French Pictures Research Articles

The Idea of Fate in Russian, French, and Chinese Cultures

The article is devoted to the comparative description of the ideas of fate in three national worldviews — Russian, French and Chinese. These worldviews are reconstructed from linguistic data and cultural context. In each of the languages, the synonymic series of the concept is described, etymology, mythological and philosophical origins, modern meanings and compatibility are analyzed. The result of the study is identification of similarities and differences in the ideas about the fate among these peoples. We see that the Russian field of fate is verbal, the French semantic is associated with the idea of falling-falling out, and the Chinese is associated with such actions as changing and understanding. The actual interrelationships of the Russian concept are an indication of the causes of the damage , the French one is a source of well–being, the Chinese one is with ideas about possibility and dependence. The Russian creation personifies the concept of fate in the image of a self-willed woman, as well as in the French picture of the world, while the Chinese figurative thinking identifies fate with a code, an assistant or a rival. In the Russian picture of the world, a person is passive in relation to his fate, in the French he is active, he fights with it, the Chinese gestalt unites both: you can passively accept, you can actively fight.

The Stafford Gallery: The greatest art collection of Regency London

Early in his new book, The Stafford Gallery, Peter Humfrey writes that the aristocratic collection and art gallery of the title formed not only ‘the most important collection of Old Masters in the Regency period’ but marked ‘a climax in the long history of aristocratic collecting’. Indeed, so significant (and unusually well documented) is the collection described in this book that in recent years a number of scholars – the writer of this review included – have elaborated various aspects of the collection’s formation and the history of its display in a series of different spaces, galleries and public museums from its formation in the 1790s to the present. Humfrey’s book is a welcome addition to this body of research. Over the course of four long chapters, generously illustrated with colour reproductions, he chronicles the development of the Bridgewater / Stafford / Sutherland collection during a period of more than a century. The collection was built by three successive generations, beginning with Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the duke transformed the immense fortune he had gained in building canals in the West Midlands into the cultural prestige represented by collecting Old Masters. It was towards the end of the duke’s life that he and two of his nephews collaborated to acquire a large group of highly sought-after Italian and French pictures from the Orléans collection, a prestigious collection that had been formed by the ducs d’Orléans and displayed in their Parisian residence, the Palais-Royal, for much of the eighteenth century. At his death in 1803, Bridgewater left his collection to one of these nephews, the Marquess of Stafford (later created Duke of Sutherland), who augmented and refined his uncle’s collection and enlarged the duke’s gallery at Cleveland House, London, for its display. And, finally, the Staffords’ two sons, the 2nd Duke of Sutherland and the Earl of Ellesmere, each inherited a portion of the collection, developing and displaying it in ways that again departed from those of the previous generations. Humfrey’s work consolidates and extends the deep and wide-ranging research that has been undertaken over many years by scholars (Nicholas Penny and Julia Armstrong-Totten are two who deserve special note for having laid important groundwork for this study) into the labyrinthine series of transactions that attended the Orléans acquisitions, making clear that the formation of a collection as large, prestigious and influential as the Bridgewater / Stafford / Sutherland collection was a messy process, dependent on a range of contingencies from the personal to the political.

Memorializing the Wars of Religion in Early Seventeenth-Century French Picture Galleries: Protestants and Catholics Painting the Contested Past

AbstractThis article examines how Protestant and Catholic elites in early seventeenth-century France memorialized the Wars of Religion in purpose-built picture galleries. Postwar France remained a divided nation, and portrait galleries offered a sectarian memory of the conflict, glorifying party heroes. Historical picture galleries, on the other hand, promoted a shared memory of the wars, focusing on King Henry IV’s successful campaign against the Catholic League to unite the kingdom. This article argues that postwar elites made a sincere effort to manage religious tensions by allowing partisan memories to circulate in private while promoting a consensual memory in public.

Transmitting Avant-garde Art: Post-impressionism in a Dublin Context

This essay explores how the London art press affected debates on avant-garde art in Ireland prior to World War I. The emergence of new specialist art periodicals, such as The Studio, The Connoisseur, and The Burlington Magazine, provided access to metropolitan ideas on art for those seeking an alternative to the dominant discourses in their own regions or nascent nations. While the significance and impact of Roger Fry's (1866–1934) groundbreaking post-impressionist exhibitions of 1910–1912 have been extensively explored, it is often forgotten that versions of these exhibitions were also shown in Dublin at a pivotal moment in Ireland's history. Taking as its case study the staging of Exhibition of Works by Post-Impressionist Painters (1911) and Modern French Pictures (1912) at the United Arts Club Dublin, this essay examines the critical contexts around them. It focuses on Ellen Duncan (1850–1937), the curator and instigator of both exhibitions, who began her foray into visual art through her contributions to the art press. Duncan defended the exhibitions in the Irish press, advocating the individuality and freedom of avant-garde culture. “Old forms must become outworn,” she asserted. This essay also explores how the overturning of traditional ideas found in post-impressionist art was for some a radical model for the invention of a New Ireland.

