Britain, Pitman then had the right to distribute Great Painters throughout the empire, and so to Australia, India, and South Africa. In what would seem an effort to divide the world into content-producing nations and content-consuming nations, Britain did not permit its colonies to sign on to Berne or Berlin accords. Though the 1911 Copyright Act, on paper, sought to prevent piratical acts in the colonies, the yoke of imperialism meant that authors living in the colonies had to be published in Britain by British publishers before receiving the copyright protections promised by Berne and Berlin.24 Sara Bannerman, The Struggle for Canadian Copyright: Imperialism to Internationalism, 1842–1971 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013). See also Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 1989). Lastly, see Suthersanen and Gendreau, Shifting Empire, 7. British-based, and usually London-based, presses thus had privileged access, both in selling books in these imperial markets but also publishing books written by authors residing in those same markets under the stamp of “imperial copyright.”25 Joseph Rezek, London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
While multinational legislation sped the transmission of knowledge about French impressionism as authors and their publishers partnered with foreign presses and book dealers abroad, not all countries complied with Berne and Berlin. Such was especially true of the United States, which did not sign on to Berne.26 Sarah Wadsworth, In the Company of Books: Literature and Its “Classes” in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006). With its growing and increasingly literate population, the United States was a critical book market. In 1891, in but one instance of unilateralist opposition to international copyright and its enforcement, the United States instead passed the Chace Act. Chace required foreign authors to individually apply for copyright.27 Michael Winship, “The Transatlantic Book Trade and Anglo-American Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century,” in Reciprocal Influences: Literary Production, Distribution, and Consumption in America, ed. Steven Fink and Susan S. Williams (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 98–108. Those who did not apply were not protected. In turn, this legislation led to the production of international networks of publishers in the early twentieth-century anglophone world. As a patch to Berne and Chace, an Anglo-American agreement protected British and U.S. authors and those who published with British and U.S. presses. British publishers partnered with U.S. publishers to secure their authors’ applications for the U.S. seal of copyright protection, easing their entry into the latter market; similarly U.S. publishers partnered with British publishers to ease their access to the imperial market.
Bénédite’s and Duret’s publications under, respectively, Lippincott in Philadelphia, in partnership with Heineman in London, and Lippincott in Philadelphia, in partnership with Grant Richards in London, exemplify how these laws could affect the distribution of art books. Following its success selling medical textbooks abroad, Lippincott expanded its trade to international sales of art books to be overseen by its new branches in Montreal and London. This last branch established Lippincott’s ability to sell in the British imperial market, though its Philadelphia and London branches would be locked in dispute around that market—especially as Philadelphia did not always comply with the law. In correspondence between the branches, London repeatedly demanded that Philadelphia relinquish the Australian, Indian, and South African markets and so abide by the British law that British-based presses held the distribution rights for these places. Perhaps due to arguments internal to the firm, Lippincott in Philadelphia partnered with London-based firms to sell books by Bénédite and Duret.28 For a discussion of the Heineman firm that partnered with Lippincott, see Frederic Whyte, William Heinemann: A Memoir (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928). For example, Lippincott in Philadelphia and Grant Richards in London partnered to print Duret’s Manet and the French Impressionists. As much transformation as word-for-word translation, Manet and the French Impressionists would be illustrated with reproductions specially chosen to appeal to the market in England. It strategically included Monet’s and Camille Pissarro’s paintings produced during their exile in England (1870–71), reproductions after English impressionist paintings, for instance those by Dewhurst, and paintings made upon the French impressionists’ later voyages to London (fig. 4).
~
Description: Reproduction of Claude Monet's The Houses of Parliament by Unknown
Fig. 4. Claude Monet, The Houses of Parliament, 1904–6. Oil on canvas. Reproduced in Théodore Duret, Histoire des peintres impressionnistes: Pissarro, Claude Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Cézanne, Guillaumin (Paris: H. Floury, 1906), opp. 144.
