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Description: Art of the Actual: Naturalism and Style in Early Third Republic France,...
~My first thanks are to the Slade Electors at the University of Oxford for their invitation in the autumn of 2006 to give the Slade Lectures in 2009. This encouraged me to put together in straightforward and even argumentative form ideas that had been with me for a long time, ideas that supplement and overlap the more thematic historical approach of my earlier book...
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00022.002
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Acknowledgements
My first thanks are to the Slade Electors at the University of Oxford for their invitation in the autumn of 2006 to give the Slade Lectures in 2009. This encouraged me to put together in straightforward and even argumentative form ideas that had been with me for a long time, ideas that supplement and overlap the more thematic historical approach of my earlier book The Troubled Republic (2004). In the spring of 2007, as the inaugural Van Gogh Visiting Fellow at the Van Gogh Museum and the University of Amsterdam, I was able to rehearse my material in a series of lively seminars, and I am most grateful to Axel Rüger, Chris Stolwijk and Rachel Esner for their invitation and enthusiasm. A grant under the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s research leave scheme in the academic year 2007–8 gave me much needed extra time to draft the lectures. Fortuitously, the second half of the decade was a rich period for exhibitions on painters whose work was cognate with my interests, and I thank the curators at the Musée d’Orsay, the Petit Palais, Le Puy, Vic-sur-Seille and elsewhere for their stimulating shows.
My time as Slade Professor at Oxford in 2009 was sheer pleasure, and I should like to express my gratitude to the Warden and Fellows of All Souls, who housed me, Craig Clunas, Christopher and Sally Brown, Jon and Linda Whiteley, Larissa Haskell, Sir John and Lady Elliott, Katherine Whistler, Alistair Wright, Gervase Rosser, Juliet Simpson, Tim Farrant and the Master of my old college, St Catherine’s.
My research has taken me to a number of most helpful libraries, in particular the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, the Documentation du Musée d’Orsay, the Sackler Library at Oxford, the National Gallery of Scotland and the Getty Research Institute, Malibu. Over the years I have talked this material over with or benefited from the help of many friends and colleagues; I thank them all, in particular Maria Anesti, Laurence Bertrand-Dorléac, Isabelle Collet, Lizzie Cowling, Frances Fowle, Dario Gamboni, Pauline Gibb, Martin Hammer, Lee Hendrix, David Howarth, Richard Kendall, Marine Kisiel, Dominique Lobstein, Alister Mill, Joanne Paradise, Rodolphe Rapetti, Amélie Simier, Catherine Verleysen, plus Liz Childs and John Klein who suffered an impromptu seminar on French naturalism anchored off Moorea. In the interstices of work on the text I was fortunate to collaborate with splendid Orsay colleagues on the Monet exhibition of 2010–11: Guy Cogeval, Sylvie Patin, Sylvie Patry and Anne Roquebert.
As the book neared completion the readers provided useful suggestions to an alia prima author, although any errors are mine alone. Financial support for the illustrations has been generously provided by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and the research funds of the former School of Arts, Culture and Environment and of Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh. At Yale University Press, Phoebe Lowndes indomitably tracked down the pictures, Katharine Ridler encored her scrupulous editing and Gillian Malpass once again acted as the acme of commissioning editors: perfectly professional, fierce, fun and tasteful, even tolerant of alliteration.
This book is dedicated to three great friends of over thirty years, with whom I have shared careers in parallel, holidays and exhibition organisation, and who each found time for a lecture. Over the many years of reading, looking and writing, my wife Belinda has supported, suggested, disagreed, advised, translated, consoled and touched the tiller, despite being busily involved with major exhibition and research projects of her own. If Gauguin comes out as an unlikely hero on the final page of this book it is, like so much else, because of her.
Acknowledgements
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