The 3rd Duke of Bridgewater as a collector of Old Master paintings

In the last decade of his life the Duke of Bridgewater (1736–1803), who had amassed enormous wealth from developing canals in the north-west of England, became a major collector of continental Old Master paintings, thereby founding what was to become the greatest private art collection in nineteenth-century London. His most spectacular purchase was the acquisition in 1798 of sixty-four Italian and French pictures, previously in the Orléans collection in Paris, many of them of outstanding quality. But more than twice this number in his collection were Dutch, including some thirty identified here as bought at the Gildemeester sale in Amsterdam in 1800. The present article traces the development of the Bridgewater collection, from early commissions by the Duke on his Grand Tour of 1753–5 to his late spending spree of the 1790s. It also considers the installation of his growing collection at his London home of Cleveland House, St James’s.

French Portraits of Byron, 1824–1880

The chameleon-like character of Byron makes it difficult to portray him. (Lady Blessington) Lady Blessington's comment about portraying Byron in words is just as applicable to the visual arts.1 In France, the many painted, engraved and sculpted portraits of Byron, produced from the beginning of what the poet himself called the 'contagion of Byronism' all over Europe,2 freely fantasised about Byron's personality and physical appearance, but nevertheless marked the French mind for a long time, laying the foundations of what can be considered a typically French image of Byron. Very recently, a nineteenth-century portrait of a male appeared on the Parisian art market with the following attribution: 'Lord Byron. Painted in Venice in 1817 by Laurencel'. Though presented as an unknown picture of Lord Byron by a little-known French artist,3 the portrait in question is obviously not of Byron. Featuring a man of about 25-30 years of age, with curly hair, open collar, wearing a fur coat and adopting a pose which clearly calls to mind the most famous portraits of Byron, this oil-oncanvas painting answers to a very widespread French image of Byron, which first appeared around 1820 and still persists today. It would be interesting to know whether this portrait was originally meant as a portrait of Byron - being in that case a kind of imaginary or ideal depiction of the poet - or has only retrospectively been associated with him. But what I intend to discuss here deals more with the artistic evaluation of Byron in nineteenth-century France that allows for either possibility. In early nineteenth- century France, a certain idea of Byron came into being that is expressed very clearly in this portrait. What follows is concerned with the history of this distinctive idea of Byron in French art. It is well known that the distinction between Byron and his work was blurred in his readers' minds from the outset of his publishing career. In particular, as his French translator Amedee Pichot put it, he was a 'man identified with the portraits of his heroes'.4 As Victor Hugo wrote: 'As we know Byron only through his poems, it is sweet to us to suppose him a life according to his soul and genius'.5 This identification of fact with fiction strongly affected visual representations of the noble poet. In early nineteenth-century French pictures, Byron is represented not just as a young and handsome poet, but also a seducer - and this is generally achieved through the re-use of poses and features from his British portraits (often made, it is interesting to recall, after Byron's own instructions).6 In France and beyond, large nineteenth-century history paintings based on Byron's poems frequently make characters - usually Don Juan or Manfred - look like the Byron of portraiture. This practice originated in British art (such as Richard Westall's illustrations for Childe Harold's Pilgrimage), but soon spread to France. In 1829, Francois-Louis Dejuinne re-used Westall's 1813 portrait of Byron in his Childe Harold and Ines in Cadiz, a now lost painting known through a lithograph by Aubry Lecomte.7 In 1831, Alexandre-Marie Colin did the same in his Don Juan and Haidee.8 This helps to explain how the subject of a portrait of a young dandy in early 1820s' costume, with a Romantically untidy appearance, can be so easily misidentified as Byron - and why such misidentifications were not, and apparently are still not, at all rare in France. Numerous other portraits of unknown young men have been wrongly identified as portraits of Byron, such as an oil painting often attributed to Theodore Gericault and kept in the Musee Fabre in Montpellier, traditionally called Portrait of Lord Byron,9 or Paillot de Montabert's Portrait of Lord Byron, painted in the 1820s and kept in the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Troyes.10 The art historian George Williamson once suggested that the famous eighteenth-century French portraitist Elisabeth Vigee- Lebrun, Marie-Antoinette's favourite painter, could have executed, sometime around 1805, a portrait of Byron (who was only seventeen at the time). …

