Acknowledgments

Thomas, Greg M.

I don't have an account

Create an account to save content, highlights, and notes to your personal bookshelf.

If you do not have access to the eBook content on the A&AePortal via an institutional subscription, you can purchase an individual subscription from your account. Learn more about subscriptions.

Purchase a subscription

Save Cite Share

Free

Acknowledgments

Greg M. Thomas

Description: Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore...

Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau

Acknowledgments

Author

Greg M. Thomas

PublisherPrinceton University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23403

Acknowledgments

This book and the doctoral thesis from which it evolved received generous financial support from The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (in the form of a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship), the Harvard Lurcy Foundation, the Harvard University Department of History of Art and Architecture, and the Purdue Research Foundation at Purdue University.

My research in Paris was aided by the unfailing kindness and professionalism of many people at the Archives Nationales, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Louvre’s Cabinet des dessins, the Louvre’s Documentation department, the Institut Néerlandais, and the Maison Charavay. Special thanks are due to Pierre Miquel, Michel Schulman, Odile Challe, Régis Michel, Bruno Chénique, and René and Louise Baudry. At Fontainebleau, I am particularly indebted to Marie-Noële Grand-Mesnil, Pierre-Olivier Fanica, Yves Grandfils of the Bibliothèque Municipale de Fontainebleau, and Pierre-Pascal Perraud of the Office National des Forêts. Elsewhere in France, I thank those who assisted me at the Archives Départementales de Seine et Marne, the Archives Départementales des Landes, the Bibliothèque Municipale de Besançon, the town hall of Bégaar, and the souvenir shop at La Faucille.

Staff members at many museums have facilitated my research and helped secure photographs; those of the Mesdag Museum in the Hague were especially accommodating. For the production of the book, I am grateful to Patricia Fidler of Princeton University Press for her support and guidance, to Lory Frankel for her thorough work on the manuscript, and to Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Jeremy Strick, and an anonymous reviewer for their reading of the manuscript at various stages. Others to whom I am indebted on many counts include Norman Bryson, Joseph Koerner, Marjorie Cohn, Frances Jowell, Eleanor Hight, the late Judge John Minor Wisdom, Eric Rosenberg, Aihe Wang, and members of my family. For his advice, support, and friendship, I dedicate this book to Henri Zerner.

Previous chapter

Book details

BOOKArt and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau

Greg M. Thomas

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00348

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23401

In Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France, Greg Thomas sets forth a new ecological model of landscape painting, in which the process of art is seen to mimic the creative processes silently at work in the environment around us. Developing an aesthetics of place with implications for the entirety of nineteenth-century art, Thomas focuses specifically and with engaging exactitude on the landscapes of Barbizon painter Théodore Rousseau. These paintings—dreams of nature as a web of life in which human beings occupy a peripheral role—overwhelmed Rousseau's contemporaries with their novel light effects, original perspective, and "sheer profusion of visual sensation." While Baudelaire considered them superior to even Corot's works, they baffled art critics and have never fit convincingly into the received categories of naturalism, "pre-Impressionism," or modernism.

Surveying Rousseau's whole career and presenting the first English translations of his writings, Thomas analyzes the artist's political beliefs and record as a pioneer conservationist. He also traces alterations in a number of the French sites that Rousseau depicted, most notably the royal forest of Fontainebleau. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the author reinterprets Rousseau's paintings as embodiments of a new way of seeing the world, a new sense of the deep interconnectedness between the human and natural worlds that coincided with the earliest formulations of modern ecological thought. Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France offers readers the considerable pleasure of rediscovering one of the most important and most neglected painters of the nineteenth century.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*

Author

Greg M. Thomas

PublisherPrinceton University Press

Print publication date May 2000 (out of print)

Print ISBN 9780691059464

EISBN 9780300273694

Illustrations 90

Print Status out of print

Publisher (out of print)

WorldCat

Google Books

Base text size -

Chapter images ()