By the time Manet and the French Impressionists appeared in print in 1910, Dewhurst, who had translated the catalogue of works illustrating that book, had already written and published his own book-length survey. In his Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development (1904) (also examined by Hadrien Viraben in chapter 4), Dewhurst would use his bibliography to document his fastidious engagement with publications in languages other than English.29 Wynford Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development (London: George Newnes, 1904). His introduction insisted that what he wrote had been informed by “all manner of documents bearing upon the subject.”30 Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting, vii. This would be confirmed by American, British, French, and occasional German sources listed in his bibliography.31 Sections from Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development would be published in The International Studio, for instance. Once more, abridgements stoked public interest. See Wynford Dewhurst, “Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development,” International Studio 19, no. 75 (May 1903): 75; and Wynford Dewhurst, “Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development,” pt. 2, International Studio 20, no. 78 (August 1903): 94. His bibliography substantiated his claims while signaling his reliability and authority through his active participation in an international and multilingual discursive field.32 Because Dewhurst included few citations in German, it may be assumed that he was not as aware of German authors, that he had limited access to these texts, or that he was not fluent in German. Yet that same extensive list of secondary sources meant that much of what he preached about “the doctrine of Impressionism” echoed what he had elsewhere read—including Duret’s and Mauclair’s aforementioned articles and books.33 Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting, vii. In his bibliography to Impressionist Painting, Dewhurst cited Duret’s Les peintres impressionnistes (1878), Manet (1902), and Art Journal article on Degas (1894). He also cited Mauclair’s The French Impressionists (1903) and The Great French Painters (1903). In tandem with his bibliography and appendix, the apparatus of his book included a list of prominent collectors and information about recent sales, which, once more, acted as evidence of his expertise on the topic. In addition to excerpting Mauclair’s The French Impressionists as part of his own appendix, Dewhurst paraphrased the two throughout his book.
Still, Dewhurst’s contribution cannot be dismissed as mere citation and quotation. He offered Impressionist Painting as an introduction to “the masterpieces of the great artists who founded and are continuing Impressionist Painting.”34 Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting, viii. In this, he underlined the continuity between the French impressionists and the international artists who followed in their brushstrokes. This latter constituency included English artists who, like him, followed the impressionist “cult of sun-worship”: “Those Englishmen who are taunted with following the methods of the French impressionists are in reality but practicing their own, for the French artists developed a style which was British in its conception.”35 Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting, 4–5. The practice of plein-air painting launched in England was thought to have been perfected in France due to its more hospitable atmosphere and weather. To Dewhurst, the origins of impressionism lay not in France but with Richard Parkes Bonington, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner. His analysis of Monet’s treatment of London and its fogs, its neighborhoods, and its street scenes emphasized the French artist’s indebtedness to seeing paintings by Turner at the National Gallery during his 1870–71 exile.36 For a recent discussion of the French impressionists in London, see Caroline Corbeau Parsons, ed., Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile, 1870–1914 (London: Tate, 2018). Living in London in those same years, Pissarro likewise had opportunities to study “the masterpieces of Turner, Constable, the Norwich painters, Watts, and the great English portraitists.”37 Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting, 50.
Attributing British origins to impressionism was not limited to British writers. Bénédite, Duret, and Mauclair had each acknowledged the importance of English landscape painters as a precedent for French impressionism. Parsing the international influences upon the evolution of this art, they accepted that impressionism’s origins could be traced, at least in part, to some combination of Bonington, Constable, and Turner—artists whom Bénédite declared to be the start of the British national school (fig. 5).38 Bénédite, Great Painters, xiii, 218, 220–21. Bénédite named Bonington “the first of the Impressionists.” He went so far as to claim Bonington for the French national school. He also wrote that “the influence of Bonington, Constable and Turner had indeed hardly left any traces in their native country, and we have seen that it was chiefly in France that they (even Turner) had their most enthusiastic adherents.” Duret accepted that Constable (but not Turner) had influenced French landscape painters who subsequently went from painting in the studio to painting outdoors—a transition completed by Manet and the French impressionists.39 Duret, Manet and the French Impressionists, 71, 204. Mauclair named Turner and Bonington (but not Constable) as landscape painters who had shaped impressionism. French art writers readily appreciated that influence ebbed and flowed across the Channel. (As Julie Codell and Kate Flint have written, however, staking the origins of impressionism in Britain would be paramount to British writers’ for accepting and adapting this art for their national school).40See Coddell, "From English School to British School"; see also Kate Flint, Impressionists in England. For French writers, English precedent did not negate the Frenchness of impressionism. To them, impressionism as a synthesis of different national traditions spoke to the supposed universalism of the French tradition—with the caveat that this tradition should not be mistaken for the pedantry and formulae of the École des beaux-arts.41 Camille Mauclair, The French Impressionists, trans. P. G. Konody (London: Duckworth, 1903), 16–17, 203–4. “Claude Lorrain, Watteau, Turner and Monticelli constitute really the descent of a landscapist like Claude Monet. In all matters concerning technique, they form the direct chain of Impressionism. As regards design, subject, realism, the study of modern life, the conception of beauty and the portrait, the Impressionist movement is based upon the old French masters, principally upon Chardin, Watteau, Latour, Largillières, Fragonard, Debucourt, Saint-Aubin, Moreau and Eisen. . . . Impressionism is an art which does not give much scope to intellectuality, an art whose followers admit scarcely anything but immediate vision, rejecting philosophy and symbols and occupying themselves only with the consideration of light, picturesqueness, keen and clever observation, and antipathy to abstraction, as the innate qualities of French art. We shall see later on, when considering separately its principal masters, that each of them has based his art upon some masters of pure French blood.”
