Note: For the sake of consistency, this book uses American English spelling, most notably for the word color. This applies to quotations and titles appearing in the text originally written in British English. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
Introduction
1. On the topic of impasto in nineteenth-century French painting, a topic that, strictly speaking, falls outside the purview of the current study, see Matthias Krüger, Das Relief der Farbe: pastose Malerei in der französischen Kunstkritik 1850–1890 (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2007).
2. Albert Wolff, “Five or Six Lunatics” (1876), in The Impressionists at First Hand, ed. Bernard Denvir (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 100.
3. Recent exhibitions of Impressionist artworks with a heavy emphasis on technical art history include, for example, “Painting Light: The Hidden Techniques of the Impressionists” (Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Foundation Corboud, Cologne, Germany, February 29–June 22, 2008), resulting in the publication of the following catalogue: Iris Lewerentz Schaefer, Caroline von Saint-George, and Katja Lewerentz, Painting Light: The Hidden Techniques of the Impressionists (Milan: Skira, 2008); and “Renoir’s True Colors: Science Solves a Mystery” (Art Institute of Chicago, February 12–April 27, 2014).
4. The technical art historian whose scholarship has received the most attention outside the fields of art conservation and restoration research, narrowly defined, is Anthea Callen. See, for example, Callen’s The Work of Art: Plein-Air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (London: Reaktion Books, 2015); The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique and the Making of Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); and Techniques of the Impressionists (London: Orbis, 1982).
5. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 36.
6. The term tastemakers refers to authors of prescriptive literature of various kinds (books, magazines, essays, etc.) that offered consumers and/or producers advice on the harmonious combination of colors in fashion and the decorative and industrial arts. The category includes individuals from a wide range of social and educational backgrounds, from chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul to Emmeline Raymond, director of La Mode illustrée. For a comparable use of the term, see Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 195.
7. Generally associated with Goethe, the idea that “men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations, and children, have a great fondness for colors in their utmost brightness” has been treated by a variety of scholars, including, most recently, Michael Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Goethe originally discussed these ideas in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (1810; London: John Murray, 1840), see especially sections 135, 835, 836, and 841.
8. For a perceptive, if overstated, analysis of chromophobia in the West, see David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).
9. Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6 (April 1999): 59–77; Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 410.
10. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1935–36), in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–55. In Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), Joshua Yumibe argues that applied color techniques in early cinema, including stenciling, tinting, and toning, simultaneously reinforced and undermined realistic modes of cinematic address. Yumibe’s investigation of fantasy and “vernacular experiments with color abstraction” in early cinema overlaps with certain aspects of my argument. Unlike Moving Color, however, this book focuses on an earlier period and strategically refuses to prioritize one specific medium. The following sources also consider the relationship between color, perception, and signification from a historical perspective: Nicholas Gaskill, “Vibrant Environments: The Feel of Color from the White Whale to the Red Wheelbarrow” (PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2010); Nicholas Gaskill, “Red Cars with Red Lights and Red Drivers: Color, Crane, and Qualia,” American Literature 81 (December 2009): 719–45; Michael Paul Rossi, “The Rules of Perception: American Color Science, 1831–1931” (PhD dissertation, MIT, 2011); and finally, new media scholar Carolyn L. Kane’s Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics After Code (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
11. Key examples include Jonathan Crary’s influential examinations of the scientific discovery of phenomena of subjective vision in his Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990); and Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). For an intellectual history of vision, see especially Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
12. See, for example, Manlio Brusatin, A History of Colors (Boston: Shambhala, 1991); John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
13. The literature on synesthesia is abundant. The best starting point is probably Kevin T. Dann, Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Also of note are David Howes and Constance Classen, Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014), 17–36, 152–74; and John Gage’s treatment of the subject in his Color and Meaning, 134–43, 261–69.
14. This parallels Regina Lee Blaszczyk’s focus on “practical men” in The Color Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012).
15. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
16. The idea of color adding a touch of “fancy” or “distinction” to otherwise identical mass-produced goods was first explored in Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 120–21. This idea reappears in historian of photography Sally Stein’s analysis of the relationship between photography and consumer culture in interwar America: “The Rhetoric of the Colorful and the Colorless: American Photography and Material Culture Between the Wars” (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1991).
17. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), 211.
18. Color’s ambiguous status, at the intersection of subjective perception and objective fact, has made it an especially popular object of analysis for philosophers, including, for example, C. L. Hardin, Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1988); and M. Chirimuuta, Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015).
19. Neil Harris, “Color and Media: Some Comparisons and Speculations,” in Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), 319.
20. Pierre de Lano, L’Amour à Paris sous le Second Empire (Paris: H. Simonis Empis, 1896), 182.
21. Exceptions include Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art, and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion Books, 2005); Blaszczyk, Color Revolution; Gaskill, “Vibrant Environments”; and Rossi, “Rules of Perception.” I am not including here the histories of specific technologies or branches of industry. These are referenced in subsequent chapters, where relevant.
22. Jacques-Henri Lartigue, The Autochromes of J. H. Lartigue, 1912–1927 (New York: Viking Press, 1981), n.p. For more on this subject, see the present volume’s epilogue.
23. Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life,” 414.
24. Michel Pastoureau, Couleurs, images, symboles: Études d’histoire et d’anthropologie (Paris: Le Léopard d’or, 1989), 61–63.
25. See especially Blaszczyk, Color Revolution; and, for more recent material, Kane, Chromatic Algorithms.
26. Scholars who have examined the history of color in other national contexts, often to very different ends, include, for the transatlantic Anglo-American world, Charlotte Crosby Nicklas. See her “Splendid Hues: Colour, Dyes, Everyday Science, and Women’s Fashion, 1840–1875” (PhD dissertation, University of Brighton, 2009); and “One Essential Thing to Learn Is Colour: Harmony, Science, and Colour Theory in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fashion Advice,” Journal of Design History 27 (September 2014): 218–36.
27. Michel-Eugène Chevreul, De la Loi du contraste simultané des couleurs et de l’assortiment des objets colorés, Atlas (Paris: Pitois-Levrault et cie, 1839).
28. Georges Roque, Art et science de la couleur: Chevreul et les peintres de Delacroix à l’abstraction (Nîmes: Ed. Jacqueline Chambon, 1997); Gage, Color and Meaning, chap. 16.
29. Crary, Techniques of the Observer; Crary, Suspensions of Perception.
30. Anne Distel, Signac: Au Temps d’harmonie, Découvertes Gallimard (Paris: Gallimard / Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001), 56–58.
31. Alexander Engel, “Colouring Markets: The Industrial Transformation of the Dyestuff Business Revisited,” Business History 54 (February 2012): 10–29.
32. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (1550; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). See also Claire Pace, “Disegno e colore,” Oxford Art Online, accessed November 28, 2015, www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T022879.
33. See Jacqueline Lichtenstein’s brilliant analysis of the disegno e colore debate in seventeenth-century France: The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). As Andrew Carrington Shelton notes, “The alleged rivalry between [Ingres and Delacroix] has, in fact, come to represent metonymically what is generally regarded as the key duality around which histories of early nineteenth-century French painting must inevitably be structured—the conflict between an officially sanctioned and institutionally entrenched neoclassicism, on the one hand, and a willfully oppositional, irreverent and stridently non-conformist Romanticism, on the other.” Andrew Carrington Shelton, “Ingres Versus Delacroix,” Art History 23 (December 2000): 726.
34. Paul Gauguin, The Writings of a Savage, ed. Daniel Guérin, trans. Eleanor Levieux (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 138–39.
35. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 86–87. On the history of form (and Formalism), see David Summers’s excellent essay “‘Form,’ Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description,” Critical Inquiry 15 (January 1, 1989): 372–406.
36. For an alternative model, see Yve-Alain Bois, “Whose Formalism?” Art Bulletin 78 (March 1996): 9–12.
37. Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color, trans. Markus I. Cruse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 9–10.
38. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 197.
Chapter One
1. Ch. Castellani, Panorama le “Tout-Paris” (Paris: s.n., 1889), accessed May 31, 2012, http://archive.org/details/panoramaletoutpa00cast.
2. Michel-Eugène Chevreul and Paul Nadar, “Art de vivre cent ans: Trois Entretiens avec Monsieur Chevreul; Photographies à la veille de sa cent et unième année,” Le Journal illustré 23, no. 36 (September 5, 1886): 282–87. On the topic of Chevreul’s interview with Nadar, see Geneviève Reynes, “Chevreul interviewé par Nadar, premier document audiovisuel (1886),” Gazette des beaux-arts 98 (November 1981): 154–84; and Thierry Gervais, “Interview of Chevreul, France, 1886,” in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jason E. Hill (London: Blooms-bury Academic, 2015), 35–37.
3. This figure (forty-four) corresponds to the life expectancy of men living in the department of the Seine in 1891. Pierre Guillaume, Individus, familles, nations: Essai d’histoire démographique; XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris: SEDES, impr. Corlet, 1985), 110.
4. “M. Chevreul,” Leisure Hour (June 1889): 428.
5. Michel-Eugène Chevreul, Lettres adressées à M. Villemain sur la méthode en général et sur la définition du mot fait (Paris: Garnier frères, 1856), 33.
6. Georges Roque, Art et science de la couleur: Chevreul et les peintres de Delacroix à l’abstraction (Nîmes: Ed. Jacqueline Chambon, 1997), 170–71.
7. For instance, Roque, Art et science de la couleur; and John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), chaps. 15 and 16.
8. About this quarrel, especially as it manifested in the early years of the Third Republic, see Pierre Vaisse, “La Querelle de la tapisserie au début de la Troisième République,” Revue de l’art, no. 22 (1973): 66–86.
9. Chevreul quoted in Chantal Gastinel-Coural, “Michel-Eugène Chevreul, directeur des teintures de la Manufacture des Gobelins,” CIETA-Bulletin, no. 67 (1989): 82. As Gastinel-Coural notes, Chevreul also had the responsibility of analyzing dyestuffs and leading various experiments aimed at improving dye processes and, starting in 1826, teaching a course on the chemistry of dyeing. The Manufacture des Gobelins’ dyeworks was also responsible for dyeing the wools and silks used by the Manufacture de Beauvais (tapestries) and Manufacture de la Savonnerie (carpets).
10. Michel-Eugène Chevreul, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, and Their Applications to the Arts, Including Painting, Interior Decoration, Tapestries, Carpets, Mosaics, Coloured Glazing, Paper-Staining, Calico-Printing, Letterpress Printing, Map-Colouring, Dress, Landscape and Flower Gardening, Etc., trans. Charles Martel (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1860), xii; Michel-Eugène Chevreul, Des Arts qui parlent aux yeux, au moyen de solides colorés d’une étendue sensible, et en particulier des arts du tapissier des Gobelins et du tapissier de la Savonnerie (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1867), 12.
11. Chevreul, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, ix.
12. Barbara Whitney Keyser, “Science and Sensibility: Chemistry and the Aesthetics of Color in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Color Research and Application 21 (June 1996): 176.
13. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990); Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
14. Chevreul, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, section 142.
15. Quoted in Roque, Art et science de la couleur, 128. The physiological basis of the contrast effects was unknown at the time Chevreul was writing.
16. Chevreul, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, xii.
17. Françoise Viénot, “Michel-Eugène Chevreul: From Laws and Principles to the Production of Colour Plates,” Color Research and Application 27 (2002): 5, 8.
18. Roque, Art et science de la couleur, 178.
19. Chevreul, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, section 170.
20. Additionally, the system counted twenty different shades of gray.
21. On quantification and measurement in chemistry, see Lissa Roberts, “The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The ‘New’ Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous Chemistry,” in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes (New York: Berg, 2005), 106–27.
22. Michel-Eugène Chevreul, “Exposé d’un moyen de définir et de nommer les couleurs, d’après une méthode precise et expérimentale, avec l’application de ce moyen à la définition et à la dénomination des couleurs d’un grand nombre de corps naturels et de produits artificiels,” Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences de L’Institut de France 33 (1861): 55, 131 .
23. Chevreul, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, section 172. On the subject of thermometers and quantification, see Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 17–18.
24. Sean F. Johnston, A History of Light and Colour Measurement: Science in the Shadows (Bristol, UK: Institute of Physics, 2001), 27–28.
25. For instance, Michel-Eugène Chevreul, “Exposé d’un moyen de définir et de nommer les couleurs d’après une méthode rationnelle et expérimentale, et application de ce moyen à la définition et à la dénomination des couleurs d’un grand nombre de corps naturels et de produits artificiels” (1861); and Michel-Eugène Chevreul, Cercles chromatiques de M. E. Chevreul reproduits au moyen de la chromocalcographie gravure et impression en taille-douce combinées par R.-H. Digeon (Paris: Digeon, 1855).
26. Chevreul, Lettres adressées à M. Villemain, 44.
27. Ibid., 50.
28. For example, Chevreul, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, section 172; Chevreul, Des Arts qui parlent aux yeux, 7, 48–49. On the significance of nomenclature in modern chemistry, see Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, “Languages in Chemistry,” in The Cambridge History of Science: The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences, vol. 5, ed. Mary Jo Nye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 174–90. On the relationship between nomenclature in natural history and chemistry, see James W. Llana, “A Contribution of Natural History to the Chemical Revolution in France,” Ambix 32 (July 1985): 71–91. The fundamental study of taxonomy and nomenclature in modern knowledge production remains Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971).
