Abstract
Provence, a travel narrative published by Ford Madox Ford in 1935, is both an invitation to reading and viewing through Ford's own text and Janice Biala's drawings that illustrate it. Alongside the narrator's progress to and through Provence, the reader's progress through the text is delineated as the progress of an art lover in a museum. Both through the agency of its genre and its iconotextual quality, the book immediately qualifies as a literary museum.However the interart dialogue is taken much further in Provence, probably because of the author's long acquaintance with painters and painting. At the centre of the narrator's travel, a visit of Avignon museum takes place. On that occasion, the paintings selected by the narrator and which appear both in absentia and in praesentia in the text in a dialogic exchange between Ford and Biala, are worth considering as well as their dialogue with the text. The poetic and heuristic functions of the actual ekphraseis will be scrutinised. How this visit and the works of art described—votive paintings mainly—reflect on the definition of Ford's own creative art and come to modify the status of a literary genre, namely, travel-writing ; how they help to further define Provence as a museum while redefining the very notion of museum : these will be the issues broached in this article that will aim at a finer appraisal of Ford's aesthetic and its ethical import.
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