Ecole Des Beaux Arts Research Articles

Thesis Supervisory Panels as the New Design Studio Paradigm in UTM Master of Architecture Programme

The UTM’s M.Arch programme revitalized its Design Studio programme, also known as the Architectural Design Thesis (ADT), when it introduced the Thesis Supervisory Panel system in 2013. Developed as an expansion from the preceding 5-year B.Arch and 3+3 Integration programme, the ADT expanded the previous 2-stage final year Design Studio spanning over two semesters into four, introducing the TSP, implementing the vertical studio and allowing students to choose their own paths. The programme was developed from the Workbase system, a hands-on, master-led Design Studio approach influenced by Ecole des Beaux Arts and Bauhaus. The authors intend to tell the story of the programme and its changes throughout the years. This paper records the growth and development of the TSPs in the M.Arch programme, tracing its origin in the Workbase practiced since the 1980s with data collected from the Thesis Coordinator’s files, departmental publications and documentations and have been organized in a simple narrative. By framing the narrative on the back story of the TSPs, the paper offer better understanding on the inner workings of the UTM M.Arch studio programme and encourages improving and strengthening the established system and opens up new studies that could enrich and diversify it further.

BASIC DESIGN EDUCATION PARAMETERS IN TURKEY

BASIC DESIGN EDUCATION PARAMETERS IN TURKEY

Starting and Today of the Interior Architecture Education; A Comparative Research on the Models of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Sanayi-i Nefise Mekteb-i Alisi (Former Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University) and Ecole Des Beaux Arts

The aim of the research is to examine the education model and architecture and decorative arts programmes formed by taking the “Ecole des Beaux Arts” as model in which Alexander VALLAURY, the founder of the Sanayi_i Nefise Mekteb-i Alisi which is the first school that trains certified architect in the Ottoman and Turkish Republic, received education and to compare it with the MSGSÜ Department of Interior architecture. This research covers the France, Ecole des Beaux Arts Department of architecture (approximately 1796-1907), Sanayi-i Nefise Mekteb-i Alisi Departments of Architecture and Decorative Arts (Turkish Republic Education Board published in hijri 1340) and MSGSÜ, Faculty of Architecture, Department of Interior Architecture. For this research, the resource and literature review have been done and the data belonging to the first education model which has been determined to continue till 1930 and regulations and programmes have been examined and the comparisons have been made.

Hokusai and Viollet-le-Duc: Eurasian Roots of Design Aesthetics

Although the idea of ＂fine arts＂ or ＂beaux-arts＂ certainly originated in Europe, the ideas of ＂art＂ or ＂arts＂ had already existed in Asia since antiquity or no later than the middle ages. Above all, such elitist terms as ＂beaux-arts＂ or ＂fine arts＂ is a kind of modern concept formulated in the 18th century. Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879), an architect, theoretician, and major critic of ＂academic＂ fine-arts education in France and the Ecole des beaux-arts of Paris, equally appreciated the artistic talent of Italian Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Japanese master of printmaking Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) in his last publication ＂Histoire d’un dessinateur＂ (History of a designer) published in Paris in 1879. Hokusai is now world-famous as the artist of some celebrated ukiyo-e prints such as ＂Great Wave off Kanagawa or Red Fuji＂. He was most influential and well-known in 19th-century Europe, however, for his series of ＂Hokusai manga＂, 15 volumes sketches published between 1814 and 1878, the last volumes being posthumously published in Tokyo, a year before the publication of the ＂Histoire d'un dessinateur＂. ＂Hokusai manga＂ means a ＂random collection of Hokusai's drawings＂ rather than a collection of ＂cartoons＂ or ＂comics＂ by Hokusai. It was a veritable encyclopedia of Japanese life and landscape by a versatile Asian artist and designer with whom another all-round European designer Viollet-lu-Duc must have immediately identified himself. His last publication ＂Histoire d’un dessinateur＂, perhaps inspired by the ＂Hokusai manga＂ and a very rare book which used the term ＂dessinateur＂ (designer) in France, was a kind of the last words of Viollet-le-Duc who fought against ＂academic＂ teaching of ＂fine-arts＂ throughout his lifetime for more rational, un-academic, and democratic ＂arts,＂ while worrying about the outdated ＂design＂ education in France.