29. John D. Mollon, “Chevreul et sa théorie de la vision dans le cadre du XIXe siècle,” in Michel-Eugène Chevreul: Un Savant, des couleurs!, ed. Georges Roque, Bernard Bodo, and Françoise Viénot (Paris: Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, 1997), 137–38.
30. Chevreul, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, section 148.
31. Mollon, “Chevreul et sa théorie de la vision dans le cadre du XIXe siècle,” 138.
32. Paul Eymard, Rapport fait à la Société impériale d’agriculture, d’histoire naturelle et des arts utiles de Lyon, dans la séance du 21 janvier 1862 par M. Paul Eymar sur L’exposé d’un moyen de définir et de nommer les couleurs d’après une méthode précise et expérimentale publiée par M. Chevreul (Lyon: Imprimerie de Barret, 1862), 4.
33. Jules Bourcier to the Société d’agriculture, August 12, 1842, Michel-Eugène Chevreul (MEC), Correspondence, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (MNHN), Paris.
34. Jules Garçon, La Pratique du teinturier, vol. 1 (Paris: Gauthier-Villars et fils, 1893), 53.
35. Chambre de commerce de Lyon to Monsieur Bineau, professeur de chimie à la faculté des sciences et l’École de la Martinière (Lyon), August 2, 1855, MEC Correspondence, MNHN.
36. Chevreul, “Exposé d’un moyen de définir et de nommer les couleurs” (1861), 23–24.
37. Chevreul to the Commandant du genie, June 12, 1864, MEC Correspondence, MNHN.
38. Sometime between 1852 and 1857, the twenty different “tones” of each of these seventy-two colors were also produced. It is unclear whether these were added to the original wheel or shown alongside it. Chevreul, “Exposé d’un moyen de définir et de nommer les couleurs” (1861), 800.
39. Eymard, Rapport fait à la Société impériale d’agriculture, 8.
40. Sarah Lowengard, The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), chap. 16. This is a conservative estimate. According to Chantal Gastinel-Coural, the Gobelins produced around 35,000 different colors of silk and wool in the eighteenth century. Chantal Gastinel-Coural, “Chevreul à la Manufacture des Gobelins,” in Roque, Bodo, and Viénot, Michel-Eugène Chevreul, 70.
41. Chevreul, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, 218.
42. Chevreul, Cercles chromatiques de M. E. Chevreul (Paris: Digeon, 1855). The color wheels were subsequently reedited in 1861 and 1864.
43. Rapports du jury mixte international publiés sous la dir. de S.A.I. le prince Napoléon, président de la commission impériale, vol. 1 (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1856), 1283.
44. Marcellin Berthelot, Notice historique sur la vie et les travaux de M. Chevreul (Paris: Typographie Firmin Didot frères et cie, 1902), 398.
45. Ibid., 427–28.
46. Ibid., 428.
47. Chevreul was well aware of the limitations of his system. But he insisted that a match for fuchsin could, indeed, be found among the colors of his first color wheel (violet-rouge 12 ton). Azuline, a blue aniline dye, was simply too bright, however. “It is equal to the blue of the Junonia clelia butterfly,” he observed in a footnote. Chevreul, “Exposé d’un moyen de définir et de nommer les couleurs” (1861), 175, 922. Chevreul does not mention William Henry Perkin’s mauve in this memoir or anywhere else to my knowledge.
48. See John Joseph Beer, The Emergence of the German Dye Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959); Ernst Homburg, “The Influence of Demand on the Emergence of the Dye Industry: The Roles of Chemists and Colourists,” Journal of the Society of Dyers and Colourists 99 (November 1983): 325–33; Anthony Travis, “Perkin’s Mauve: Ancestor of the Organic Chemical Industry,” Technology and Culture 31 (January 1990): 51–82; Anthony Travis, The Rainbow Makers: The Origins of the Synthetic Dyestuffs Industry in Western Europe (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1993); and Simon Garfield, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).
49. Travis, “Perkin’s Mauve,” 64–66.
50. This definition of synthetic dyestuff is from Wilfred Vernon Farrar, “Synthetic Dyes Before 1860,” Chemistry and the Chemical Industry in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Richard L. Hills and W. H. Brock (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1997), section 8, pp. 1–16.
51. As Farrar, Homburg, and Travis point out, Perkin’s mauve was not the first synthetic dyestuff and its success was largely due to the popularity of other violet colors at the time, in particular, pourpre française. Perkin’s accomplishments, in other words, were as much commercial as they were scientific and technological. Farrar, “Synthetic Dyes Before 1860”; Homburg, “Influence of Demand on the Emergence of the Dye Industry”; Travis, “Perkin’s Mauve.”
52. Charles Decaux, “Couleurs, préparations et teintures,” in Rapports des membres de la section française du jury international dir. M. Michel Chevalier, vol. 1 (Paris: N. Chaix, 1862), 331–32.
53. “Bleus artificiels: 1er Article,” Le Teinturier universel 2, no. 2 (April 15, 1861): 10.
54. It took seven more years before the BASF was able to produce synthetic indigo for a competitive price. Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), 224.
55. The name of the dye was probably inspired by the Berlin West Africa Conference, a diplomatic meeting held in Berlin from November 15, 1884, to February 26, 1885, that aimed to resolve a trade dispute among major European colonial powers in the Congo River basin in Central Africa. The conference was widely covered in the press at the time. By the 1910s, several other Congo colors were introduced, such as Congo orange, Congo brown, and Congo blue. David P. Steensma, “‘Congo Red’: Out of Africa?” Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine 125 (February 2001): 250–52.
56. I am relying here on Alexander Engel’s excellent quantitative analysis of the British and German dye industries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes that from the late 1870s to the First World War, the number of commercially viable dyes increased yearly “by up to a few dozen.” In the end, “hundreds upon hundreds of dyestuffs were launched and their marketability tested in practice.” Alexander Engel, “Colouring Markets: The Industrial Transformation of the Dyestuff Business Revisited,” Business History 54 (February 2012): 10–29.
57. Garfield, Mauve, 61. That said, journalists tended to describe as “mauve” all fashionable violet garments, regardless of coloring matter employed. Some of these garments may have been dyed using murexide or French purple (pourpre française). These colors simultaneously competed with and paved the way for Perkin’s dye. Travis, “Perkin’s Mauve,” 65; Homburg, “Influence of Demand on the Emergence of the Dye Industry,” 330–32.
58. Julien Turgan, “Fabrication des couleurs d’aniline: Fabrique de matières colorants, A. Poirrier (Saint-Denis),” in Les Grandes Usines de France: Tableau de l’industrie française au XIXe siècle (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1860–65), 286.
59. Alain Radau, “Les Nouvelles Couleurs dérivées du goudron de houille,” La Revue des deux mondes (August 1874): 915.
60. George J. Sheridan Jr., The Social and Economic Foundations of Association Among the Silk Weavers of Lyons, 1852–70, vol. 1 (New York: Arno Press, 1981), 221.
61. Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialization,” Past and Present, no. 108 (August 1985): 133–76.
62. Grands Magasins du Louvre catalogue, summer 1875, CC268, Catalogues commerciaux (CC), Bibliothèque Forney, Paris. On product variety in the twentieth-century marketplace, see Mika Pantzar, “The Growth of Product Variety: A Myth?” Journal of Consumer Studies and Home Economics 16 (1992): 345–62.
63. Émile Zola, Manuscrits et dossiers préparatoires, Les Rougon-Macquart, Au Bonheur des dames (NAF 10275–78), Département des manuscrits—Nouvelles Acquisitions françaises, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
64. Edmond Bourdain, Manuel du commerce des tissus: Vade mecum du marchand de nouveautés (Paris: J. Hetzel et cie, éditeurs, 1885), 13.
65. Ibid., 62.
66. Chevreul, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, section 845.
67. Ibid., section 829.
68. Ibid., sections 906–7.
69. In Chevreul’s time, one of the most vocal proponents of this definition of beauty was Victor Cousin (1792–1867). A charismatic public speaker, Cousin was the most famous French philosopher of the mid-nineteenth century and determined, for several decades, who should teach philosophy in France and what should be taught. See, in particular, his Du Vrai, du beau et du bien (Paris: Didier, 1854). Cousin, however, was not the first to define beauty as the balance between unity and variety. This idea can also be found, for example, in the writings of eighteenth-century British artists Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) and William Hogarth (1697–1764).
70. Chevreul, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, section 908.
71. Alain Rey, ed., Le Grand Robert de la langue française (Paris: Dictionnaires le Robert, 2001), s.v. “bariolage.”
72. Pierre de Lano, L’Amour à Paris sous le Second Empire (Paris: H. Simonis Empis, 1896), 181.
73. My analysis of tastemakers is inspired by Leora Auslander, Taste and Power Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
74. Emmeline Raymond, “Théorie des couleurs,” La Mode illustrée, no. 16 (April 13, 1861): 126.
75. Charles Blanc, L’Art dans la parure et dans le vêtement (1875; Paris: Henri Laurens, 1890), 173–74.
76. Auguste Racinet, L’Ornement polychrome (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot frères, fils et cie, 1869), n.p.
77. Henry Havard, La Décoration (Paris: Librairie Charles Delagrave, 1892), 29.
78. Emmeline Raymond, “La Théorie des couleurs dans ses rapports avec la toilette,” La Mode illustrée, no. 35 (August 31, 1862): 286.
79. Blanc, L’Art dans la parure et dans le vêtement, 125.
80. Édouard Guichard, De l’Ameublement et de la décoration intérieure de nos appartements (Paris: Bénard, 1866), 23.
81. Miriam Levin, Republican Art and Ideology in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1986), 92. On Proust as president of the Union centrale des arts décoratifs, see also Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 118–20.
82. Raymond, “La Théorie des couleurs dans ses rapports avec la toilette,” 286.
83. Blanc, L’Art dans la parure et le vêtement, 173–74.
84. Ibid., 18.
85. Ernst Brücke, Des Couleurs au point de vue physique, physiologique, artistique et industriel, trans. P. Schutzenberger (Paris: J. B. Baillière et fils, 1866).
86. “Bulletin commercial,” Le Teinturier universel, no. 15 (November 1, 1860): 119–20.
87. Grand Dépôt, Porcelaines, faiences et cristaux (Paris: s.n., 1889), n.p.
88. John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), chap. 13; Roque, Art et science de la couleur, 215.
89. Chevreul, “Exposé d’un moyen de définir et de nommer les couleurs” (1861), 927.
90. Ibid., 926.
91. Chevreul, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, section 656.
92. Michel-Eugène Chevreul, De l’Abstraction considérée relativement aux beaux-arts et la littérature (Dijon: Imprimerie J. E. Habutot, 1864), foreword, n.p.
93. Chevreul, Lettres adressées à M. Villemain, 61.
94. Ibid., 60.
95. Ibid., 89.
96. Dumarsais quoted in Georges Roque, Qu’est-ce que l’art abstrait? Une Histoire de l’abstraction en peinture (1860–1960) (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 388.
97. Chevreul’s prefiguring of the modernist myth of a nonreferential visual sign was, to be clear, wholly accidental. In describing color as a purely autonomous, nonreferential sign, his objective was most likely to emphasize the uniqueness and significance of his field of study; the study of color, he insisted, was wholly unrelated to that of music. The expression nonreferential sign is admittedly a tautology; signs always—by definition—refer to something else. The expression is widely used among art historians and theorists, however, especially in discussions about the “autonomy of art,” a central tenet of modernism. See, for example, Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, Art Is Not What You Think It Is, Blackwell Manifestos (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), especially xi–xii, 157–59; and Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image (London: Verso, 2009). A lengthier (and far less theoretical) discussion of the autonomy of color and art, more generally, appears in chapter 4, in the context of my analysis of James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: Falling Rocket (ca. 1875).
98. Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992), 35.
99. A search for the phrase foule bariolée in major text databases, such as ARTFL, Gallica, and Google Books, produces hundreds of results for the second half of the nineteenth century. The phrase was commonly used in both fiction and nonfiction publications, including the daily press.
100. Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, vol. 4, Taste and Corruption (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 45.
101. Charles Lacouture, Répertoire chromatique (Paris: Gauthier-Villars et fils, 1890), n.p.
Chapter Two
1. French botanist Charles Plumier officially identified and named fuchsias in the late sixteenth century. He named the plant after his predecessor, the German botanist and physician Leonhard Fuchs (i.e., Leonard Fox).
2. Perkin first tried to market the dye under the name Tyrian purple. He renamed the dye mauve in or around 1859. In 1863, Perkin used the new name in the title of a scientific journal article, “On Mauve or Aniline-Purple,” Proceedings of the Royal Society 12 (1862–63): 713–15. Elsewhere in the text, however, he referred to the dye as “mauveine,” which was more in keeping with official chemical terminology. Anthony Travis, The Rainbow Makers: The Origins of the Synthetic Dyestuffs Industry in Western Europe (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1993), 51–53, 265.
