by Jon Lackman | 3 June 2010 | Modern
Classiques Garnier Numérique (formerly known as Éditions Champion Électronique) has released a new online database (subscription required), “Writings on Art from the 18th to the 20th Century“:
It brings together 61,000 pages, going from 1741 to 1927, gathering 72 authors and containing 169 titles. Esthetics, philosophy, art history, texts by painters and writers, but also novels and artists’ journals … The Writings on Art are essentially centred on art criticism, i.e. on the salons and on literary monograph[s] devoted to painters … [from] Father André’s Essay on the Beautiful [to] the first real salon … composed by La Font de Saint Yenne [to] the last volume of Proust’s Recherche du temps perdu.
This searchable database is tremendously useful for anyone studying modern French art, but especially for someone like me studying modern French art criticism. For example, one thing I’m writing about is the use of the words cadavre and sale (dirty) by critics. This database turns up 488 and 258 examples respectively. Long hours of traditional research in the library would have turned up a tenth as much.
The full list of writers included in the database:
Edmond About
Yves-Marie André
Guillaume Apollinaire
Georges Albert Aurier
Honoré de Balzac
Théodore de Banville
Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly
Maurice Barrès
Charles Baudelaire
Léonce Bénédite
Charles Blanc
Jean-Baptiste de Boyer d’Argens
Charles de Brosses
Jules-Antoine Castagnary
Anne Claude Philippe Caylus
Champfleury
François-René de Chateaubriand
Charles-Nicolas Cochin
Abraham Constantin
Eugène Delacroix
Étienne-Jean Delécluze
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
Fernand Desnoyers
Denis Diderot
Maxime Du Camp
Alexandre Dumas
Louis Émile Edmond Duranty
Théodore Duret
Étienne Falconet
Eugène Fromentin
Paul Gauguin
Théophile Gautier
Edmond de Goncourt
Jules et Edmond de Goncourt
François Guizot
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Dominique Ingres
Auguste Jal
La Font de Saint Yenne
Jules Laforgue
Alphonse de Lamartine
Marc-Antoine Laugier
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Stéphane Mallarmé
Guy de Maupassant
André Mellério
Prosper Mérimée
Jules Michelet
Octave Mirbeau
Alfred de Musset
Gustave Planche
Pierre Joseph Proudhon
Marcel Proust
Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy
Ernest Renan
Auguste Rodin
George Sand
Victor Segalen
Paul Sérusier
Armand Silvestre
Théophile Silvestre
Stendhal
Hippolyte Taine
Adolphe Thiers
Théophile Thoré
Rodolphe Töpffer
Émile Verhaeren
Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc
Louis Vitet
Alexandre Weill
Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Émile Zola