Töchter of Feminism: Germany and the Modern Woman Artist

Töchter of Feminism:Germany and the Modern Woman Artist Diane Radycki (bio) It long ago caught my attention that in the early 20th century—a period in art when Paris reigned supreme—few modern women artists were French. Overwhelmingly, the women artists of this period were connected to Germany, rather than to Paris or London. This was so whether they were Expressionists, Cubists, Dadaists, Constructivists, or Surrealists [Figure 1]. Either these women were themselves native Germans, such as Käthe Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Hannah Höch, Gabriele Münter, Clara Rilke-Westhoff, and Renée Sintenis, or they were schooled in Germany, as were the Americans Florine Stettheimer, Katherine Dreier, and Louise Nevelson (all in Munich), the Ukrainian Sonia Terk-Delaunay (in Karlsruhe), and the Swiss Sophie Taeuber-Arp in (Munich and Hamburg) and Meret Oppenheim (in southern Germany, as well as Basel). The exceptions to the rule are the Russians and the French. Yet, the Russian Marianne Werefkin spent her professional life working in Munich; while Natalia Goncharova and Alexandra Exter were active in the exchanges in the 1920s between the Russian and German Constructivists. Even the French exceptions were not without German connections. The naïf Séraphine Louis (aka de Senlis) was working as a servant when, at age forty-two, she was discovered and promoted by the important German critic Wilhelm Uhde, the biographer of Henri Rousseau, modernism’s primitive painter par-excellence.1 And the influential German gallerists Alfred Flechtheim and Herman von Wedderkop delivered the French Cubist Marie Laurencin to a major German audience. Not all early modernist women artists had a relationship to Germany. The notorious Suzanne Valadon had nothing to do with Germanay. Nor did the widely exhibited and reviewed Emilie Charmy (French) and Maria Blanchard (Spanish), both of whom are discussed by Gill Perry in Women Artists and the Parisian Avant Garde (1995). But the latter two are not found in the standard art historical surveys of modernism. What I want to investigate—and speculate on—is the relationship between Germany and those modern women artists who are in the canon. Where to start? One obvious place may well be art school. Was girls’ art schooling at the turn of the century so different—so superior?—in Germany that it would account for the overwhelming place in the modernist sun for the women artists trained there? In fact, the German system at the time was more conservative than the systems in France and England. For one thing, it was not coeducational. “Female students will find no admission” is a literal translation of Schülerinnen finden keine Aufnahme, a notice advertised by the Royal Academy School for Fine Arts in a 1906 German school directory.2 As a consequence, schools for girls—“Ladies’ Academies” or Damen Akademie—were established by women artists themselves, organized together in the “Union of Women Artists” (Verein der Künstlerinnen). [End Page 43] These Damen Akademies gained recognition—and partial support—from the government; in effect, they became annexes to the all-male Royal Academy art schools in Berlin, Munich, Dusseldorf, and Karlsruhe. Royal Academicians often moonlighted teaching girls at Damen Akademies. However, the training in these women-only art schools was expensive—more than six times what male students paid at the schools of the Royal Academy. Compared to the curriculum of the Royal Academy, that of the Damen Akademie was shorter and the study was less rigorous. Let me give an example related by a student and friend of Kollwitz of their experience in an anatomy class at the Damen Akademie in Berlin in the 1880s. “Instruction” consisted of a box full of bones passed around among the girls. They were never told which bones were which or how they fit together in a skeleton.3 Kollwitz, by her own accounting, mastered faces and hands—as naught else anatomically was available for her study. When Paula Modersohn-Becker took an anatomy class at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1900, she exclaimed that anatomy was explained to her there as it never had been explained to her before: with diagrams, models, and drawings.4 Before she went to Paris, Becker, too, studied at...

American Architecture Students in Belle Epoque Paris: Scholastic Strategies and Achievements at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts

The Gilded Age and Progressive Era witnessed the largest influx of American architecture students to the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The U.S. contingent—120 students admitted in the 1890s, 154 in the 1900s—accounted for 10 to nearly 20 percent of incoming students each year. This illustrated essay uses projects prepared by these students to introduce the major features and principles of the Ecole's architecture curriculum, in particular the physical and instructional framework of the atelier and the medium of the concours. The essay presents a step-by-step selection of projects by American students admitted between 1890 and 1909. These range from a twelve-hour sketch problem required for the admission competition to a diplôme (masters' thesis). Beyond introducing the Beaux-Arts method of instruction, these prints provide insight into the subsequent American career of their authors and thus of American architecture and urban design overall, given the enormous influence exerted by the Ecole des Beaux Arts and its anciens élèves. Drawings requested from Ecole students were not just artfully composed and brilliantly rendered pictures. They were problem-solving endeavors. Former students preserved them not only as study models, but also as status symbols, even trophies.