~
Description: First page of The English and American Schools by Unknown
Fig. 5. Léonce Bénédite, First page of “The English and American Schools,” in Great Painters of the Nineteenth Century and Their Paintings (London: Pitman, 1910), 217.
IMPRESSIONISM AS A LANGUAGE
As British and French writers alike understood, “various movements” predicated on impressionism had started to spread throughout “France and the Continent.”42 Dewhurst, Impressionism, 7, 36. Continuing from his key phrase “we are all Impressionists now,” Duret wrote that “of the students it is true, for ninety per cent of those who take up landscape painting follow with admiration the paths of the Impressionists. A glance through the annual salons, either in Europe or America, fully proves the assertion. Before many years have elapsed, even in England, one will find this the case. The difficulty of Hanging Committees will be, not to hide away Impressionist work to the least damage of its surroundings, but to hang the anecdotal, moral, and all canvases of like genre, in such obscure corners as will give the least offence to their moribund and conservative creators.” Bénédite, Duret, and Mauclair all recounted that impressionism had disciples far beyond L’Hexagone. If English had become a global publishing language through which to disseminate art history, impressionism had become a global artistic language with which to paint modern and local (or regional or national) history. Tracing the appeal of impressionism on “both sides of the Atlantic,” Mauclair enumerated a lengthy list of its European and U.S. disciples: “[Max] Liebermann, in Germany; [Peder Severin] Krøyer, in Denmark; [Frits] Thaulow and [Anders] Zorn, in Norway; [Émile] Claus, [Théo van] van Rysselberghe and [Albert] Baertson [sic], in Belgium; [Alexander] Harrisson [sic], Alexander [sic] and [John Singer] Sargent, in America; the Glasgow School, in England [sic]; [Francesco Paolo] Michetti and [Giovanni] Segantini, in Italy; and [Joaquín] Sorella [sic] y Bastida and [Ignacio] Zuloaga, in Spain.”43 Camille Mauclair, The Great French Painters and the Evolution of French Painting from 1830 to the Present Day, trans. P. G. Konody (London: Duckworth, 1903), 121. As Frances Fowle recounts in her essay on Scottish impressionism, Mauclair’s knowledge of non-French art depended on which artists and artworks he encountered in Paris galleries and museums as well as at international exhibitions. His extensive list closely resembled works discussed by Bénédite and displayed at the Luxembourg as well as the more limited ranks of international artists mentioned by Duret. Mauclair’s list further echoed the ranks of impressionists from around the world who, as Laura Moure Cecchini details in this anthology, participated in the pre–World War II Venice Biennales. Yet Mauclair did not consider these artists to be equal contributors to a dialogue on impressionism. He summarily dismissed these artists as unoriginal and inauthentic “disciples” duly following the example set by the French impressionists. As the place of impressionism in art history shifted in France from rebellion to tradition, the international artists who adapted impressionist practices were condemned as transforming it into an academic and institutionalized art, a dead-end to the conversation launched by the French impressionists.44 Camille Mauclair, “French Impressionism and Its Influence in Europe,” trans. H. A. P. Torrey, International Monthly (1905): 54. “Impressionism is still a living force in France and in Europe. Its combative, creative period, however, is ended. It may already be looked at from a distance that permits impartial criticism; the results of it may be stated, and its further extensions foreseen. From the present it belongs to the tradition of French painting; and one of the objects of this essay will be to show wherein, precisely, impressionism is by its technique and its ideas ‘traditional’ in France, despite the fact that it has been violently contested, and that an unmerited ridicule has been heaped upon it which even today has hardly ceased.”