3. “Science et l’industrie,” Le Temps, August 23, 1862.
4. The common mauve (Malva silvestris) has eye-catching violet flowers as well as a rich cultural history in Europe. Some species of Malva are native to Asia and Africa. It is unlikely, however, that Perkin’s dye was named after one of these exotic species.
5. Information on early varieties of fuchsias is from Félix Porcher, Le Fuchsia, son histoire et sa culture, suivies d’une monographie contenant la description de 65 espèces et de 384 variétés (Paris: A. Goin, 1858).
6. Charles Baltet, L’Horticulture française: Ses progrès et ses conquêtes depuis 1789 (Paris: Librairie agricole, Librairie G. Masson, la Société nationale d’acclimatation, chez l’auteur, 1892), 108.
7. Patrice de Moncan and Claude Herteux, Le Paris d’Haussmann (Paris: Les Éditions du Mécène, 2002), 172.
8. Of course, the pigments responsible for colors in flowers are also part of chemistry. However, this branch of chemistry, known today as phytochemistry, is unrelated to that which gave rise to synthetic dyes such as mauve, fuchsin, and bleu de Lyon.
9. Michel-Eugène Chevreul, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, and Their Applications to the Arts: Including Painting, Interior Decoration, Tapestries, Carpets, Mosaics, Coloured Glazing, Paper-Staining, Calico-Printing, Letterpress Printing, Map-Colouring, Dress, Landscape and Flower Gardening, Etc., trans. Charles Martel (London: H. Bohn, 1860), section 760.
10. George Wilson to Chevreul, July 4, 1851, in Michel-Eugène Chevreul (MEC), Correspondence, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (MNHN), Paris. The collection mentioned in Wilson’s letter was probably that amassed by leading amateur horticulturalist and orchid collector Sigismund Rucker.
11. Chevreul, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, section 733.
12. Ibid., section 734.
13. Commonly known as the “language of flowers,” the sentimental floral vocabularies that permeated nineteenth-century French popular culture had no place in Chevreul’s analysis, which sought to ground itself in the “language of science.” For a transnational account, see Beverly Seaton, The Language of Flowers: A History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995). As Seaton explains, books detailing the symbolic meaning of flowers were especially popular in the early nineteenth century. Fashion expert Emmeline Raymond, who appears in the previous chapter, published one such volume later in the century, L’Esprit des fleurs: Symbolisme-science (Paris: J. Rothschild, 1884).
14. Chevreul also considered other characteristics—such as height, shape, placement within the garden, and so on—but these played a secondary role in his analysis.
15. Guy Lecerf, “Chevreul: Contraste et harmonie dans l’art des jardins,” in Michel-Eugène Chevreul: Un Savant, des couleurs!, ed. Georges Rocques, Bernard Bodo, and Françoise Viénot (Paris: Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, 1997), 235. L’Haÿ is now known as L’Haÿ-les-Roses, in recognition of one of its principal attractions: the Roseraie du Val-de-Marne.
16. Armand Millet, “Violets, Their Origins, and Cultivation,” in Armand Millet and His Violets, by Armand Millet and Ernest John Perfect (High Wycombe, UK: Park Farm Press, 1996), 54.
17. Chevreul, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, section 733.
18. Sources disagree about the exact date of the Carré Creux’s completion. It is possible that Decaisne had already completed some, or perhaps even all, of the work by 1863. Guy Lecerf, however, indicates that the flower garden was only completed in 1866. Lecerf, “Chevreul: Contraste et harmonie dans l’art des jardins,” 236.
19. [Docteur] Pouchet, “Le Muséum d’histoire naturelle,” in Paris guide, par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France (Paris: Librairie internationale, 1867), 162.
20. Chevreul was director of the Muséum d’histoire naturelle on six different occasions: 1836–37, 1844–45, 1850–51, 1854–55, 1862–63, 1863–79.
21. François Hérincq, “Massifs ou corbeilles de fleurs: La Corbeille du jardin des plantes,” L’Horticulteur français de mil huit cent cinquante et un: Journal des amateurs et des intérêts horticoles 5, 2nd ser. (1863): 275.
22. Chevreul, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, section 737.
23. “Henri Decaisne,” in Dictionnaire général de biographie et d’histoire . . . , ed. Louis Charles Dezobry and Théodore Bachelet, 5th ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Delagrave, 1869), available in the Archives Biographiques Françaises database.
24. Joseph Decaisne, Recherches anatomiques et physiologiques sur la garance, sur le développement de la matière colorante dans cette plante, sur sa culture et sa préparation, suivies de l’examen botanique du genre “Rubia” et de ses espèces (Brussels: Impr. de M. Hayez, 1837).
25. “Observations sur les résultats obtenus par l’institution d’un cours théorique et pratique de chimie depuis l’avènement de M. Chevreul comme directeur des teintures à la Manufacture des Gobelins, et sur les avantages résultant des opérations du Laboratoire, 1826–1858,” Manufacture des Gobelins, Versements des ministères et des administrations qui en dependent—Beaux-Arts (AN F21 679), Archives nationales de France, Paris.
26. Michel-Eugène Chevreul, “Exposé d’un moyen de définir et de nommer les couleurs, d’après une méthode précise et expérimentale, avec l’application de ce moyen à la définition et à la dénomination des couleurs d’un grand nombre de corps naturels et de produits artificiels,” Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences de L’Institut de France 33 (1861): 289–832. In addition to flowers, Chevreul identified the colors of some fruits, leaves, roots, woods, and other plant materials.
27. Édouard André quoted in Lecerf, “Chevreul: Contraste et harmonie dans l’art des jardins,” 238.
28. Jennifer Davies, The Victorian Flower Garden (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), chap. 1; Clemens Alexander Wimmer, “Bed and Bedding System,” in Encyclopedia of Gardens: History and Design, ed. Candice A. Shoemaker (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), 116–18.
29. Noel Kingsbury describes bedding out as “painting with plants.” Noel Kingsbury, Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 346. See also Davies, Victorian Flower Garden, 11–12.
30. On this topic, see Mary Gribbin and John Gribbin, Flower Hunters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
31. Abigail Jane Lustig, “The Creation and Uses of Horticulture in Britain and France in the Nineteenth Century” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1997), 61–62.
32. Quoted in Clare A. P. Willsdon, Impressionist Gardens (London: Thames and Hudson, 2010), 16.
33. For an interesting popular history of hybridization, see Jane S. Smith, The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants (New York: Penguin Press, 2009). Noel Kingsbury provides a more detailed, but still accessible, account of the history of plant breeding in Hybrid.
34. “International Conference on Hybridization,” Science 10 (July 28, 1899): 113.
35. Kingsbury, Hybrid, 346.
36. Jean Gayon and Doris T. Zallen, “The Role of the Vilmorin Company in the Promotion and Diffusion of the Experimental Science of Heredity in France, 1840–1920,” Journal of the History of Biology 31 (1998): 255; Charles Naudin, Nouvelles recherches sur l’hybridité dans les végétaux (Mémoire présenté à l’Académie des sciences en décembre 1861) (Paris: s.n., 1862), 31–33.
37. Joseph Decaisne and Charles Naudin, Manuel de l’amateur des jardins: Traité général d’horticulture, vol. 2 (Paris: F. Didot frères, fils et cie, 1866), 493. Decaisne and Naudin were referring, more specifically, to the multiple hybrid varieties derived from Verbena chamoedryfolia.
38. Albert Larbalétrier, “La Couleur des fleurs,” La Nature 25, 2nd semester (1897), 410.
39. For a discussion of the influence of fashion trends in horticulture during the early modern period, see Elizabeth Hyde, Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 58–76. Kingsbury addresses this issue in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century plant breeding in Hybrid, chap. 13.
40. Vilmorin-Andrieux et cie, Supplément aux fleurs de pleine terre (Paris: Vilmorin-Andrieux et cie, 1884), 135.
41. Quoted in Kingsbury, Hybrid, 338.
42. Brent Elliott, Flora: Une Histoire illustrée des fleurs de jardins, trans. Odile Koenig (Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé, 2001), 138.
43. Henri Dauthenay, Les Géraniums (Pelargonium zonale et inquinans) (Paris: O. Doin, 1897), iv.
44. William Robinson, The Parks, Promenades, and Gardens of Paris (London: Murray, 1869), 543.
45. Tout-Paris [pseud.], “La Journée Parisienne: Paris s’enguirlande,” Le Gaulois, December 17, 1880.
46. The efforts of fictional department store owner Octave Mouret to attract consumers with his bright, colorful displays are memorably recounted in Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise (1883; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
47. Bernard Marrey, Les Grands Magasins des origines à 1939 (Paris: Librairie Picard, 1979), 41.
48. Luisa Limido notes a parallel between the gardens of the Second Empire and department stores, which she views as offering customers “un parcours de promenade.” In addition, “Cette continuité physique concrétise une continuité conceptuelle: les mêmes principes régissent en effet l’aménagement des magasins et celui des jardins, les mêmes caractéristiques s’y retrouvent, et par conséquent les mêmes pratiques sociales s’y déroulent.” Luisa Limido, L’Art des jardins sous le Second Empire (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2001), 53.
49. L’Illustration quoted in Marrey, Les Grands Magasins, 97.
50. Georges Montorgueil, Croquis parisiens: Les Plaisirs du dimanche à travers les rues (Paris: Librairies-imprimeries réunies, 1897), viii.
51. Adolphe Alphand, Les Promenades de Paris: Histoire—description des embellissements—dépenses de création et d’entretien des Bois de Boulogne et de Vincennes, Champs-Élysées—parcs—squares—boulevards—places plantées (1867–73; reprint, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1984), lvii.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 127.
54. Charles Yriarte, Les Fleurs et les jardins de Paris (Paris: Librairies-imprimeries Réunies, 1893), 247.
55. Quoted in Clare A. P. Willsdon, “‘Promenades et Plantations’: Impressionism, Conservation, and Haussmann’s Reinvention of Paris,” in Soil and Stone: Impressionism, Urbanism, Environment, ed. Frances Fowle and Richard Thomson (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 113.
56. Robinson, Parks, Promenades, and Gardens of Paris, 29.
57. Alphand, Promenades de Paris, lvii.
58. William Robinson, The English Flower Garden and Pleasure Ground, 7th ed. (1883; reprint, London: Murray, 1899), 6.
59. Quoted in Brent Elliott, “Mosaiculture: Its Origins and Significance,” Garden History 9 (Spring 1981): 90.
60. Elie-Abel Carrière, “Mosaïculture,” Revue horticole 51 (1879): 151.
61. Jacques Welker quoted in Elliott, “Mosaiculture,” 80. Elliott finds Welker’s explanation “disingenuous” because, “from the sound of his inspiration, he should have gone straightway to create a complex pattern of interlaced ribbon beds, instead of the gentle variant on Alphandesque massing he actually produced” (80).
62. Émile Zola, Manuscrits et dossiers préparatoires, Les Rougon-Macquart, Au Bonheur des dames (NAF 10275–78), Département des manuscrits—Nouvelles Acquisitions françaises, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
63. See, in particular, Jacques-Raymond Lucotte, “Fleuriste, (Art méchaniq.),” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des art et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, vol. 17 (1751–72), 780, ARTFL Encyclopédie Project ed., accessed September 30, 2013, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu; and L. Knab, “Fleur. III. Industrie.–Fleurs artificielles,” in La Grande Encyclopédie: Inventaire raisonné des sciences, des lettres et des arts, vol. 17 (Paris: H. Lamirault et cie, n.d.), 601.
64. T. J. Wenzel, Mémoire présenté à l’assemblée nationale en faveur de l’établissement d’une manufacture de végétaux artificiels (Paris: Imprimerie de Moutard, 1790).
65. “Salon des Magasins de la Compagnie florale, rue de Choiseul, 3, à Paris,” n.d. [ca. 1857], newspaper clipping, “Fleurs artificielles,” PC 17-4, Fonds Moeurs, Cabinet des arts graphiques, Musée Carnavalet, Paris.
66. Ibid.
67. Charles Petit, Rapports du jury international, Exposition universelle de 1867 à Paris, publiés sous la direction de M. Michel Chevalier: Fleurs et plumes chapeaux de pailles modes et coiffures de femme (Paris: Imprimerie et librairies administratives de Paul Dupont, 1867), 2.
68. Statistics for 1847 and 1858 come from Arthur Mangin, “Industries parisiennes: Fleurs artificielles,” Revue contemporaine 41, 2nd ser. (September–October 1864): 515.
69. “Chronique,” Le Temps, August 6, 1878.
70. H.-L.-Alph. Blanchon, L’Industrie des fleurs artificielles et des fleurs conservées (Paris: Librairie J.-B. Baillière et fils, 1900), 13.
71. Mangin, “Industries parisiennes,” 505.
72. Julien Turgan, “Établissement Marienval,” in Les Grandes Usines de France: Tableau de l’industrie française au XIXe siècle, vol. 11 (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1878), 26.