A Mural Carved in Stone

The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts appears as both a fortress and a temple of art and caused a sensation when it opened in 1876. While much has been written about the building and its principal architect Frank Furness, there is scant mention of the six carved metopes on the building's exterior that replicate Paul Delaroche's 1853 Hemicycle in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts's Salle des Prix. This essay explores how the carved appropriation of the Hemicycle, which as early as 1855 was acclaimed in the United States as "one of the most remarkable works which painting has ever produced," signaled the Academy's function and purpose, and why a copy of a French mural painting carved in stone was deemed appropriate for the exterior of an American museum and art school.

Art without Culture

Product Review| June 01 2010 Art without Culture A review of Braddock, Alan C., Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Cited in the text as TE. Alex Benson Alex Benson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Qui Parle (2010) 19 (1): 181–192. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.19.1.0181 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Alex Benson; Art without Culture. Qui Parle 1 June 2010; 19 (1): 181–192. doi: https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.19.1.0181 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsQui Parle Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2010 Qui Parle2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Review Essays You do not currently have access to this content.

Pasadena's Civic Center: A Grand Vision Realized, Despoiled, and Revived

The story of Pasadena's civic center parallels the broad outlines of developments in twentieth-century American architecture and city planning. Beginning with the City Beautiful movement in the early 1900s that was driven by civic improvement organizations, often preponderantly female and led by a cultural elite, several Beaux Arts civic center plans were produced, most notably in Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco. City planners and civic elites envisioned ensembles of public buildings that emulated the squares of Europe, with the important difference that in America the focus would be a civic building, a state capitol or a city hall, in place of the church or cathedral that dominated the European public square. For the most part, the medieval town did not allow Renaissance and Baroque thinkers to impose their plans for grand axial vistas on existing cities, although these visions were worked out in garden designs. At the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where Haussmann had transformed the medieval city in the nineteenth century, American architects learned the precepts of Beaux Arts planning and design and saw with their own eyes the visual effects of broad tree-lined boulevards terminated by monumental works of architecture to create grand urban vistas.