For his part, Duret reported that impressionism had taken “root in various countries” after pushing “beyond the boundaries of France, where it had its birth, to act upon the art of other countries.”45 Duret, Manet and the French Impressionists, 124. In a coda to Manet and the Impressionists absent from Histoire des peintres impressionnistes, he traced the shifting reception of this art in France, recounting its varied reception in Europe and the United States circa 1909. With the Caillebotte Bequest partially accepted by the Luxembourg, he concluded that the “question of their [the impressionists’] greatness” had been settled in France.46 Duret, Manet and the French Impressionists, 198. Using the art market, exhibitions, and museums to measure different nations’ appreciation of French impressionism, he attributed its ready acceptance in the United States to that country’s perceived liberty from the stultifying academies of the “Old World.”47 Duret, Manet and the French Impressionists, 202. Books were central to evangelizing the gospel of impressionism in both the “New” (that is, the United States) and “Old” (that is, Europe) Worlds. Compared with the open appreciation for impressionism in the United States, Duret, like Dewhurst, determined that England “remained the country where the painting of Manet and the Impressionists has been least appreciated”—despite the fact that English audiences had had access to articles and books on French impressionism for decades.48 Duret, Manet and the French Impressionists, 204. Duret recognized Dewhurst as contributing “as a writer and lecturer to familiarise the English public with the Impressionist art of France.”
Mauclair and Duret desired the international acceptance of French impressionism, but were reluctant to accept the adaptation of impressionism by artists from outside France. In his translated Great Painters of the Nineteenth Century and Their Paintings, Bénédite, by comparison, tenuously extended greatness to artists outside France—what Mauclair (or his editors) had adamantly refused to do by entitling his book Great French Painters. Interestingly, Bénédite’s set of great international artists repeated those named, and panned, by Mauclair. Many of the artists promoted by Bénédite had their paintings hung in the Luxembourg in a room dedicated to international artists located across the corridor from another room devoted to the French impressionists. In Holland, the Maris brothers were “Impressionists”; in Switzerland, Ferdinand Hodler was an “Impressionist”; and, in England, Bonington was the “first Impressionist.” Despite this dialogue between French impressionists and international artists, Bénédite began his Great Painters with a staunchly nationalist question: “Painting in the nineteenth century—who that knows this period at all does not immediately think of France?” The structure of the book’s contents further reinforced the supposed primacy of the French national school and perpetuated the nation-based division of artists and art schools. Each chapter studied one national school—or a group of related national schools (for example, all the schools under the Austro-Hungarian Empire)—in isolation. Despite these pronounced limitations to his conception of internationalism, Bénédite grafted the national schools of Europe and the United States like branches onto a phylogenetic language tree, with its roots sunk deep into French soil. With a flourish of his and, ultimately, his editor’s or his translator’s pen, he declared: “There are no more, properly speaking, distinct schools than there is a distinct ideal in the souls of the nations. . . . There really is in the nineteenth century but one universal school, speaking one single artistic language, in which the one nation distinguishes itself from the other by shades of idiom and local accent.”49 Léonce Bénédite, Great Painters of the Nineteenth Century and Their Paintings (London: I. Pitman, 1910), xii–xiii. To Bénédite, that one universal school had sprung forth from France, and that one artistic language was painting en plein-air. By employing “en plein air” as a way of rhetorically spanning impressionism, naturalism, even realism, Bénédite was able to sidestep the tumult of definitions of “impressionism.” “En plein air” also separated an internationally practiced approach from the national affiliation of impressionism with France (even as French impressionism had come to be seen as a synthesis of other nations’ artistic traditions). In the aforementioned quote, Bénédite used terms drawn from linguistic studies—“idiom,” “accent,” and “speech”—to position painting en plein air as a simultaneously universal, national, and local practice. Insisting that the differences between the national schools of art had been eroded, albeit not quite eradicated, Bénédite proceeded to trace how “en plein air” had become “a new art for a new world.”50 Bénédite, Great Painters, xiv. Recalling phrases issued by his fellow French writers, he mapped the École du plein air as “spread[ing] equally over all the European schools . . . as far as America.”51 Mauclair, Great French Painters, 120–21. These international artists were not illustrated in Great French Painters. Mauclair hesitated that impressionism did not constitute an artistic school, despite its spread throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. To be a school demanded authority and leadership—which impressionism, in its celebration of independence and individuality, resisted. In what may be a reference to his own books, he recounted how the practice of painting en plein air would be disseminated by new technologies allowing for more affordable and quick reproductions and opening lines of communication between Europe, the Americas, and the Middle and Far East.