73. Madame Celnart [Élisabeth-Félicie Bayle-Mouillard], Nouveau Manuel complet du fleuriste artificiel et du feuillagiste (Paris: Encyclopédie-Roret, 1901), 272–73. The original edition of this book was published in 1838. A far less common type of fleur de fantaisie was, for instance, a flower that combined the anatomical parts of different types of flowers (petal, sepal, stamen, and so on).
74. F. M., “Paris au jour de l’an,” Le Figaro, January 1, 1867.
75. Émile Zola, “Les Squares,” in Contes et nouvelles, ed. Roger Ripoll (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 320.
76. “Notre but,” L’Iris: Journal spécial théorique et pratique de la fabrication des fleurs artificielles et des plumes et manuel de botanique appliqué au même sujet avec planches de fleurs naturelles les plus nouvelles et les plus rares (May–June 1843): n.p.
77. Ibid.
78. Mangin, “Industries parisiennes,” 505.
79. Paria [pseud.], “Union centrale des beaux-arts appliqués à l’industrie,” Le Fleuriste: Organe hebdomadaire du commerce et de la fabrique 1, no. 2 (October 11, 1874): 12–13.
80. John Joseph Beer, The Emergence of the German Dye Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959); Simon Garfield, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Anthony Travis, The Rainbow Makers: The Origins of the Synthetic Dyestuffs Industry in Western Europe (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1993).
81. Clélie Sourdon, Nouveau Manuel simplifié du fleuriste artificiel (Paris: Librairie encyclopédique de Roret, 1858), 5–6.
82. Quoted in Judith Bumpus, Impressionist Gardens (Oxford, UK: Phaidon, 1990), 15.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid., 15–16.
85. Ibid., pl. 34.
86. Michael Clarke, foreword to Willsdon, Impressionist Gardens, 8–9.
87. For instance, John House, “Monet’s Gladioli,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 77, nos. 1–2 (January 1, 2003): especially 14–15.
88. Quoted in Bumpus, Impressionist Gardens, 17.
89. Joachim Pissarro, Monet’s Cathedral: Rouen, 1892–1894 (New York: Knopf, 1990), 16.
90. Ministère du travail et de la prévoyance sociale, Enquête sur le travail à domicile dans l’industrie de la fleur artificielle (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1913), 319–20.
91. Ibid.
92. Montorgueil, Croquis parisiens, iii.
Chapter Three
1. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 87. On the materiality of paint, see Matthias Krüger, Das Relief der Farbe: Pastose Malerei in der französischen Kunstkritik 1850–1890 (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2007).
2. Mark Roskill, “Early Impressionism and the Fashion Print,” Burlington Magazine 112 (June 1970): 391–95.
3. Quoted in Birgit Haase, “Claude Monet: Women in the Garden,” in Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, ed. Gloria Groom (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2012), 100.
4. Roskill, “Early Impressionism and the Fashion Print”; Marie Simon, Mode et peinture: Le Second Empire et l’impressionnisme (Paris: Hazan, 1995); Ruth Iskin, Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Groom, Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity.
5. Anthea Callen, Techniques of the Impressionists (London: Orbis, 1982) and The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique and the Making of Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); David Bomford, Impressionism: Art in the Making (London: National Gallery, 1991); David Bomford et al., Degas: Art in the Making (London: National Gallery, 2004); Philip Ball, Bright Earth Art and the Invention of Color (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), chap. 8.
6. On the place of semiotics in art history, see Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,” Art Bulletin 73 (June 1, 1991): 174–208.
7. On tainted wine, see “Observations sur le compte rendu de la séance du 5 février 1877; par le M. le général Morin,” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences 84, 1st semester (1877): 291–94.
8. For example, on psychophysics and Impressionism, see Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999); and Michele Foa, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
9. E. M. Rashdall, “Claude Monet,” The Artist 9 (July 2, 1888): 195.
10. Edmond Duranty, “Duranty Hails the ‘New Painting’” (1876), in The Impressionists at First Hand, ed. Bernard Denvir (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 103.
11. Georges Rivière, “L’Impressionniste” (1877), in Lionello Venturi, Les Archives de l’impressionnisme, vol. 2 (Paris: Durand-Ruel, 1939), 309.
12. See, in particular, Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” and “The Later Monet,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, 3–11.
13. Richard Allen Shiff, “Impressionist Criticism, Impressionist Color, and Cézanne” (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1973), 54. Shiff reintroduces this argument in Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) but does not develop it to nearly the same extent; color is no longer the central focus of the study.
14. Victor Cherbuliez, “Le Salon de 1876,” Revue des deux mondes 15, 3rd per. (June 1, 1876): 516.
15. Edmond Duranty, La Nouvelle peinture: A propos du groupe d’artistes qui expose dans les galeries Durand-Ruel (1876; Paris: Librairie Floury, 1946), 39.
16. Jules Laforgue, “Impressionism” (1883), in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, ed. Linda Nochlin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 17, 16. See also Steven Z. Levine, Monet and His Critics (New York: Garland, 1976), 61.
17. Alfred de Lostalot, “Exposition des oeuvres de M. Claude Monet,” Gazette des beaux-arts 27 (April 1, 1883): 344.
18. Ibid.
19. Rashdall, “Claude Monet,” 196.
20. Ibid., 197.
21. Pierre Francastel, L’Impressionnisme (Paris: Librairie “Les Belles Lettres,” 1937), 37–38.
22. Ibid., 40. On Francastel’s analysis of Chevreul’s influence on Impressionism, see Georges Roque, “Chevreul and Impressionism: A Reappraisal,” Art Bulletin 78 (March 1996): 27. Francastel argued that the Impressionists were also influenced by the theories of Hermann von Helmholtz and Ogden Rood. However, as Roque points out, Rood’s scientific treatise, Modern Chromatics, was not translated into French until 1881, that is, after the Impressionists’ style took a dramatic turn toward bright prismatic color.
23. Georges Roque, Art et science de la couleur: Chevreul et les peintres de Delacroix à l’abstraction (Nîmes: Ed. Jacqueline Chambon, 1997), chap. 15.
24. Michel-Eugène Chevreul, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours, and Their Applications to the Arts: Including Painting, Interior Decoration, Tapestries, Carpets, Mosaics, Coloured Glazing, Paper-Staining, Calico-Printing, Letterpress Printing, Map-Colouring, Dress, Landscape and Flower Gardening, Etc., trans. Charles Martel (London: H. Bohn, 1860), section 333.
25. It is unclear whether Chevreul’s acquaintances in the art world, which included well-established Academic painters such as Horace Vernet and Paul Delaroche, fully mastered this aspect of his teachings, and the chemist does not seem to have left any record of his views on Impressionist painting. In fact, he likely was only remotely familiar with the work of this new generation of artist.
26. Michel-Eugène Chevreul, De la Loi du contraste simultané des couleurs et de l’assortiment des objets colorés, Atlas (Paris: Pitois-Levrault et cie, 1839).
27. Pierre Francastel, Art and Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1956; New York: Zone Books, 2000), 175.
28. Henry Havard, “L’Exposition des artistes indépendants,” Le Siècle, April 27, 1879. On Degas’s experimentation with a wide range of materials and techniques, see Henri Loyrette, Degas (Paris: Fayard, 1991); and Douglas W. Druick and Peter Zegers, “Scientific Realism: 1873–1881,” in Jean Sutherland Boggs et al., Degas, exhibition catalogue (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988), 202.
29. Following the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876, Émile Blémont noted about the artists: “Ils sont synthétistes et non analystes, et ils ont en cela raison, croyons-nous; car si l’analyse est la méthode scientifique par excellence, la synthèse est le vrai procédé de l’art.” Émile Blémont, “Les impressionnistes” (1876), in Venturi, Les Archives de l’impressionnisme, 2:298. Later on, Zola observed, “Selon moi, on doit bien saisir la nature dans l’impression d’une minute; seulement il faut fixer à jamais cette minute sur la toile, par une facture largement étudiée. En définitive, en dehors du travail, il n’y a pas de solidité possible.” Émile Zola, “Le Naturalisme au Salon” (1880), in Les Écrivains devant l’impressionnisme, ed. Denys Riout (Paris: Macula, 1989), 173.
30. Ball, Bright Earth, 12.
31. Charles Decaux, “Action de la lumière du jour et de la lumière électrique sur les couleurs employées en teinture et en peinture à l’eau et à l’huile,” Bulletin de la Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale 10 (November 1883): 513–36.
32. Ball, Bright Earth, 181.
33. Callen, Art of Impressionism, 105.
34. John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 223.
35. Alain Radau, “Les Nouvelles couleurs dérivées du goudron de houille,” La Revue des deux mondes 4 (August 15, 1874): 895.
36. On chemical synthesis as a modern form of alchemy, see Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art, and the Chemical Industry (London: Reaktion Books, 2005).
37. Gaston Tissandier, La Houille (Paris: Hachette, 1869), xiv–xv.
38. Paul Schützenberger, Rapport sur les procédés chimiques de blanchiment, de teinture, d’impression, d’apprêts: Exposition universelle internationale de 1878 à Paris, groupe V–classe 48 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1882), 77.
39. Jules Persoz, Rapports du jury international publiés sous la direction de M. Alfred Picard, Classe 46—Procédés chimiques de blanchiment, de teinture, d’impression et d’apprêt (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1891), 11.
40. Edmond Bourdain, Manuel du commerce des tissus: Vade mecum du marchand de nouveautés (Paris: J. Hetzel et cie, éditeurs, 1885). See also chapter 1.
41. Michel-Eugène Chevreul, “Note sur les étoffes de soie teintes avec la fuchsine, et réflexions sur le commerce des étoffes de couleur,” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences 51 (1860): 74.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Michel-Eugène Chevreul, “Violet lilas fuchsine sur soie,” Le Teinturier universel, no. 9 (August 1, 1860): 66.
45. Charles Decaux, “Couleurs, préparations et teintures,” in Rapports des membres de la section française du jury international dir. M. Michel Chevalier, vol. 1 (Paris: N. Chaix, 1862), 341–42.
46. Exposition internationale [1867] et al., Matières colorantes dérivées de la houille (Paris: P. Dupont, 1867), 10–11.
47. Radau, “Les Nouvelles couleurs dérivées du goudron de houille,” 904–5.
48. “La Teinture des soies et la solidité des couleurs” (1882), Rapports de la Chambre de commerce, Chambre de commerce de Lyon, Archives municipales de Lyon.
49. Some sources claim that Sisley’s father was the director of an import-export haberdashery business. See, for example, “Sisley, Alfred,” in Benezit Dictionary of Artists, Oxford Art Online, accessed June 5, 2013, www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/benezit/B00170363.
50. Jeanne-Marie David, “Monet in Rouen,” in A City for Impressionism: Monet, Pissarro, and Gauguin in Rouen, ed. Laurent Salomé (Rouen: Musée des beaux-arts de Rouen and Skira Flammarion, 2010), 38–40.
51. Callen, Art of Impressionism, 98.
52. Quoted in Paul Smith, Impressionism Beneath the Surface (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995), 87.
53. Quoted in Loyrette, Degas, 212–13.
54. The year 1870 marked Degas’s last appearance at the Salon; in addition to Madame Camus in Red, he exhibited Mme Théodore Gobillard (1869).
55. Simon, Mode et peinture, 231. See also Iskin, Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting, 113.
56. Huysmans quoted in Françoise Tétart-Vittu, “Édouard Manet, La Parisienne,” in Groom, Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, 127.
57. Gloria Groom, “The Social Network of Fashion,” in Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, 36–37.
58. See, for instance, Hippolyte Taine’s response to early 1860s women’s fashion, addressed in Philippe Perrot, Les Dessus et les dessous de la bourgeoisie: Une Histoire du vêtement au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1981), 220. See also chapter 1 in this book.
59. Huysmans quoted in Loyrette, Degas, 381. On the subject of Degas’s pastels, see Ambroise Vollard, Degas: An Intimate Portrait, trans. Randolph T. Weaver (New York: Crown, 1937), 63.
60. Albert André, “Renoir” (1919), in Renoir: Écrits, entretiens et lettres sur l’art, by Auguste Renoir and Augustin de Butler (Paris: Amateur, 2002), 26.
61. Alfred Stevens, Impressions sur la peinture (Paris: Librairie des bibliophiles, 1886), 26.
62. Jehan Georges Vibert, La Science de la peinture (Paris: P. Ollendorff, 1891), 12.
63. Ibid., 11. Père Tanguy, who sold colors to Renoir, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, and Camille Pissarro, did business on the edge of Montmartre. Richard Kendall, Degas Beyond Impressionism (London: National Gallery, 1996), 37; Callen, Art of Impressionism, 98.
64. Indeed, the bulk of what was produced by large-scale industrial manufacturers such as Lefranc et cie was sold to the mainstream Academic artists. Callen, Art of Impressionism, 98.
65. Armand Silvestre, “L’Exposition de la rue Le Peletier” (1876), in The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886; Documentation, by Ruth Berson and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Seattle: Distributed by University of Washington Press, 1996), 109 (emphasis added).