Vizcaya. An American Villa and Its Makers by Witold Rybczynski, Laurie Olin

BOOK REVIEWS Witold Rybczynski and Laurie Olin. Vizcaya. An American Villa and Its Makers. Phi ladeIph ia University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, 320 pp., color and blackand -white photographs, hardcover, S34 95, ISBN o-81223951 -2. Vizcaya, perched on the edge of Biscayne Bay in 1\fiami, Florida, and built specifically for a tropical climate, is one of the great villas of the American Renaissance. Until now, it has been overlooked by other period studies. But vVitold Rybczynski and Laurie Olin, noted scholars on the built environment, have filled this gap in the period scholarship vvith their book, Vizcaya. An American ViLla and Its A1akers. This study presents an intimate portrait of the estate, its designers, and the history of its creation. Designed and built betv,,een 1912 and 1921, Vizcaya served as the winter retreat of wealthy entrepreneur James Deering. The house and gardens were the result of a most unusual collaboration of "three neophytes:" Paul Chalfin, F. Burrell HoffmanJr., and Diego Suarez. Although Deering was active in the design process, Chalfin remained the primary force at Vizcaya, involving himself in all aspects of the estate's design, construction, and furnishing. Chalfin had studied painting at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, was vvell traveled, and \·vas familiar vvith the Ne'v York and Boston art scenes; he also knew the 60 ARRIS I VO LU M E N I NET EEN 2008 circle surrounding Isabella Ste\·vart Gardner. The overall impression given of him in the book is that he was able to manipulate the design and financial aspects of the project, often \vhile assuming total authorship. Hoffman, vvho served as the architect for the project, had studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and had worked briefly for Carrere and Hastings before opening his ovvn office. Suarez \·vas a landscape designer from Columbia, who had studied architecture in Italy, and had designed and restored several Italian gardens. \Vith the backing of James Deering's International Harvester fortune, these three men together created Vizcaya, a masterpiece that none of the three would subsequently equal on his ovm. The estate, an eclectic .Mediterranean revival design , drew on a variety of precedents including the villas of the Veneto and Tuscany, particularly Baldassare Longhena's Villa Rezzonico, and other important monuments of Italian Baroque architecture. The men also relied on literary sources such as. Edith \Vharton's Italian Vdfas and Gardens (1904), Sir George Sit\vell's On the i\1/aking of Gardens (1909), and Geoffrey Scott's Architecture C?f Humanism (1914). The overall goal, however, \Vas to transcend specific historical precedent to create a fantastic impression of history. The result was an intriguing mixture of the knowledge, experiences, and imagination of all four men that created a statement all its own. Best approached by boat, the house presented its formal facade to the bay, which was framed by t\VO curved extensions of the seawall. A spectacular breakwater in the form of a ship was accented by obelisks, encrusted with sculpture, and covered with greenery. A symmetrical facade of two towers flanking a triplearched loggia and crO\vned with a scrolled parapet opened onto a raised terrace once covered with grass. Construction was of concrete, accented with a variety of stonework, including the local, rough coral rock, and architectural elements purchased abroad. Arrival by land was only slightly less impressive, beginning at the gatehouse at South fv1iami Avenue and passing through the lush hardwood hammocks and forecourts, past sculptures , herms, and cascading fountains, before arriving a second time at the house. The south facade opened onto formal gardens, \·vhich vvere carefully planned to include a variety of architectural elements: a labyrinth, a secret garden, a theater garden, fountains, grottos, sculpture, and, beyond the casino, a now lost, Venetian-inspired garden of canals, waterways, islands, tennis courts, and a summer house. To the north, a small swimming pool slipped under the house, creating a grotto accented with shells from the \Vest Indies. In addition to the formal gardens, Vizcaya also vvas a working agricultural villa, with the partially extant Village located across South :Miami Avenue. \ 1Vhat distinguished Vizcaya from many of the other grand estates of the Gilded Age...

David Georges Emmerich Professor of Morphology

David Georges Emmerich taught morphology at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and later at the Paris-La Villette School of Architecture from 1965 to 1990. An architect and engineer by training, convinced of the modern movement's inability to provide mankind with the architectural space needed, his research led to constructive systems using cheap, industrialised components, with wide scope for self-help housing as well as a broad range of architectural structures. His extensive study of regular partitioning in space, natural shapes, the resistance of shapes and combinatorial analysis led him to developing stereometric systems; and, more specifically, to the invention of self-tensioning, or tensegrity, structures.

Optics and Biologic Connectedness

“...I is this passion for beautiful colors that makes us paint as we do... and not the love of the ‘dot,’ as foolish people say,” wrote painter Paul Signac in his journal (1). He was defending the art movement started by his good friend and fellow artist George Seurat and built upon by Signac himself, Camille Pissarro, and others. This movement, divisionism or pointillism, was Seurat’s artistic contribution during a brief but extraordinary life. Parisian from a middle-class family, tall, and handsome, Seurat enjoyed a comfortable life and proper education. He showed early talent for drawing, studied sculpture, and attended the prestigious Ecole Des Beaux-Arts. A competent photographer, he became interested in the workings of light, particularly in black-and-white images. This interest grew as he studied optics and the processes at work on the silver particles of photographic film (2). During his art studies, particularly under the tutelage of a student of Ingres, he came to believe in a systematic approach to art. Nicknamed “le notaire” (the notary) for his immaculate attention to his appearance, Seurat was temperamentally suited for a scientific approach to art (3). Idiosyncratically bent toward order and control and gifted with formidable observational skills, patience, concentration, and painstaking adherence to detail, he embarked on a style of painting based on color and structure that was cerebral and calculated. Like the impressionists, Seurat was interested in the relationship between natural light and the application of paint, only he wanted to create an impression not on the canvas but in the mind of the viewer. Influenced by the work of French chemist Michel-Eugene Chevreul (1786–1889), he believed that next to each other, colors appear as dissimilar as possible, both in optical composition and tonal value (4). Seurat’s color theory, in which the viewer plays a key role in perception, influenced the development of modern art. His artistic goal, Seurat once said, was to show “modern people, in their essential traits, move about as if on friezes, and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of color, by directions of the tones in harmony with the lines, and by the directions of the lines” (5). In his best known work, images are tightly structured as if on a grid, the figures systematically placed in relation to each other in permanent, non-negotiable arrangements. Pure color is used directly from the tube, in static “points” clearly separate but intended to merge in the viewer’s eye, producing a confluent image brighter than any achieved with brushstrokes. Like many scientific experiments, Seurat’s daring process had unexpected results. The points remained visible, akin to tesserae in a mosaic, but produced a shimmering translucent effect (5). A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, on this month’s cover of Emerging Infectious Diseases, is Seurat’s masterpiece and one of the bestknown works of the 19th century. The placid scene in an island park on the Seine shows a local crowd during a moment of leisure outdoors. Seurat’s version of this commonplace event is revolutionary. As figures register in the viewer’s eye, they seem suspended in mid-moment, levitating yet permanently fixed. Prototypes rather than likenesses, they represent workers in shirt sleeves, fashionable couples, children at play, soldiers in uniform. Seurat did not dwell