Mobilized by a brisk trans-oceanic and trans-hemispheric trade, books such as those surveyed in this essay produced networks of art writers and readers cutting across national, linguistic, and geopolitical boundaries. Through art and literary periodicals, French writers such as Bénédite, Mauclair, and Duret affirmed their expertise and expanded their readership. Local art writers then engaged with what they wrote. Books by Bénédite, Mauclair, and Duret, whose reputations were established in France and abroad, may have been considered desirable for and profitable in the anglophone market. Translation meant that Bénédite, Duret, and Mauclair did not simply write to Paris-based circles. They wrote to the world; and they knew that they did, as shown by their acknowledgment of international artist ranks and by their work to tie French impressionism to other national schools and traditions. Translation sped the pace by which international discourse around impressionism could be formulated. Publications by Bénédite, Duret, and Mauclair thereby participated in what Partha Mitter has termed a “virtual cosmopolis,” constructed on lines of communication connecting center and periphery, which in turn facilitated “conversations across cultures.”52 Keith Moxey, “A ‘Virtual Cosmopolis’: Partha Mitter in Conversation with Keith Moxey,” Art Bulletin 95, no. 3 (2014): 381–92. More, their books produced what Robert Darnton has identified as “communication circuits” that allow historians to trace “how ideas were transmitted through print and how exposure to the printed word affected the thought and behavior of mankind.”53 Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?,” in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002), 9–26. Those circuits, traced throughout the present anthology, would include a cadre of editors and “silent translators.” Translation studies theorist Lawrence Venuti has contended that English-language translations especially attempted to conceal signs of translation and so erase any residue of the lines and circuits theorized by Mitter and Darnton.54 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995); see also Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998). While the effect of translation on the dissemination of art histories and the formation of professional networks of art writers has only begun to be studied, editors and translators surely placed their own imprint on the circuits of art-historical knowledge constructed through printed, illustrated, and translated words on impressionism. Much like today, in the early twentieth century, language—the language of style, the language of art history, and the languages in which books were printed and distributed—would be critical to all the circulation and localization of the impressionist idiom. As impressionism became an international artistic idiom, so, too, did writing about this art become an international art-historical practice, permitting the international public to witness the production of that history as it unfolded across the printed page.