IFNγ and antibody responses among French nurses during a tuberculosis contact tracing investigation

Study A comparative study which compared PPD skin testing inserted according to the French Society of Pneumology's recommendations and interferon gamma release assay (IGRA) (QuantiFERON ® TB Gold In-tube, QF–TB–IT, Cellestis, Carnegie, Australia) was performed during a tuberculosis contact investigation in our hospital. Patients Nineteen French health-care workers (HCWs) volunteered to participate. All of the HCW enrolled were BCG vaccinated and had a normal chest X-ray at entry. Results Among the HCW, 68.4% were TST positive. By comparison, only 31.6% had a positive QF-TB-IT result. We took advantage of the negative tube and the corresponding plasma for antibody detection by ELISA. None were ELISA positive. Fourteen HCWs were followed up. None of the HCWs accepted a course of antiTB chemoprophylaxis. Despite the difficulty in establishing a trend in kinetics, we saw the complexity of interpretation of a dynamic T-cell response after contact with an index case. Conclusion This initial and first French picture provides us with the observation that only 44% of TST-positive HCW were IGRA positive, and the IGRA test allowed the detection of LTBI in two TST negative HCWs.

‘Down with French vaudevilles!’ The Catholic film movement's resistance and boycott of French cinema in the 1930s

At the end of the 1920s and in the 1930s, a strong Catholic film movement emerged in (Western) Europe, mainly targeting ‘morally dangerous’ films. Besides Hollywood films many popular French pictures featured in this black list. Especially after the introduction of the severe production codes in 1934 in the United States, many French ‘vaudevilles’ were attacked and boycotted. This article revisits this (under-researched) key period in the history of the European Catholic film action, focusing mainly upon the Belgian case. Referring to many now forgotten popular French films, the article conceptualizes the public resistance and boycott of these films from moral or media panic theories.

Dismemberment, divorce and hostile takeovers: A comment on corporate moral personhood

We can explain our intuitions about corporate takeover cases by appeal to Peter French's picture of the corporation as a moral person. He argues that corporations are persons in much the same sense as you and I, and are entitled to the same rights as humans. On this analysis, takeovers are murders, attempted murders, attempts to enslave, etc. I want to explore the consequences of this view for corporate takeovers. I shall argue that, though French can explain why our moral intuitions seem to arise in response to some concern about the corporations themselves, his analysis commits us to the wrong intuitions in some cases. I shall then offer an account of these intuitions which focuses on the character of corporations.

Wilkes, Angela. French Picture Dictionary. Illustrated by Colin King and translated by Katherine Folliot. Lincolnwood, Illinois: National Textbook Company, 1986

Wilkes, Angela. <i>French Picture Dictionary</i>. Illustrated by Colin King and translated by Katherine Folliot. Lincolnwood, Illinois: National Textbook Company, 1986

The Swinging Women of Watteau and Fragonard

French pictures of fetes galantes and related subjects do not, as often thought, merely mirror real-life activities. They are usually constructed from pictorial patterns and motifs that were meant to convey narrative, psychological, or allegorical content. Swinging is a motif that carried a varied, mostly erotic, freight of connotation and innuendo, which must be understood if one is to appreciate fully the many pictures that feature it. This essay studies its use in French 18th-century painting, particularly in the works of Watteau and Fragonard, and touches also on the contemporary iconography of hats, shoes, and feet.

The Modern French Picture of Luther

The Modern French Picture of Luther

Sex Role Images in French Children's Books

Examination of a group of French picture books for preschool children reveals patterns similar to those found in American children's books. There is a strong male bias in the numerical representation of the sexes and strict sex role stereotyping of characters. Boys are shown coping with their environment, girls learning good behavior. Ignoring French women's progress in the professions, the sample books portray women in the traditional housewife/mother role or in low-paid, unskilled occupations. Surprisingly, female status is lower in the more modern of the two series studied. The significance of these findings for French children's development is discussed.

Power Units for Future Aircraft

This Paper was originally written at the request of L'Association Francaise des Ingenieurs et Techniciens de L'Aeronautique (AFITA) and was presented at a meeting in Paris on 30th April, 1946. The Service Technique of the French Air Force were also interested.The Paper reproduced here represents the entire lecture, except for those parts which were concerned purely with the French picture.

Modern French Pictures at the United Arts Club

Modern French Pictures at the United Arts Club