In Australia, between America and Europe, Beaux Arts and Modernism, Scholarship and Qualification: The Melbourne University Architectural Atelier, 1919–1947

The role of architectural education in facilitating the international flow of ideas and developing the local profession during the interwar period is relatively underexplored. In Australia, the Melbourne University Architectural Atelier (1919–1947) was instrumental in introducing foreign methodologies while promoting a locally inflected paradigm of modern architecture. Based initially on the Ecole des Beaux Arts, the atelier's emphasis on composition and form, rather than a single accepted architectural style, fostered a culture of experimentation among Australian architects. But its focus on scholarship instead of professional qualification led to its eventual demise, highlighting the complex relationship between global design culture and local architectural practice.

The Exchange of Models in Florentine Workshops of the Quattrocento: A Sheet from the 'Verrocchio Sketchbook'

nineteenth century, twenty-nine pages are known. On them are sketches brought to various stages of completion, mostly copies of sculptures and drawings, and many notes that do not bear any direct relationship to the images. The text and drawings appear to belong to different phases of use, although they were probably executed during the same years in the same workshop: it seems most likely that the sheets, already partially covered with sketches of various sorts, were later made use of for the writing of records, accounts and notes. The 'Sketchbook', which bears the date '1487' on three of its sheets (Chantilly, Musee Conde, inv. 21, 22, 23) and '1488' on another (Paris, Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, inv. 374), was executed in the workshop of the sculptor Francesco di Simone Ferrucci from Fiesole, as has been largely agreed since the studies of Giovanni Morelli.1

Between two cultures: late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chinese paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

During a crucial period from the 1860s to about 1980, Chinese painting was transformed into a modern expression of its classical heritage. This book draws on a selection of modern Chinese paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in order to explore this period, discussing issues of modernity and creativity in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Chinese painting. Wen C. Fong deals with both traditionalist and modernising Chinese masters from the comparative perspective of East and West, traditional and modern. He begins by examining the last traditional 'revival', the epigraphic school of painting, and the rise of a populist art in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai. Next he focuses on painters who absorbed the lessons of Western realism, in particular one artist who followed the Ecole des Beaux Arts and one who adapted the model of the Japanese Nihonga painters, and on three great traditionalist masters, two of whom were professional populist painters. Finally he explores Chinese painting from about 1950 to 1980 by the second generation of artists and teachers in the national academies who, having been trained by traditionalist and Western-style teachers, developed their own schools of influence in their search for a new synthesis of Chinese and Western methods. Wen C. Fong is Douglas Dillon Curator Emeritus of Asian Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and former Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He is also the author of Beyond Representation, published by Yale University Press.

Poussin's lesson: Representing representation in the Romantic Age

Paul Delaroche's mural for the Hemicycle of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, inaugurated in December 1841, is a piece of pedagogical theater. It was here, in the amphitheater designed by Felix Duban, that students, teachers, and administrators assembled for the official distribution of prizes and awards. Much more than just an amphitheater, the hemicycle stood at the ritual pinnacle of the emulative system that dominated the curriculum of the Ecole and that structured the experience of its students. No wonder Delaroche leaped at the opportunity to execute this prestigious commission, so patently did it offer him the opportunity to confer to future generations of artists the lessons drawn from two decades of high accomplishment (figure 1).