 
1      L’art et les artistes advertisement, Staryé Gody (July–December 1911): n.p. »
2      Léonce Bénédite, “La peinture française” (fourth article), L’art et les artistes 14 (March 1912): 225–40. In this last article, which Bénédite dedicated to nineteenth-century art, impressionism would be limited to two pages in which he named the protagonists and offered what would become an increasingly standardized definition. »
3      L’art et les artistes also ran an advertisement for this series in the Italian La Rivista d’arte (September–December 1910): n.p. Incidentally, in La Rivista d’arte, the ad for L’art et les artistes appeared on the same page as an advert for Staryé Gody»
4      Sara Tas, “Between Patriotism and Internationalism: Contemporary Art at the Musée du Luxembourg in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Collections 27, no. 2 (July 2015): 227–40. »
5      There has been extensive research into negotiations between Caillebotte’s executors and Beaux-arts bureaucrats. See Marie Berhaut, Caillebotte: Sa vie et son œuvre, Fondation Wildenstein (Paris: Bibliotèque des arts, 1978); Marie Berhaut, “Le Legs Caillebotte: Verités et contre-verités,” Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de l’art français (1983): 209–23; and Pierre Vaisse, “Le Legs Caillebotte: Annexe: Documents,” Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de l’art française (1983): 201–8. See especially Pierre Vaisse, Deux façons d’écrire l’histoire (Paris: Éditions Orphrys, 2014). »
6      These are but some of the selected books by Léonce Bénédite: Le musée national du Luxembourg: Catalogue raisonné et illustré des peintures, sculptures, dessins, gravures en médailles et sur pierres fines et objets d’art divers des écoles contemporaines (Paris: Motteroz, 1900); La peinture au XIXème siècle: D’après les chefs-d’oeuvre des maîtres et les meilleurs tableaux des principaux artistes (Paris: Flammarion, 1909); Great Painters of the Nineteenth Century and Their Paintings (London: Isaac Pitman, 1910); Le musée du Luxembourg: Les peintures (Paris: Librarie Renouard, 1912). In addition to these surveys of the Luxembourg and its paintings, Bénédite published several artist monographs, books, and articles on sculptures, reviews of the Paris salons, and numerous articles on the arts. »
7      The notion of a “Musée imaginaire” was first developed by André Malraux. For a recent history of this concept, see Walter Grasskamp, The Book on the Floor: André Malraux and the Imaginary Museum, trans. Fiona Elliott (Los Angeles: Getty, 2016). »
8      Théodore Duret, Histoire des peintres impressionnistes (Paris: H. Floury, 1906); Théodore Duret, Histoire d’Edouard Manet et de son oeuvre (Paris: H. Floury, 1902). After World War I, Duret also published a monograph on Renoir. »
9      Mauclair’s shifting political alliances and artistic sympathies were often mired in incoherence and contradiction, making them too complicated to fully address here. See Michael Marlais, Conservative Echoes in Fin de siècle Parisian Art Criticism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). For a more recent discussion of Mauclair’s political leanings, see Emilie Anne-Yvonne Luse, “Erasing the Avant-Gardes: Anti-Modernism in French Art History, Criticism, and Education, 1920–1944” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2019). See also Katia Papandreopoulou, “Camille Mauclair (1870–1945) critique et historien de l’art. Une leçon de nationalisme pictural” (PhD diss., Université Paris I–Sorbonne, 2013). »
10      Mauclair's The French Impressionists was advertised in the March 1903 issue of The Publisher. It was listed as part of the "Popular Library of Art" series. Camille Mauclair, L’impressionnisme. Son histoire, son esthétique, ses maîtres (Paris: Librairie de l’art ancien et moderne, 1904). Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. »
11      “Postscript,” Academy (January 31, 1874): 132, cited in Ruth Berson, The New Painting, Impressionism, 1874–1886: Documentation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 1:9. »
12      Henry James, “Parisian Festivity,” New York Tribune, May 13, 1876, 2, cited in Impressionists in England: The Critical Reception, ed. Kate Flint (London: Routledge, 1984), 37–38; Philippe Burty, “Fine Art: The Exhibition of the ‘Intransigeants,’” Academy (April 15, 1876): 363–64, cited in Berson, New Painting, 1:64–66; Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Impressionists and Edouard Manet,” trans. George T. Robinson, Art Monthly Review and Photographic Portfolio 1, no. 9 (September 30, 1876): 117–22, cited in Berson, New Painting, 1:91–97. Subscriptions to the New York Tribune have been estimated at eighty thousand by the end of the 1870s. See Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, The International Distribution of the News: The Associated Press, Press Association, and Reuters, 1848–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 46. »
13      Burty, “Fine Art,” 65. »
14      Burty, “Fine Art,” 65–66. At the time of the 1872 exhibition, Charles W. Deschamps had served as secretary for the New Bond Street gallery. »
15      Mallarmé, “Impressionists and Edouard Manet,” 92–93, 95. »
16      Flint, Impressionists in England. Flint has documented how Durand-Ruel’s New Bond Street gallery, where Monet and others displayed their work, received some attention from the English press, including the Times in 1873 and 1874. Interestingly, with few notable exceptions—for instance, Henry James—most of the early reviews of the impressionists and their exhibitions were anonymous. »