66. Quoted in Oscar Reutersvärd, “The ‘Violettomania’ of the Impressionists,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 9 (December 1950): 110. Manet was a prime target for this type of criticism because he only began using brighter and bluer colors in the mid-1870s, after these had become synonymous with the Impressionists. Manet’s interest in exploring a new range of colors appears in Laundry (1875), an oddly uncharacteristic painting both thematically and chromatically. This painting is currently the focus of a major study by Associate Professor Margaret Werth (Delaware University).
67. Manet quoted in George Moore, Modern Painting (London: W. Scott, 1898), 87.
68. De Lostalot, “Exposition des oeuvres de M. Claude Monet,” 346 (emphasis added).
69. This interpretation of Impressionism is most cogently articulated in Meyer Schapiro’s Impressionism: Reflections and Perceptions (New York: George Braziller, 1997).
70. “Chimie industrielle—Sur une cuve au noir d’alinine et sur la transformation du noir d’aniline en une matière colorante rose fluorescente. Note de M. Fr. Goppelsroeder, présentée par M. Wurtz,” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences 84 (1877): 477–50.
71. The chemists remained “sensuous” long into the nineteenth century, despite the general shift toward quantification. On this topic, see Lissa Roberts, “The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The ‘New’ Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous Chemistry,” in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes, 106–27 (New York: Berg, 2005).
72. Germany annexed the French regions of Alsace and Lorraine following its victory in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). The region returned to France after the First World War. Thus, at the time Zwiller completed the painting, the laboratory and attendant dye factory would have been under German political control.
73. Pierre Laszlo, “Foundations of Chemical Aesthetics,” Hyle 9 (2003): 11–23, accessed July 1, 2014, www.hyle.org/journal/issues/9-1/laszlo.htm.
74. Carnets de croquis et notes d’Edgar Degas (DC 327), Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
75. Ibid., Sketchbook no. 19.
76. Ibid., Sketchbook no. 1.
77. Ibid.
78. Vollard, Degas, 14.
79. Zola, “Le Naturalisme au Salon,” 175.
80. Vollard, Degas, 14.
81. Georges Rivière, M. Degas: Bourgeois de Paris (Paris: Librairie Floury, 1935), 59.
82. Degas’s comments as reported by Rivière. Ibid., 76.
83. Ibid.
84. Huysmans, “L’Exposition des indépendants en 1880” (1883), in Riout, Les Écrivains devant l’impressionnisme, 274.
85. Theodore Reff, Degas: The Artist’s Mind (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), 270, 22–23. For a more extensive analysis of Degas’s technique, see Line Clausen Pedersen, Degas’ Method ([Copenhagen]: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 2013).
86. Beaumont Newhall, “Degas, photographe amateur: Huit lettres inédites,” Gazette des beaux-arts, no. 61 (January 1963): 61–64.
87. Theodore Reff, “The Technical Aspects of Degas’s Art,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 4 (January 1, 1971): 143.
88. Simon, Mode et peinture, 134.
89. Degas quoted in Vollard, Degas, 87.
90. Richard R. Brettell, “The Laundresses,” in Degas in the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1984), 122–23; Eunice Lipton, Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 123.
91. Many washerwomen worked in public laundries, including Paris’s famous bateauxlavoirs. Ironing, in contrast, was almost always done indoors, in laundresses’ small private shops. According to Eunice Lipton’s calculations, among the twenty-seven works by Degas on the theme of laundry, only eight depict washerwomen. Lipton, Looking into Degas, 135.
92. Edmond de Goncourt quoted in Paul-André Lemoisne, Degas (Paris: Librairie centrale des beaux-arts, 1911), 96.
93. Émile Zola, Manuscrits et dossiers préparatoires, Les Rougon-Macquart, L’Assommoir (NAF 10271), Département des manuscrits—Nouvelles Acquisitions françaises, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
94. Edmond de Goncourt quoted in Lemoisne, Degas, 96.
95. Decaux, “Action de la lumière du jour et de la lumière électrique,” 514 (emphasis added).
96. Lipton, Looking into Degas, 153.
97. Iskin, Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting, chap. 3.
98. Decaux, “Action de la lumière du jour et de la lumière électrique,” 514. It is unclear which exposition Decaux is referring to here—perhaps the 1883 World’s Fair in Amsterdam.
99. Vicomte Georges d’Avenel, Le Mécanisme de la vie moderne, 4th ser. (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1902), 45–46.
100. Aruna D’Souza, “Why the Impressionists Never Painted the Department Store,” in The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, ed. Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 129–47.
101. Fénéon quoted in Kendall, Degas Beyond Impressionism, 100–101.
102. Ludovic Halévy, “Un Souvenir de M. Ludovic Halévy,” Pages libres, no. 332 (May 11, 1907): 496–99. As Theodore Reff notes, “One of [Degas’s] closest friends, Henri Rouart, was an inventor and metallurgical engineer whose circle consisted of other engineers, industrialists, and artillery officers, and as Jacques-Émile Blanche points out, ‘Ces messieurs avaient l’habitude de la precision, ils étaient des specialistes dont le langage technique, les connaissances scientifiques, l’esprit d’ordre et de discipline plaisaient tant à M. Degas.’” Reff, “Technical Aspects of Degas’s Art,” 142–43.
103. “I went yesterday before dinner to the Institut [de France]; I disturbed and saw Berthelot. Sophie [presumably Sophie Berthelot, Marcellin Berthelot’s wife and Louise Halévy’s cousin] entered when I was leaving.” Lettres de la Bibliothèque de l’Institut (Académie française): Lettres de Degas à Halévy, in Edgar Degas, “Documentation (Artiste),” Dossiers artistes et oeuvres, Centre de documentation, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
104. Degas’s words reported in George Moore, Impressions and Opinions (New York: Brentano’s, 1894), 225.
105. Quoted in Henri Loyrette, Degas: “Je voudrais être illustre et inconnu” (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 158.
106. Quoted in Edgar Degas, Tout l’oeuvre peint de Degas, trans. Simone Darses, new and rev. ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 14.
107. Callen, Techniques of the Impressionists, 76–79.
108. C. de Malte, “Exposition de la Société anonyme des artistes peintres sculpteurs, graveurs et lithographes,” in New Painting, by Berson and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1:27.
109. Anthea Callen’s The Work of Art: Plein Air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (London: Reaktion Books, 2015) is probably the most recent iteration of this long-standing interpretation of Impressionism.
110. Duranty, “Duranty Hails the ‘New Painting,’” 103.
111. Philippe Burty, “Exposition des impressionnistes” (1877), in Berson and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, New Painting, 1:124.
112. Roger Ballu, “L’Exposition des peintres impressionnistes” (1877), in Berson and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, New Painting, 1:125.
113. Jean Renoir, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, mon père (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 298.
114. Renoir, “Grammaire 1883–1884: Grammaire dédiée à tous ceux qui aiment l’art et à ceux qui veulent en faire leur carrière,” in Renoir and Butler, Renoir, 57.
115. John House, “Renoir’s Worlds,” in Renoir: Exhibition Catalogue (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985), 11–18.
116. Renoir, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, mon père, 250–51.
117. Aviva Burnstock, Klaas Jan van den Berg, and John House, “Painting Techniques of Pierre-Auguste Renoir: 1868–1919,” Art Matters: Netherlands Technical Studies in Art 3 (2005): 47–65. The authors note that between 1868 and his death in 1919, Renoir showed “a surprisingly consistent use of materials” (63).
118. Renoir, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, mon père, 430.
119. Renoir, “Version définitive de la lettre préface, 1911,” in Renoir and Butler, Renoir, 98.
120. Renoir, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, mon père, 346, 349.
121. Renoir’s words, as reported by his son. Ibid., 160.
122. Schapiro, Impressionism, 210. Schapiro is writing here about the Impressionists in general, but his comments also apply to Monet, whom the author considers a prime representative of the movement.
123. Monet to Gustave Geoffroy, July 21, 1890, in Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné, vol. 3 (Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1974), 257.
124. Quoted in John House, Monet: Nature into Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 1.
125. Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 66.
126. Freud addressed the concept of displacement in various texts, most notably in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). See Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Early Psycho-Analytic Publications, vol. 4, 1900, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 180–81; Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Early Psycho-Analytic Publications, vol. 5, 1900–1901, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 306–8.
127. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 197.
128. Ibid.
129. Wildenstein, Claude Monet, 3:44–46.
130. Monet’s work on the series was divided into three different phases: he began a first set of views of the cathedral in February 1892; almost exactly a year later, he returned to Rouen, adding several more views to the series; lastly, he heavily reworked the paintings in his studio in Giverny. He completed the entire project in 1894.
131. House, Monet: Nature into Art, 28; Joachim Pissarro, Monet’s Cathedral: Rouen, 1892–1894 (New York: Knopf, 1990), 23–27.
133. Quoted in Pissarro, Monet’s Cathedral, 19.
134. Ibid., 22.
135. Stephen Z. Levine, “Décor/Decorative/Decoration in Claude Monet’s Art,” Arts Magazine, February 1977, 138.
136. Quoted in Christopher Conrad, “From Impression to Organization of the Picture,” in Claude Monet: Fields in Spring (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 2006), 56.
137. Upon seeing the cathedral and London series approximately a decade later, the American artist Alexander Harrison asked Monet’s dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, whether or not the paintings had been executed from nature. The question clearly upset the artist. “Que mes Cathédrales, mes Londres et autres toiles soient faites d’après nature ou non, cela ne regarde personne et ça n’a acune importance. Je connais tant de peintres qui d’après nature et ne font que des choses horribles. Voilà ce que votre fils devrais répondre à ces messieurs,” he wrote to Durand-Ruel on February 12, 1905. By the next day, however, Monet already wanted to revise his answer: “Comme je vous l’ai dit hier, ce que peuvent dire ces messieurs n’a aucune valeur au point de vue de mes oeuvres, et il faut me connaître bien peu et ne pas savoir comment je travaille pour dire de telles bêtises.” Wildenstein, Claude Monet, 5:368. As we know, Monet heavily reworked paintings from the cathedral and London series in his studio in Giverny. Yet the idea of plein air painting—the idea of an unmediated representation of the external world—remained central both to Monet’s conception of himself as an artist and to his public artistic persona.
138. Quoted in Pissarro, Monet’s Cathedral, 28 (ellipses in original).
139. Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the ’90s: The Series Paintings (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with Yale University Press, 1989), 279. See also Levine, Monet and His Critics, 188–90.
140. Since the German annexation of Alsace, Rouen’s textile industry was in full expansion; many cotton weavers, dyers, and printers trained in what was formally France’s premier textile-producing region came to Rouen in search of livelihood.
141. Peter J. T. Morris and Anthony S. Travis, “A History of the International Dyestuff Industry,” American Dyestuff Reporter 81 (November 1992), accessed May 14, 2013. http://colorantshistory.org/HistoryInternationalDyeIndustryRev1/HistoryInternationalDyestuffIndustryOct6.pdf.
142. Charles-Émile Kopp and Em. Grieu, “Notice sur quelques matières colorantes bleues, artificielles, employées dans l’industrie de 1860 à 1883,” Bulletin de la Société industrielle de Rouen 11 (August 1883): 357–72.
143. Claude Monet to Alice Monet, April 11, 1893, in Wildenstein, Claude Monet, 3:274. In his letter to Alice, Monet identifies the company as “fabrique Bessellière [sic].” To my knowledge, no such company existed in Maromme. On the history of Besselièvre et fils, a well-established cotton printing company in Maromme, see Rapports du jury international: Groupe XII—Décoration et mobilier des édifices publics et des habitations (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902), 365.
144. David, “Monet in Rouen,” 40.
145. L. R. Delsalle, “Le Ruisseau de Robec de Claude Monet: Proposition de localisation d’un site pictural,” Bulletin des amis des monuments rouennais (October 1990–September 1991): 75–79.
146. Alice Hoschedé to Ernest Hoschedé, on or around June 23, 1880, in Wildenstein, Claude Monet, 1:446.
147. Théodore Duret, Les Peintres impressionnistes: Claude Monet, Sisley, C. Pissaro, Renoir, Berthe Morisot (Paris: H. Heymann et J. Perois, 1878), 18.
148. Quoted in House, Nature into Art, 36.
149. Anne M. Wagner, “Why Monet Gave Up Figure Painting,” Art Bulletin 76 (December 1994): 613.
150. Quoted in House, Nature into Art, 36.
151. Lilla Cabot Perry, “Reminiscences of Claude Monet from 1889 to 1909,” American Magazine of Art 18 (March 1927): 120.
152. Monet to Evan Charteris, June 21, 1926, quoted in Stephen Z. Levine, “Monet’s Series: Repetition, Obsession,” October 37 (Summer 1986): 65.
153. On March 18, 1892, Monet wrote to Alice Hoschedé, “J’ai été pincé par mon frère (jour de bourse) et j’ai dû aller dîner avec ses amis les chimistes, sans même pouvoir regarder ce que j’ai fait dans la journée.” Wildenstein, Claude Monet, 3:265.
154. Frédéric Goupil, Traité méthodique et raisonné de la peinture à l’huile (Paris: Renault, 1872), 3.
155. Monet quoted in Ashok Roy, “Monet’s Palette in the Twentieth Century: Water-Lilies and Irises,” National Gallery Technical Bulletin 28 (2007): 60.
156. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 197.
157. Crary, Suspensions of Perception. For a more recent example of this approach, focusing on Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat, see Foa, Georges Seurat.
158. Jules Claretie, “Paysages d’avril” (1881), in Riout, Les Écrivains devant l’impressionnisme, 77.
159. Quoted in Levine, Monet and His Critics, 23–24.
160. Quoted in ibid., 71.
Chapter Four
1. On the history of the cultivation of chrysanthemums, see Thomas H. Everett, “Chrysanthemums, Florists’ or Garden,” in The New York Botanical Garden Illustrated Encyclopedia of Horticulture, 2nd ed. (New York: Garland, 1981), 747–48.
2. Evelyne Castera, “Etienne Lacroix, le fondateur,” unpublished manuscript, n.d., 132, Lacroix-Ruggieri Company archives, Muret, France.
3. Castera, “Etienne Lacroix,” 131.
4. Simon Werrett, “Fireworks and Color in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015): 459.
5. For a list of other ingredients used to produce color in early modern fireworks, see “Table 1: Color-generating substances in early modern fireworks,” in ibid., 468.
6. Ibid., 464.
7. Ibid., 458–77 passim.
8. Tenney L. Davis, “The Early Use of Potassium Chlorate in Pyrotechny,” in A Davis Chrestomathy: Selected Writings of the Late Tenney Lombard Davis, Ph.D., ed. Warren K. Klofkorn (Phoenix: Prometheus Press), 74; Simon Werrett, Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), especially 161; Simon Werrett, “Green Is the Colour: St. Petersburg’s Chemical Laboratories and Competing Visions of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century,” Ambix 60 (May 2013): 134.
9. On color not being singularly important for early modern artificers, see Werrett, “Fireworks and Color,” 475.
10. Alan St. Hill Brock, A History of Fireworks (London: George G. Harrap, 1949), 160.
11. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, “Firework Displays, Firework Dramas, and Illuminations: Precursors of Cinema?” German Life and Letters 48 (July 1995): 338–52.
12. Tzvetan Todorov quoted in David Sandner, Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712–1831 (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2011), 17–18.
13. Compared to color’s role in heightening the realism of representations or subverting representation altogether, as in twentieth-century abstract art and its Impressionist and Post-Impressionist precursors, discussed in chapter 3 and the epilogue, scholars have not paid as much attention to the relationship between color and fantasy, that is, the representation of what does not—normally—exist. Historians of visual culture’s relative lack of interest in how color signals the fantastical in modern visual culture is symptomatic of scholars’ lack of appreciation for modern enchantment—spectacular make-believe. Nineteenth-century literary and artistic endeavors that are defined by their lack of seriousness have simply not garnered the scholarly attention afforded other modern modes of signification. Tellingly, the handful of exceptions to this rule—including Neil Harris’s Humbug! The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); James Cook’s The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Simon During’s Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Michael Saler’s, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)—have generally framed modern enchantment as an intellectual and literary question, even while discussing specifically visual forms of mass entertainment, such as magic tricks and cinema. Moreover, these studies focus on the Anglo-American context, where the standard nineteenth-century art historical narrative, charting the gradual liberation of color and the attendant birth of modernism, holds less historiographical sway. To my knowledge, the only two authors who have devoted sustained attention to the relationship between color and wonder are artist David Batchelor and anthropologist Michael Taussig; addressing art, literature, and popular culture from vastly different time periods and cultures, their studies provide useful overviews of the topic: David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000); Michael Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). An exciting book has also recently been published: Tom Gunning et al., Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, ed. Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi (Amsterdam: EYE Filmmuseum / Amsterdam University Press, 2015). Unfortunately, it is recent enough that I was unable to fully integrate it into my analysis.
14. See, in particular, Elisabeth Lebovici and Philippe Bracco, Ruggieri: 250 ans de feux d’artifice (Paris: Denoël, 1988); Jérôme Coignard, “Le Feu d’artifice, instrument de pouvoir,” Connaissance des Arts, no. 603 (March 2003): 84–89; and Kevin Salatino, Incendiary Art: The Representation of Fireworks in Early Modern Europe (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1997). Simon Werrett has investigated the social and political forces responsible for the transformation of pyrotechnics into a branch of applied chemistry, shedding new light on the complex interactions between artisanal and scientific forms of knowledge in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Werrett, Fireworks. Werrett’s research on the history of fireworks in the early modern period, including his more recent articles, is the most comprehensive and rigorous treatment this subject has received to date.
15. Michael R. Lynn, “Sparks for Sale: The Culture and Commerce of Fireworks in Early Modern France,” Eighteenth-Century Life 30 (Spring 2006): 74–97.
16. Lutz P. Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power, Modern German Culture and Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 162–63.
18. As Robert L. Herbert explains, “By ‘abstract,’ writers and painters of the period did not mean ‘devoid of reference to the real world’ as we now use the term. They meant to draw away from nature, in the sense of disdaining imitation in order to concentrate upon the distillation of essential shapes and movements. These distilled forms were superior to nature because they partook of idea, and represented the dominance of the artist over the mere stuff of nature. In embryo, the Symbolists and Neo-Impressionists did establish the philosophical defense of pure abstraction, but nature still formed part of the basic dialogue.” Robert L. Herbert and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Neo-Impressionism (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1968), 23. For more information on abstraction in nineteenth-century art theory, consult Georges Roque, Qu’est-ce que l’art abstrait? Une Histoire de l’abstraction en peinture (1860–1960) (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), chap. 2.
19. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 119–20.
20. Ibid., 120.
21. In reality, the fireworks that appear in figure 57 are green and red, not blue and red. “Fête du 15 août,” Nouvelle Imagerie d’Épinal, no. 459, 1863, PD 201 (fol.)—vol. 2/M029127, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.
22. Brock, History of Fireworks, 196.
23. According to Alan Brock, the first reference to potassium chlorate in the making of fireworks occurred in 1824, in James Cutbush, “Remarks on the Composition and Properties of the Chinese Fire, and on the So-Called Brilliant Fires,” American Journal of Science 7 (1824): 118–40, especially 132; see Brock, History of Fireworks, 157. It was not until the 1830s, however, that these potassium-chlorate-based compositions were systematically investigated and publicized. According to Tenney L. Davis, the “earliest important publication” on colored flame compositions was Moritz Meyer’s “Die Feuerwerkerei in ihrer Anwendung auf Kunst, Wissenschaft, und Gewerbe,” a fifty-five-page brochure published in 1833. Davis, “Early Use of Potassium Chlorate in Pyrotechny,” 74.
24. For more information on the chemistry of color fireworks, see John A. Conkling, Chemistry of Pyrotechnics: Basic Principles and Theory (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1985), chap. 7. See also Werrett, “Fireworks and Color,” 460.
25. J. L. Dumont, “Quand les flames prennent des couleurs,” unpublished manuscript, 2004, Lacroix-Ruggieri Company archives; Brock, History of Fireworks, 155.
26. Brock, 152.
27. F.-M. Chertier, Nouvelles recherches sur les feux d’artifices (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1843), 387.
28. Werrett, “Fireworks and Color,” 475.
29. F.-M. Chertier, Essai sur les compositions qui donnent les plus belles couleurs dans les feux d’artifice (Paris: Chez Delaunay, libraire, 1836).
30. Ibid., 10.
31. Chertier, Nouvelles recherches sur les feux d’artifices, 387.
32. Louis-Eustache Audot, L’Art de faire à peu de frais les feux d’artifice pour les fêtes de famille, mariages et autres circonstances semblables, 4th ed. (Paris: l’auteur, 1853); Paul Tessier, Traité pratique des feux colorés, 2nd ed. (1859; Paris: Librairie militaire de L. Baudoin et cie, 1883).
33. Evelyne Castera, “Étienne Lacroix,” 65–68.
34. Quoted in ibid., 119.
35. Tenney Davis, “Fireworks for Fun: Amusing Explosives Appeal to Something Deep Down in Human Nature,” in A Davis Chrestomathy: Selected Writings of the Late Tenney Lombard Davis, Ph.D., ed. Warren K. Klofkorn (Phoenix: Prometheus Press), 29; Feux d’artifice: Exposition, Avignon, 1980 (Avignon: Maison Jean Villar / Bibliothèque nationale, Département des arts du spectacle, 1980), n.p.
36. Louis de Cahusac, “Feux d’artifice” (1756), quoted in Patrick Bracco, Fireworks / Feux d’artifices: French Fireworks from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1976), 7.
37. For more information on the structure and appeal of fireworks shows in the early modern era, see ibid.; Werrett, Fireworks; and Simon Werrett, “Picturing Pyrotechnics,” Public Domain Review, n.d., accessed July 25, 2014, http://publicdomainreview.org/2014/06/25/picturing-pyrotechnics.
38. Matthew Truesdell, Spectacular Politics: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the Fête Impériale, 1849–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
39. “Government by Shows—The Paris Fêtes,” Illustrated London News, August 21, 1852.
40. According to Bernard Ménager, “Le 15 août est donc avant le 14 juillet républicain le premier essai réussi d’une fête nationale vraiment populaire, d’inspiration laïque malgré la coincidence avec une date importante du culte marial [the Assumption of the Virgin]. Elle a incontestablement concouru à la fidélité dynastique des masses populaires.” Bernard Ménager, Les Napoléon du peuple (Paris: Aubier, 1988), 157. For a more skeptical analysis of the Saint-Napoléon celebrations and the expressions of popular enthusiasm to which they gave rise, see Rosemonde Sanson, “Le 15 août: Fête nationale du Second Empire,” in Les Usages politiques des fêtes aux XIXe–XXe siècles: Actes du colloque organisé les 22 et 23 novembre 1990 à Paris, ed. Alain Corbin, Noëlle Gérôme, and Danielle Tartakowsky (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1994), 117–36.
41. Édouard Drumont. Les Fêtes nationales à Paris (Paris: Ludovic Baschet, 1879), n.p. Drumont is mostly known for his virulent anti-Semitism, which prompted him to take on a leading role during the Dreyfus affair (1894–1906). His weekly illustrated newspaper, La Libre Parole, was an important vehicle of French anti-Semitism.
42. Amédée Denisse, Traité pratique complet des feux d’artifice (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1882), ix–x.
43. G. G., “Coup d’oeil sur Paris,” Le Figaro, May 7, 1889, 1–2.
44. Chertier, Essai sur les compositions, 80–81.
45. Alan St. H. Brock, Pyrotechnics: The History and Art of Firework Making (London: Daniel O’Connor, 1922), 146.
46. Quoted in Sanson, “Le 15 août,” 126.
47. Michael Saler argues that audiences’ willful, self-aware participation in their own hoodwinking is a defining characteristic of modern enchantment. See Michael Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review,” American Historical Review 111 (2006): 692–716. For a more extensive analysis of modern enchantment, see Saler, As If.
48. Following philosopher Philip Fisher, I define wonder “as a sudden experience of an extraordinary object that produces delight.” Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 55. See also Patrick Sherry, “The Varieties of Wonder,” Philosophical Investigations 36 (October 2013): 340–54. Fisher’s definition of wonder is similar to Tzvetan Todorov’s classic definition of the fantastic; both emphasize the essentially positive, subjective response of the observer.
49. “Un grand nuage blanchâtre s’éloigne lentement au souffle de la brise, et la foule satisfaite, gaie et tranquille, redescend vers le Champs-Élysées et le fleuve, par ces larges voies triomphales récemment ouvertes, qui rendent tout désordre et tout accident impossible,” Théophile Gautier observed about the Saint-Napoléon celebration on August 15, 1863, drawing attention to one of the principal logistical differences between contemporary fireworks shows in Paris and those of yesteryear. Théophile Gautier, “La Fête du 15 août,” Le Moniteur universel, August 17, 1863.
50. Rapport July 1, 1878 (DA 297), Archive de la préfecture de police de Paris, Le Pré Saint Gervais.
51. “La Fête nationale,” La Lanterne, July 2, 1878.
52. Émile Zola, Manuscrits et dossiers préparatoires, Les Rougon-Macquart, Au Bonheur des dames (NAF 10275–78), Département des manuscrits—Nouvelles Acquisitions fran-çaises, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
53. See Simon During’s discussion of the “Surrealist marvel” in similar terms in Modern Enchantments, 30.
54. David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 222.
55. “La Fête nationale,” Le Rappel, July 2, 1878.
56. Henry de Chennevières, “Fêtes publiques et feux d’artifice,” L’Artiste 54, no. 1 (1884): 356–61.
57. Ibid., 361.
58. Henry de Chennevières, “Les Ruggieri, artificiers,” Gazette des beaux-arts 36, 2nd per. (1887): 140.
59. Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin: Architecture, sculpture, peinture (Paris: J. Renouard, 1867).
60. Quoted in Batchelor, Chromophobia, 23. Batchelor describes this passage as a “near-perfect example of textbook chromophobia” (23).
61. Quoted in Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v Ruskin (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 158.