Learning by Example: Architectural Education in New Zealand Before 1940

The training in Design is based upon the world-famous system adopted by the Ecole des Beaux Arts at Paris, which has been followed by Liverpool, Manchester, and London University Schools of Architecture with such distinguished success. It is also the system operative at the Architectural Association Schools in London and most of the American Universities. Auckland University College School of Architecture Prospectus, 1927, p. 6.

Microbial degradation of paintings

“… l’alliance possible et desiderable de la Science et de l’Art… ,” Louis Pasteur, when he was nominated to the first chair in physical chemistry at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. In 1940 four young men discovered the Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne region of France. The cave

NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH PAINTING PRACTICES AND MATERIALS IN THE TROPICS: A CASE STUDY OF THE OEUVRE OF ROBERTO LEWIS IN PANAMA

NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH PAINTING PRACTICES AND MATERIALS IN THE TROPICS: A CASE STUDY OF THE OEUVRE OF ROBERTO LEWIS IN PANAMA

The Fonds Schoelcher: History and Contents

The French writer and politician Victor Schoelcher is well known to scholars of George Frideric Handel's life and works as author of an important biography of the composer, The Life of Handel (London, 1857). Schoelcher was also a cataloguer and avid collector of Handel's music. His catalogues, though never published, have served as a basis for subsequent efforts, and his collection of manuscripts, printed editions, and librettos must be counted as one of the major Handel collections. Schoelcher's Handel library, now at the Bibliotheque nationale, Paris, has lain in relative obscurity: there is only one scholarly study of it in the literature (1) and there is no published catalogue. The collection, however, merits much greater attention. A summary, manuscript listing of part of its contents can be found at the Bibliotheque nationale, and that list, combined with Schoelcher's own catalogue of his library and with a rough estimate of as yet uninventoried portions of the collection, shows that the Fonds Schoelcher numbers more than three thousand items, including eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuscripts, first and early editions, arrangements, opera and oratorio librettos, newspaper clippings, programs, tickets, and even posters. I am presently cataloguing the collection and offer here a preliminary report on its history and contents. I emphasize the fact that this report is preliminary: so far, I have catalogued about 1,300 items. Nonetheless, it is already clear that this is an important collection that deserves to be better known. VICTOR SCHOELCHER (1804-1893) The son of a porcelain manufacturer, Schoelcher first made his mark as an art critic, but it was during a voyage to the Caribbean and the southern United States in 1829-30 that he found his true calling, when he encountered slavery for the first time. From that date on, Schoelcher was a tireless champion for the slaves of the French territories, publishing numerous pamphlets and books based on research conducted in many of the countries where involuntary servitude was practiced. When he was appointed Under-Secretary of State for the colonies in 1848, he wrote, and succeeded in passing, the law abolishing slavery in the French colonies. For that, Schoelcher is still revered in the Caribbean today: in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guyana monuments evoke his memory, his portrait graces the majority of town halls, and the esprit schoelcherien is referred to almost daily in the press. (2) Schoelcher opposed the coup d'etat of December 1851 and, like his friend Victor Hugo and many others, was exiled. Schoelcher spent the next eighteen and one-half years in England. In August 1870 he returned to France and directed a legion of artillery during the siege of Paris. In 1871 he was elected to the National Assembly, where he served until being voted a senator for life in December 1875. Schoelcher was a prolific author; many, but by no means all, of his writings concern the abolition of slavery. (3) He also campaigned for prison reform and revocation of the death penalty, fought for the rights of women and children, chronicled various historical events of his time, and wrote essays and two books on music, the Life of Handel and La Modernite de la musique (Paris, 1881). Finally, he was a distinguished collector. His library, a point of pride, was noted by more than one contemporary. Over the course of his long life, Schoelcher amassed a remarkable collection that was generously given before his death to a variety of libraries and museums. (4) To the Bibliotheque nationale he gave several thousand books in 1884 and, according to one author, a further 18,000 volumes after his death in 1893. (5) Between 1879 and 1885 he donated to the Ecole des Beaux Arts a collection of more than 9,000 engravings along with 500 reference works and a detailed, six-volume manuscript catalogue he co-authored with his colleague Wundt. …