THE LIBRARY OF the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris conserves an unpublished manuscript version of the Procès-verbaux of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. This little-known document, entitled ‘Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (1648–1722). Etablissement, statuts, réglements, comptes-rendus des séances, présentation et réception des membres’, contains new information about the institution’s functioning during the Regency of Orléans. Notably, it lists previously unknown winners of quarterly drawing competitions in the years 1715–21 and gives a more detailed account of the concurrent painting competitions. It also throws fresh light on the early academic careers of several major eighteenth-century painters such as Chardin and Vanloo.

IN 1971 Didier Bodart published the journal of a French painter living in Florence in 1821 whose identity was unknown but who, as the diary revealed, was in frequent and close contact with Ingres during the early months of the latter’s four-year stay in the city. The journal is thus cited as evidence of Ingres’s day-to-day existence at this period: the anonymous painter first visited him on 27th April 1821 and admired his portrait of the Russian chargé d’affaires Count Gouriev; he borrowed Flaxman’s Tragedies of Aeschylus from Ingres, took advice about his own work and accompanied him to the studio of Lorenzo Bartolini; he arranged for Jean-Pierre Gonin, a Swiss merchant, to commission two portraits from Ingres for a sizeable price; he was pleased that Ingres approved of his View of Florence from the Cascine which he showed him; and he walked with him in the Boboli gardens. Bodart gleaned some information about the painter’s background from internal evidence: a landscapist working in watercolour and oils, he also produced fixés – small paintings in oil on taffeta applied to a sheet of glass – which he sold to foreigners passing through, or residing in, Florence; a list of paintings, dated 12th November, also figures in the diary. When he began the diary on 1st January 1821, the writer had recently moved to Florence from Rome, since he soon noted the arrival from Rome of the case containing his paintings and studies. Indeed, as we shall see, he had probably met Ingres in Rome, where the latter had been based since 1806.

TO BEGIN BY considering two paintings, both entitled Le Peintre et son modèle, dated 1920 and 1944 respectively (Figs.20 and 21), is a fruitful introduction to the two painters who are the subject of this article. The earlier work is by André Lhote (1885–1962), the Bordeaux-born painter who had his first solo show in Paris in November 1910, exhibited in the milieu of Cubism, became the regular art critic for the Nouvelle Revue française from 1919 and, in 1925, opened his own academy to consolidate a career as an esteemed pedagogue whose atelier instruction guided numerous artists in their early years. The second, later painting is by Jean Bazaine (1904–2001) who, after studying painting, sculpture and art history, in addition to making various forays into writing, showed his work and published regular art criticism throughout the 1930s before becoming a major figure in the so-called Nouvelle Ecole de Paris after 1944. Both paintings present a glimpse into the private studio of each artist and, presumably, into their individual working practices, articulated through the dialogue between artist and model, subject and object. In Lhote’s demonstrative canvas, the artist is emphatically male; his jutting pipe and scythe-shaped palette confront the nude female model posing by the side of the easel. On the canvas reappears the model’s transformed body, her warm flesh become dull, monochrome, geometrically angled and flattened into planes, to the extent that one wonders if the painted figure is to be condemned rather than admired.

IN 1868 AND 1869 Manet sent paintings to group exhibitions in at least three provincial cities in France. From 15th July 1868 until the end of that month, The dead man (now usually called The dead toreador; Fig.32) was on view in Le Havre where it received a silver medal, and in December Manet exhibited The Spanish singer and Boy with a sword (both Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) at the Société Artistique des Bouches-du-Rhône in Marseille, where they were offered for sale. Then in January 1869 an exhibition at the Société des Amis des Arts de Lyon opened. There were high hopes in Lyon that increasing numbers of Parisian artists would send works to the Société’s annual exhibition. Manet exhibited three works, also for sale: The dead man, Still life (now called The rabbit; Fig.31) and Le Gamin (probably Boy with dog; Fig.33). The decidedly mixed critical success of Manet’s participation in the group show, combined with the increasing political uncertainty in France in 1869, put an end to this run of provincial exhibitions. At the same time, the Lyon exhibition sheds light on the fascinating perceptual interplay between the capital and the many provincial French cities that held annual Salons.

BETWEEN JUNE AND December 1820 the entrepreneur William Bullock exhibited in London Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (Musée du Louvre, Paris). Lee Johnson showed that the critical record of the exhibition was enthusiastic and extensive. However, Johnson says that when the Raft was shown in Dublin from February to March 1821, it ‘appears to have evoked no comment in the Dublin Press’ – at least, as he cautiously added, not in any of the five newspapers he had surveyed. Johnson’s caution was well founded, because the Raft of the Medusa did indeed receive attention in the Irish press. Of the five papers he mentioned, four carry no criticism or review of the painting but, despite Johnson’s statement to the contrary, the Dublin Journal did carry a review, albeit inconspicuously in a column headed ‘The Theatre’. It enthusiastically conveyed the full merit of ‘this noble picture [. . .] beyond all competition the finest production of the art ever exhibited in this country’, which, it claimed, could be compared only to Raphael’s Transfiguration for its ‘universality of feeling and interest’. Although many subsequent writers have reiterated Johnson’s findings, none has gone so far as to endorse Lorenz Eitner’s assertion that, apart from advertisements, the exhibition ‘was ignored by the Dublin press’ and that it ‘received no mention in the Dublin papers’. A new survey of Dublin newspapers provides an opportunity to revise this opinion and to add to the documentation of the reception of this great painting.

IN HIS BIOGRAPHY of Paul Cézanne, John Rewald mentions, without giving details, the time the painter spent in August 1864 at ‘l’Estaque, a small fishing village near Marseille’. This reference is based, in fact, on a letter from Cézanne which is not included in his published correspondence and which Rewald had discovered and transcribed before supplying the present writers with a copy in June 1986. The letter, which is held by the Bibliothèque Doucet (Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie, Paris), is written in pencil and brown ink, on a folded sheet of thin beige paper whose outer surface serves as an envelope. One of the corners is torn, so the address is incomplete and reads as follows: Monsieur / [S]aint-Martin av[oca]t / rue Vacon 36 / Marseille. We therefore tried to find out a little more about the addressee, virtually unmentioned in the Cézanne literature.

PHILIP CONISBEE, Senior Curator of European Paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, died on 16th January 2008 at his home in Washington. He was among the most prominent members of a group of British art historians who moved to the United States in the 1980s. In his adopted country (he became a U.S. citizen in 1994) he broadened his scholarship, earlier focused on eighteenth-century French painting, to embrace a wider range of French art, from Georges de La Tour to Paul Cézanne, as well as other national schools, such as Danish painting of the Golden Age and German Romanticism. Tall, urbane and witty, Philip was an influential scholar and a great public advocate for art. From 1973 onwards he was a valued and prolific contributor to THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE.