French Art in Nineteenth-Century Britain (review)

Recent years have witnessed a series of high-profile exhibitions, academic conferences, and scholarly publications that effectively challenge insular readings of nineteenth-century British and French art. Shows such as Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics (2003), Turner, Whistler, Monet (2004), and Degas, Sickert, Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris 1870–1910 (2005), all at Tate Britain, emphasised the need to view the featured artists' work as part of an international community by exploring the richly productive cross-Channel traffic in pictorial and aesthetic ideas that mark the period. These shows and their accompanying catalogues demonstrated that even if this period saw the cultivation of ever more defiantly nationalistic conceptions of artistic practice, this did not militate against mutual cultural exchange. Nowhere was this more evident than in British and French artists' ability to exploit the increasingly sophisticated international exhibiting and collecting networks then emerging. Unsurprisingly, exploration of such connections has proven a particularly fertile area of research.

Contributors to the Victoria and Albert's 2002 symposium, "Going abroad: British art and design in a wider world 1500–1900," and Christiana Payne and William Vaughan's 2004 edited volume, English Accents: Interactions with British Art c. 1776–1855, presented a good deal of evidence qualifying or contesting inherited modernist narratives that for so long marginalized British contributions to the history of nineteenth-century art. French admiration for the technical accomplishments and novel subject matters of early nineteenth-century British naturalism has long fascinated students of the period. But it is only now that the longer history of the continental perception and reception of British art is coming into focus. In the case of French artists looking over the water, Theodore Gericault's famous exhibition of The Raft of the Medusa in London in 1820 is only one instance among many of a French artist alert to the potential of the city's art market. Scholarship attending to such developments has done much to upset conventional wisdom regarding the dominance of Paris and French artists in accounts of the period. Moreover, it has served to sharpen our awareness of the limitations of an art history still conceived, by and large, in the isolationist terms inherited from the period, of national schools reflective of a national character. Edward Morris's French Art in Nineteenth-Century Britain is an important contribution to this scholarly reassessment, not least in providing the reader with a wealth of unfamiliar archival evidence testifying to artistic connections between British and French artists, writers, and collectors.

Morris's study of nineteenth-century Anglo-French artistic relationships is a work of long, considered scholarly engagement. The author's familiarity with the primary sources, whether printed or in manuscript, is formidable. All who have an interest in this period will find references to unfamiliar archives and nuggets of fascinating new information. Indeed, one of the important lessons of Morris's text is its demonstration that the sources for the history of art in this period are far from exhausted. This is as true for the study of British artists as it is for their much more thoroughly investigated neighbours and rivals across the Channel. For Morris's concerns extend far beyond those suggested by the title, and he is just as exercised by the presence of British artists and art works in France as by French art in nineteenth-century Britain. Readers of Morris's book will, therefore, find themselves constantly stimulated by the connections being drawn.

These are, however, associations the reader must make largely unassisted. Morris's brief introduction provides no guidance as to the author's intent, and what follows is an essentially rather dry, if assiduously produced, compilation of recorded instances of nineteenth-century artistic interaction between Britain and France. This is very much a narrative history, which makes little endeavour to interpret or detect broader patterns or significance in the material presented. There is no attempt...