62. John Ruskin quoted in ibid., 47.
63. Ibid. David Craven, “Ruskin vs. Whistler: The Case Against Capitalist Art,” Art Journal 37 (Winter 1977), 139–43.
64. Katharine Jordan Lochnan et al., Turner, Whistler, Monet: Impressionist Visions (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario in association with Tate Publishing, 2004); Geneviève Lacambre, “Whistler et la France,” in Whistler, 1834–1903 (Paris: Réunion des Musées nationaux / Musée d’Orsay, 1995), 39–47; Jo Sager, “Whistler’s Application of Musical Terminology to His Paintings: The Search for a Synaesthetic Response” (PhD dissertation, Ohio University, 2004), especially chap. 2; Suzanne M. Singletary, “Whistler and France” (PhD dissertation, Temple University, 2007).
65. Théodore Duret, “James Whistler,” Gazette des beaux-arts 23 (April 1881): 368.
66. Théodore Duret, “Expositions de la Royal Academy et de la Grosvenor Gallery,” Gazette des beaux-arts 23 (June 1881): 554.
67. Ibid., 554.
68. Quoted in Merrill, Pot of Paint, 145.
69. Quoted in Craven, “Ruskin vs. Whistler,” 142.
70. Andrew McLaren Young, Margaret MacDonald, and Robin Spencer, The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 96.
71. Alfred de Lostalot, “Exposition internationale de peinture et de sculpture: Galerie Georges Petit,” Gazette des beaux-arts 35 (June 1887): 523.
72. Duret, “James Whistler,” 368.
73. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 140.
74. Renoir’s words, as reported by Georges Rivière in his Renoir et ses amis (1921), in Renoir: Écrits, entretiens et lettres sur l’art, by Auguste Renoir and Augustin de Butler (Paris: Les éditions de l’amateur, 2002), 180.
75. McLaren Young, MacDonald, and Spencer, Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, 1:99.
76. Daily News, November 27, 1878. Press cuttings (Reel 4689, Frame 76), James McNeill Whistler Collection, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.
77. De Lostalot, “Exposition internationale de peinture et de sculpture,” 523.
78. To my knowledge, Robert Getscher is the only one to have—even tentatively—suggested the possibility of such a connection. “To separate his figure and ground, Whistler could have lightened the background with any of the colors already in it. Instead, he introduced yellow. Chevreul’s ‘law’ was his guide, no matter how he learned of it, and even if he only sensed it in his fingertips.” James McNeill Whistler and Robert H. Getscher, James Abbott McNeill Whistler Pastels (New York: George Braziller, 1991), 54.
79. Michel-Eugène Chevreul, De l’Abstraction considérée relativement aux beaux-arts et la littérature (Dijon: Imprimerie J. E. Habutot, 1864), n.p.
80. “Status de la Société des fêtes versaillaises” (1859), Fêtes versaillaises (Série I 1-1054), Archives municipales de Versailles.
81. On the subject of the Rococo revival, see Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), especially 109–71; and Ken Ireland, Cythera Regained? The Rococo Revival in European Literature and the Arts, 1830–1910 (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006). On Empress Eugénie’s fondness for Marie Antoinette and the Rococo, more generally, see Marie Simon, Mode et peinture: Le Second Empire et l’impressionnisme (Paris: Hazan, 1995), 95; and Hélène Demoriane, “Le Louis XVI qu’aimait Eugénie,” Connaissance des arts, no. 116 (October 1961): 76–85.
82. “The Fête of the French Republic Has Passed,” Times (London), July 16, 1888.
83. “La Fête nationale,” Le Figaro, July 15, 1888.
84. De Chennevières, “Les Ruggieri, artificiers,” 132.
85. Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, 17.
86. Margaret Cohen, “Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria: The Arcades Project,” in Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 203–4.
87. On enchantment in the early modern era, see Joy Kenseth, ed., The Age of the Marvelous (Hanover, N.H.: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1991).
88. Gaston Bachelard, La Psychanalyse du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). See also Davis, “Fireworks for Fun,” especially 27.
89. T. J. Clark, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam,” October 100 (Spring 2002): 170.
90. Jules Chéret and Roger Marx, Exposition Jules Chéret: Pastels, lithographies, croquis, esquisses, affiches illustrées; Galeries du Théâtre d’Application, décembre 1889 (Paris: Les Galeries, 1889), ii.
Chapter Five
1. Phillip Dennis Cate and Sinclair Hitchings, The Color Revolution: Color Lithography in France, 1890–1900 (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Peregrine Smith, 1978), 37.
2. Maurice Talmeyr, “L’Âge de l’affiche,” Revue des deux mondes 137 (September 1, 1896): 209.
3. Jules Claretie, La Vie à Paris (Paris: Victor Harvard, 1885), 518.
4. Eduard Van Biema, “La Réclame, son origine et son développement,” La Nouvelle Revue 117 (1899): 295.
5. For example, Cate, Color Revolution; Karen Lynn Carter, “L’Âge de l’affiche: The Reception, Display, and Collection of Posters in Fin-de-Siècle Paris” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2001); Karen Lynn Carter, “The Spectatorship of the Affiche Illustrée and the Modern City of Paris, 1880–1900,” Journal of Design History 25 (January 2012): 11–31; Karen Lynn Carter, “Unfit for Public Display: Female Sexuality and the Censorship of Fin-de-Siècle Publicity Posters,” Early Popular Visual Culture 8 (May 2010): 107–24; Bradford R. Collins, “The Poster as Art: Jules Chéret and the Struggle for the Equality of the Arts in Late Nineteenth-Century France,” Design Issues 2 (Spring 1985): 41–50; Ruth E. Iskin, “Identity and Interpretation: Receptions of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Reine de Joie Poster in the 1890s,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 8 (Spring 2009), accessed May 18, 2012, www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring09/55-spring09/spring09article/63--identity-and-interpretation-receptions-of-toulouse-lautrecs-reine-de-joie-poster-in-the-1890s; Ruth E. Iskin, “‘Savages into Spectators/Consumers: Globalization in Advertising Posters, 1890s–1900s,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 29 (September 6, 2007): 127–49; and Ruth E. Iskin, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2014).
6. Henri Bouchot, La Lithographie (Paris: Librairies-impr. réunies, 1895), 247.
7. André Mellerio, La Lithographie en couleurs (1898), trans. Margaret Needham, in Cate, Color Revolution, 4.
8. Alois Senefelder, A Complete Course of Lithography: Containing Clear and Explicit Instructions in All the Different Branches and Manners of That Art: Accompanied by Illustrative Specimens of Drawings; To Which Is Prefixed a History of Lithography, from Its Origin to the Present Time. Trans. A. S. (London: R. Ackermann, 1819).
9. Jean Engelmann, Notice sur la chromolithographie (Paris: s.n., 1864), 6.
10. Gaultier de Claubry, “Rapport sur le concours relatif à l’impression lithographique en couleur,” Bulletin de la Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale 36 (1837): 505. See also Gaultier de Claubry, “Rapport sur le concours relatif à l’impression lithographique en couleurs,” Le Lithographe 1 (1838): 288–90. On the early history of chromolithography, see Michael Twyman, Images en couleurs: Godefroy Engelmann, Charles Hullmandel et les débuts de la chromolithographie (Lyon: Musée de l’imprimerie, 2007); and Michael Twyman, A History of Chromolithography: Printed Colour for All (London: British Library; New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2013), 97–124.
11. Art Journal (1869), quoted in Victoria Button and Victoria and Albert Museum, “The Arundel Society: Techniques in the Art of Copying,” Conservation Journal, no. 23 (April 1997), accessed March 15, 2012, www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/conservation-journal/issue-23/the-arundel-society-techniques-in-the-art-of-copying.
12. Prosper Mérimée, Notice sur les peintures de l’église de Saint-Savin (Paris: Impr. royale, 1845); Bouchot, La Lithographie, 240. By this time, Engelmann was established in both Mulhouse and Paris under the name Engelmann & Graf.
13. Armand Audiganne, L’Industrie contemporaine, ses caractères et ses progrès chez les différents peuples du monde (Paris: Capelle, 1856), 173.
14. Promenades dans l’Exposition universelle de 1855 (Paris: J. Cherbuliez, 1855), 98.
15. Twyman, History of Chromolithography, 216.
16. Peter C. Marzio, The Democratic Art: Chromolithography, 1840–1900; Pictures of a Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: D. R. Godine, in association with the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1979). Much of the scholarship on the history of chromolithography focuses on the American context. See, for example, Michael Clapper, “‘I Was Once a Barefoot Boy!’: Cultural Tensions in a Popular Chromo,” American Art 16 (July 1, 2002): 17–39; Joni Kinsey and Thomas Moran, Thomas Moran’s West: Chromolithography, High Art, and Popular Taste (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Jay T. Last, The Color Explosion: Nineteenth-Century American Lithography (Santa Ana, Calif.: Hillcrest Press, 2005); and Dawn M. Schmitz, “The Humble Handmaid of Commerce: Chromolithographic Advertising and the Development of Consumer Culture, 1876–1900” (PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburg, 2004), 22–69. Michael Twyman’s scholarship is an important exception to this rule, including his “Chromolithography: The European Legacy,” Ephemera Journal 10 (2003): 2–26; Images en couleurs; and, most recently, History of Chromolithography.
17. L. Gérard, “Publications de Léon Curmer,” Les Beaux-Arts 7 (July–December 1863): 334.
18. Wolfgang M. Freitag, “Early Uses of Photography in the History of Art,” Art Journal 39 (Winter 1979): 117–23.
19. “Chromolithographie,” in Dictionnaire de l’Académie des Beaux-Arts, vol. 4 (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1878), 16–17.
20. Bouchot, La Lithographie, 246.
21. Neil Harris, “Color and Media: Some Comparisons and Speculations,” in Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), 318–36.
22. Henry Nocq, Tendances nouvelles: Enquête sur l’évolution des industries d’art (Paris: H. Floury, 1896), 145.
23. On the history of these ideas in the context of French decorative arts, see Nancy Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
24. On the bourgeoisie’s taste for fake luxuries, see Philippe Perrot, Le Luxe: Une Richesse entre faste et confort, XVIIIe–XIXe siècle (Paris: Éditions du seuil, 1995), especially chap. 5.
25. “Chromolithographie,” in Dictionnaire de l’Académie des Beaux-Arts, 17.
26. Engelmann, Notice sur la chromolithographie, 9.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 10. To my knowledge, the only scholar to have paid serious attention to popular job printing, including different types of ephemera, is Michael Twyman. His extensively researched History of Chromolithography is the definitive account of nineteenth-century chromolithography. See especially pp. 185–268. On window transparencies, see pp. 646–50.
29. Engelmann, Notice sur la chromolithographie, 12–13.
30. Albert Achaintre, Étude sur les impressions en couleurs (Paris: A. Lahure, 1883), 29.
31. Commission d’enquête sur la situation des ouvriers et des industries d’art: Instituée par décret en date du 24 décembre 1881 (Paris: Impr. A. Quantin, 1884), 181. Since Jean Engelmann died in 1875, it is reasonable to assume that the “Mr. Engelmann” interviewed here was Jean’s brother, Godefroy Engelmann, Jr. (1814–1897).
32. Ibid., 177.
33. Ibid., 179.
34. Ibid., 177.
35. Ségolène Le Men and Réjane Bargiel, “L’Art de Jules Chéret,” in La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret: De l’Affiche au décor, by Jules Chéret, Réjane Bargiel, and Ségolène Le Men (Paris: Arts décoratifs, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2010), 20.
36. This account of Chéret’s early career draws heavily upon Anne-Marie Sauvage, “Les débuts de Jules Chéret jusqu’à 1881,” in Chéret, Bargiel, and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret, 35–49.
37. Camille Mauclair, “La Vie de Jules Chéret,” L’Affiche et les arts de la publicité 8, no. 91 (October 1932): 190.
38. This idea appears in a variety of sources—for example, the newspaper article “L’Exposition Chéret,” Le Rappel, 1889, Coupures de journaux et de presse relatives à Jules Chéret, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
39. Mauclair, “La Vie de Jules Chéret,” 191.
40. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Certains (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1908), 52. Engineer Adolphe Alphand played an important part in the redesign of the city, spearheaded by Napoléon III. Specializing in the design of parks and gardens, he worked under the supervision of the prefect of the Seine, the Baron Georges Haussmann. For a lengthier discussion of his accomplishments, see chapter 2. On the subject of posters subverting, with their bright colors, the gray homogeneity of Paris, see Ségolène Le Men, Seurat et Chéret: Le Peintre, le cirque et l’affiche (Paris: CNRS, 1994), 44–45. The subject is also addressed in Carter, “L’Âge de l’affiche,” especially chap. 2.
41. Joris-Karl Huysmans, “Le Salon officiel de 1880,” in L’Art moderne, 2nd ed. (Paris: P. V. Stock, 1902), 185.
42. Huysmans, “Le Salon de 1879,” in Huysmans, L’Art moderne, 16.
43. Ernest Maindron, “Les Affiches illustrées (deuxième et dernier article),” Gazette des beaux-arts 30, 2nd per. (December 1884): 543.