17      Julie Coddell, “From English School to British School: Modernism, Revisionism, and National Culture in the Writings of M. H. Spielmann,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 14, no. 2 (Summer 2015), https://bit.ly/30yCrDD. Wynford Dewhurst, “Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 56, no. 2887 (March 20, 1908): 482. »
18      Théodore Duret, Whistler, trans. Frank Rutter (London: Grant Richards, 1917), 98. »
19      Théodore Duret, “Edgar Degas,” Art Journal, no. 33 (July 1894): 204–8, cited in Flint, Impressionists in England, 296–301. Duret described Degas’s deft abilities for reviving “among the French school of painters a peculiarly national phase of Art, such as had previously been manifested by painters like Poussin and Ingres.” Duret continued that Ingres, who had carefully studied Raphael, and Degas “possessed a resemblance caused by their common nationality, and amidst a crowd of masters of other schools, struck a note absolutely French, such as only Frenchmen can sound. Degas, allowing for different times and other surroundings, sounds at heart the same note as they, and must be ranked as their [Raphael’s and Ingres’s] legitimate successor.” Degas’s art, he wrote, had derived “its inspiration from the sources of national tradition, tempered and modified by what has been given him of modern peculiarities by the surroundings in which he finds himself.” See also Camille Mauclair, “Edouard Manet,” Art Journal, no. 44 (September 1895): 274–79, cited in Flint, Impressionists in England, 252–60. Mauclair praised Manet’s work as “almost classic, above caviling criticism, sanctified by the beauty, the harmony, and the fascination of one of the sanest and most robust natures.” Mauclair used this article to affirm Manet’s irrefutable place in “the history of French Art. The man who thus finds to-day posthumous appreciation and success, deserved them all his life, and received little but abuse.” Elsewhere, Mauclair referred to Manet as a “genius” and “great artist.” »
20      Sandra Berman and Michael Wood, eds., Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). »
21      For a discussion of late nineteenth-century reproductive processes, see Lois Olcott Price, “The Development of Photomechanical Book Illustration,” in The American Illustrated Book in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Gerald W. R. Ward (Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur, 1987), 233, 245, 250. »
22      Uma Suthersanen and Ysolde Gendreau, eds., A Shifting Empire: 100 Years of the Copyright Act 1911 (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2013). »
23      Though it falls outside the scope of the present study, these authors also worked to secure publishers to translate and distribute their books in other European languages, including German and, to a lesser extent, Italian. »
24      Sara Bannerman, The Struggle for Canadian Copyright: Imperialism to Internationalism, 1842–1971 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013). See also Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 1989). Lastly, see Suthersanen and Gendreau, Shifting Empire, 7. »
25      Joseph Rezek, London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). »
26      Sarah Wadsworth, In the Company of Books: Literature and Its “Classes” in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006). »
27      Michael Winship, “The Transatlantic Book Trade and Anglo-American Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century,” in Reciprocal Influences: Literary Production, Distribution, and Consumption in America, ed. Steven Fink and Susan S. Williams (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 98–108. »
28      For a discussion of the Heineman firm that partnered with Lippincott, see Frederic Whyte, William Heinemann: A Memoir (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928). »
29      Wynford Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development (London: George Newnes, 1904). »
30      Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting, vii. »
31      Sections from Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development would be published in The International Studio, for instance. Once more, abridgements stoked public interest. See Wynford Dewhurst, “Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development,” International Studio 19, no. 75 (May 1903): 75; and Wynford Dewhurst, “Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development,” pt. 2, International Studio 20, no. 78 (August 1903): 94. »
32      Because Dewhurst included few citations in German, it may be assumed that he was not as aware of German authors, that he had limited access to these texts, or that he was not fluent in German. »
33      Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting, vii. In his bibliography to Impressionist Painting, Dewhurst cited Duret’s Les peintres impressionnistes (1878), Manet (1902), and Art Journal article on Degas (1894). He also cited Mauclair’s The French Impressionists (1903) and The Great French Painters (1903). In tandem with his bibliography and appendix, the apparatus of his book included a list of prominent collectors and information about recent sales, which, once more, acted as evidence of his expertise on the topic. »
34      Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting, viii. »
35      Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting, 4–5. The practice of plein-air painting launched in England was thought to have been perfected in France due to its more hospitable atmosphere and weather. »
36      For a recent discussion of the French impressionists in London, see Caroline Corbeau Parsons, ed., Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile, 1870–1914 (London: Tate, 2018). »
37      Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting, 50. »
38      Bénédite, Great Painters, xiii, 218, 220–21. Bénédite named Bonington “the first of the Impressionists.” He went so far as to claim Bonington for the French national school. He also wrote that “the influence of Bonington, Constable and Turner had indeed hardly left any traces in their native country, and we have seen that it was chiefly in France that they (even Turner) had their most enthusiastic adherents.” »
39      Duret, Manet and the French Impressionists, 71, 204. »
40     See Coddell, "From English School to British School"; see also Kate Flint, Impressionists in England. »
41      Camille Mauclair, The French Impressionists, trans. P. G. Konody (London: Duckworth, 1903), 16–17, 203–4. “Claude Lorrain, Watteau, Turner and Monticelli constitute really the descent of a landscapist like Claude Monet. In all matters concerning technique, they form the direct chain of Impressionism. As regards design, subject, realism, the study of modern life, the conception of beauty and the portrait, the Impressionist movement is based upon the old French masters, principally upon Chardin, Watteau, Latour, Largillières, Fragonard, Debucourt, Saint-Aubin, Moreau and Eisen. . . . Impressionism is an art which does not give much scope to intellectuality, an art whose followers admit scarcely anything but immediate vision, rejecting philosophy and symbols and occupying themselves only with the consideration of light, picturesqueness, keen and clever observation, and antipathy to abstraction, as the innate qualities of French art. We shall see later on, when considering separately its principal masters, that each of them has based his art upon some masters of pure French blood.” »
42      Dewhurst, Impressionism, 7, 36. Continuing from his key phrase “we are all Impressionists now,” Duret wrote that “of the students it is true, for ninety per cent of those who take up landscape painting follow with admiration the paths of the Impressionists. A glance through the annual salons, either in Europe or America, fully proves the assertion. Before many years have elapsed, even in England, one will find this the case. The difficulty of Hanging Committees will be, not to hide away Impressionist work to the least damage of its surroundings, but to hang the anecdotal, moral, and all canvases of like genre, in such obscure corners as will give the least offence to their moribund and conservative creators.” »
43      Camille Mauclair, The Great French Painters and the Evolution of French Painting from 1830 to the Present Day, trans. P. G. Konody (London: Duckworth, 1903), 121. »
44      Camille Mauclair, “French Impressionism and Its Influence in Europe,” trans. H. A. P. Torrey, International Monthly (1905): 54. “Impressionism is still a living force in France and in Europe. Its combative, creative period, however, is ended. It may already be looked at from a distance that permits impartial criticism; the results of it may be stated, and its further extensions foreseen. From the present it belongs to the tradition of French painting; and one of the objects of this essay will be to show wherein, precisely, impressionism is by its technique and its ideas ‘traditional’ in France, despite the fact that it has been violently contested, and that an unmerited ridicule has been heaped upon it which even today has hardly ceased.” »
45      Duret, Manet and the French Impressionists, 124. »
46      Duret, Manet and the French Impressionists, 198. »
47      Duret, Manet and the French Impressionists, 202. »
48      Duret, Manet and the French Impressionists, 204. Duret recognized Dewhurst as contributing “as a writer and lecturer to familiarise the English public with the Impressionist art of France.” »
49      Léonce Bénédite, Great Painters of the Nineteenth Century and Their Paintings (London: I. Pitman, 1910), xii–xiii. »
50      Bénédite, Great Painters, xiv. »
51      Mauclair, Great French Painters, 120–21. These international artists were not illustrated in Great French Painters. Mauclair hesitated that impressionism did not constitute an artistic school, despite its spread throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. To be a school demanded authority and leadership—which impressionism, in its celebration of independence and individuality, resisted. »
52      Keith Moxey, “A ‘Virtual Cosmopolis’: Partha Mitter in Conversation with Keith Moxey,” Art Bulletin 95, no. 3 (2014): 381–92. »
53      Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?,” in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002), 9–26. »
54      Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995); see also Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998). »
5. Making an Art-Historical Empire: French Histories of Impressionism in Translation
Previous chapter Next chapter