44. Ibid., 546.
45. Ibid.
46. Henri Béraldi, Les Graveurs du XIXe siècle: Guide de l’amateur d’estampes modernes, vol. 4 (Paris: L. Conquet, 1886), 172.
47. Quoted in Félicien Champsaur, “Les Affiches estampes,” Le Temps, May 3, 1886.
48. Félicien Champsaur, “L’Imagerie parisienne,” Le Figaro: Supplément littéraire, May 16, 1885.
49. Gustave Kahn, “Jules Chéret,” Art et décoration 12 (1902): 177–93.
50. Georges Dubosc, “Coin de Rouen: Une Affiche” (1890), Coupures de journaux et de presse relatives à Jules Chéret, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
51. Ibid.
52. Mellerio, La Lithographie en couleurs (1898), 80.
53. Laura Anne Kalba, “How Media Were Made: Chromolithography in Belle Époque France,” History and Technology 27 (December 2011): 441–53.
54. Reyner Banham makes the same argument in reference to modernist architecture and art criticism in his essay “Machine Aesthetic,” Architectural Review 117 (April 1955): 225–28. I first explored this idea in a short catalogue essay: Laura Anne Kalba, “Color in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: The History of Chromolithography from Godefroy Engelmann to Jules Chéret,” in Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints (Chicago: University of Chicago Smart Museum of Art, 2012), 133–46.
55. “Chéret (Jules),” Revue biographique (1890), Coupures de journaux et de presse relatives à Jules Chéret, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
56. “Les Collections d’affiches” (1889), Coupures de journaux et de presse relatives à Jules Chéret, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
57. Marcus Verhagen, “Refigurations of Carnival: The Comic Performer in Fin-de-Siècle Parisian Art” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1994), 94. On “Frenchness” and Chéret, see Ségolène Le Men, “L’Oeuvre de Chéret en resonances,” in Chéret, Bargiel, and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret, 63.
58. Kahn, “Jules Chéret,” 177.
59. “Un Dessinateur d’affiches,” L’Éclair (1890), Coupures de journaux et de presse relatives à Jules Chéret, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
60. Lucien Muhlfeld, “Courrier de Paris” (1890), Coupures de journaux et de presse relatives à Jules Chéret, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
61. For an analysis of the relationship between advertising and national identity, see Aaron Jeffrey Segal, “The Republic of Goods: Advertising and National Identity in France, 1875–1918” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1995).
62. Miriam Levin, “Democratic Vistas—Democratic Media: Defining a Role for Printed Images in Industrializing France,” French Historical Studies 18 (Spring 1993): 102.
63. Commission d’enquête, 179.
64. Bouchot, La Lithographie, 293.
65. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, “Selling Consumption in the Eighteenth Century: Advertising and the Trade Card in Britain and France,” Cultural and Social History 4 (June 1, 2007): 145–70.
66. Piergé, “Les chromos,” La Vie du collectionneur, no. 116 (February 2, 1996): 10.
67. Some of these models were printed in runs of up to forty thousand copies. The figures presented here are from the following sources: Didier Royer, “Les Chromos, rois de la pub,” La Vie du collectionneur, no. 1 (October 3, 1991), 15; Piergé, “Les Chromos,” 10. According to another source, Le Bon Marché printed a total of 360 different series. Luigi Loir, Luigi Loir, 1845–1916: De la Belle Époque à la publicité; Catalogue raisonné, vol. 1 (Carmel, Calif.: Classic Art Gallery, 2004), 156. Among manufacturers, the English Liebig Extract of Meat Company was especially well known for its trade cards; the company edited approximately 5,000 different series between 1872 and 1914. Jörge de Sousa, La Mémoire lithographique (Paris: Arts et métiers du livre, 1998), 123–24.
68. Jennifer M. Black, “Corporate Calling Cards: Advertising Trade Cards and Logos in the United States, 1876–1890,” Journal of American Culture 32 (2009): 291–306.
69. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), chap. 1.
70. A searchable index to the Bulletin de la Société archéologique, historique et artistique: Le Vieux Papier (1900–) is available online: “Tables centennales du Vieux Papier, mode d’emploi,” www.levieuxpapier-asso.org/tables, accessed April 2, 2012. See also Henri George, “Historique de la Société le vieux papier,” accessed April 2, 2012, www.levieuxpapier-asso.org/historique-de-lassociation.
71. For this reason, I would like to challenge, or rather nuance, Ruth Iskin’s otherwise excellent history of the rise of poster collecting in the late nineteenth century; poster collectors from this era had a distinct sociocultural profile, often at odds with the broader category of iconophiles who were interested in all forms of ephemeral imagery. See Iskin, Poster, 263–302. Indeed, when it was founded in 1900, the Société le vieux papier explicitly excluded poster collectors. [Secrétaire general], “Note bulletin,” Bulletin de la Société archéologique, historique, et artistique: Le Vieux Papier, no. 1 (April 1, 1900): 10.
72. Commission d’enquête, 180.
73. For example, the Philadelphia Library Company holds in its collection an English-language Liebig trade card printed in France by Jallet, Minot, et cie. The Liebig Extract of Meat Company, which operated in several countries, both in Europe and the Americas, printed trade cards in several different languages. Save for the text, the images were exactly the same. For further evidence of this phenomenon, see the popular trade card collecting website, www.chromo.be, which includes an exhaustive list of Liebig trade card sets, including information about their different languages: “Alphabetic Lists of All Sets of the Liebig Company,” accessed March 1, 2014, www.chromo.be/alfalist.asp.
74. Karen Lynn Carter, “Joris-Karl Huysmans, a Dénicheur of Jules Chéret’s Posters,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41 (Fall 2012–Winter 2013): 122–41.
75. Collection Gustave Bourcard: Exposition d’affiches illustrées contemporaines au profit de l’Hôpital Marin de Pen-Bron Nantes; Galerie Préaubert, du 19 novembre au 2 décembre 1889 (Nantes: s.n., 1889), 2.
76. Béraldi, Les Graveurs du XIXe siècle, 4:176.
77. Only two exceptions come to mind, both of which also address the technique and form of nineteenth-century American trade cards and how they operated within popular commercial culture: Black, “Corporate Calling Cards:”; and Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), chap. 1.
78. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 139.
79. Franz Roh, “Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 15–31; Northrop Frye, “Improved Binoculars,” in Northrop Frye on Modern Culture, ed. Jan Gorak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 27–48; Michael Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 209–33.
80. Schudson, Advertising, 214.
81. Ernest Maindron, “Les Affiches illustrées (premier article),” Gazette des beaux-arts 30, 2nd per. (November 1884): 419–33. On poster collecting in fin-de-siècle France and the efforts of decorative arts reformers, critics, and collectors to elevate posters to the status of art, see Collins, “The Poster as Art”; and Carter, “L’Âge de l’affiche,” especially chap. 5.
82. Béraldi, Les Graveurs du XIXe siècle, 4:175.
83. Rossella Froissart Pezone, L’Art dans tout: Les Arts décoratifs en France et l’utopie d’un art nouveau (Paris: CNRS editions, 2004), especially 81–211.
84. Fénéon quoted in Le Men, Seurat et Chéret, 40–41.
85. Gustave Kahn, L’Esthétique de la rue (Paris: Charpentier, 1901), 304.
86. Gustave Kahn, “Jules Chéret,” Art et décoration 12 (1902): 189.
87. José A. Argüelles, Charles Henry and the Formation of a Psychophysical Aesthetic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); Martha Ward, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), chap. 6.
88. Charles Henry, Cercle chromatique: Présentant tous les compléments et toutes les harmonies de couleurs; Avec une Introduction sur la théorie générale du contraste, du rythme et de la mesure (Paris: C. Verdin, 1888), 5.
89. As Martha Ward points out, despite his untraditional training and professional affiliations, Henry nevertheless succeeded in having his papers presented at the Académie des sciences and Académie de médecine de Paris as well as his publications accepted into reputable scientific journals, such as La Revue philosophique and La Revue archéologique. Ward, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde, 126. By most standards, however, Henry remained an eccentric figure. Marcus Verhagen describes him as a “scientist and general mad hatter who was close to Symbolist circles,” and Lynn Gamwell calls him a “scientific dilettante.” Verhagen, “Refigurations of Carnival,” 100–102; Lynn Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 118.
90. See, in particular, Robert L. Herbert, “‘Parade de Cirque’ de Seurat et l’esthétique scientifique de Charles Henry,” Revue de l’art 50 (1980): 9–23.
91. Jonas Cohn, “Experimentelle Untersuchungen über die Gefühlsbetonung der Farben, Helligkeiten und ihrer Combinationen,” Philosophische Studien 10 (1894): 562–603. Translated by Victor Henri, the results of Cohn’s study were quickly published in L’Année psychologique 1 (1894): 438–45. See also H. J. Eysenck, “A Critical and Experimental Study of Colour Preferences,” American Journal of Psychology 54 (July 1941): 385–94.
92. On the various ways the decorative arts prefigured abstract artists’ attention to form, see Gladys Fabre, “De l’Enseignement des arts appliqués à l’avènement de la forme pure,” in Aspects historiques du constructivisme et de l’art concret (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1977), n.p. On hostility toward the decorative in art criticism, see Elissa Auther, “The Decorative, Abstraction, and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft in the Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg,” Oxford Art Journal 27 (2004): 339–64.
93. Jean Lorrain, “Chéret,” Le Courrier français, February 9, 1896, Coupures de journaux et de presse relatives à Jules Chéret, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
94. Henry, Cercle chromatique, 141–43; Charles Féré, La Pathologie des émotions: Études physiologiques et cliniques (Paris: F. Alcan, 1892), 31–46; Kevin T. Dann, Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 28.
95. Féré, La Pathologie des émotions, 35.
96. For an overview of synesthesia in Debussy criticism, see Laura Anne Kalba, “Hearing Voices: A Study of the Soundscape and Visual Culture of Debussy’s Paris,” in Debussy’s Paris: Art, Music, and Sounds of the City (Northampton, Mass.: Smith College Museum of Art, 2012), 14–31; and Juliet Bellow, “Dance in Debussy’s Paris: Re-figuring Art and Music,” in the same publication, 46–59.
97. I draw here upon scholar of religion Lawrence Sullivan’s 1986 analysis of “cultural synesthesia,” discussed in David Howes and Constance Classen, Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014), 157.
98. Béraldi, Les Graveurs du XIXe siècle, 4:175.
99. Donald Warren, “Notes of a Poster Collector in Paris,” The Chap-Book, Semi-Monthly: A Miscellany and Review of Belles Lettres (October 1, 1894): 251.
100. Cate, Color Revolution, 19.
101. Warren, “Notes of a Poster Collector in Paris,” 251.
102. Miriam Levin, “Democratic Vistas—Democratic Media,” 102. While he undoubtedly shared these concerns, Kahn avoided giving voice to them in L’Esthétique de la rue or his lengthy “Jules Chéret” article published in 1902. It is also possible that Kahn’s faith in the psychophysiological effects of color was such that he cared little about their precise material manifestation. So long as there were still some posters bringing joy to the dull streets of Haussmannian Paris, hope for a brighter, more just future remained alive for Kahn.
103. Hayward Cirker and Blanche Cirker, Masterpieces of the Poster from the Belle Epoque: Forty-Eight Full-Color Plates from “Les Maîtres de l’affiche” (New York: Dover, 1983), n.p.
104. See Ruth Iskin’s analysis of how Les Maîtres de l’affiche transformed posters “into precious objects through size reduction and by using higher quality paper and inks,” a process she describes as “auratization.” Iskin, Poster, 155–70.
105. Several of these exist in the Leonardo Lauder postcard collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Benjamin Weiss, e-mail correspondence, February 26, 2014.
106. Charles T. J. Hiatt, “The Collecting of Posters,” The Studio 1 (May 1, 1893): 61. On poster collecting in the United States, see Neil Harris, “American Poster Collecting: A Fitful History,” American Art 12 (April 1, 1998): 11–39.
107. Katharine Miller Wilson, “Poster,” Washington Post, December 1, 1895.
Epilogue
1. The first quotation is from an undated letter Gauguin wrote to his wife, quoted in Jean Dorsenne, La Vie sentimentale de Paul Gauguin (Paris: Artisan du livre, 1927), 87. The second quotation is from Paul Gauguin, “Racontars de rapin” (1902), in Oviri: Écrits d’un sauvage, ed. Daniel Guérin (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 263.
2. François Arago, “Le Daguerréotype,” La France littéraire 35 (1839): 419.
3. Marc Antoine Gaudin, Traité pratique de photographie, exposé complet des procédés relatifs au daguerréotype (Paris: J.-J. Dubochet et cie, éditeurs, 1844), iii.
4. Among the many histories of early color photography processes, I especially recommend Bertrand Lavédrine and Jean-Paul Gandolfo, L’Autochrome Lumière: Secrets d’atelier et défis industriels (Paris: CTHS, 2009); and Nathalie Boulouch, Le Ciel est bleu (Paris: Textuel, 2011).
5. See Debora Silverman’s excellent analysis of Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon in her Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 91–118.
6. Paul Gauguin, The Writings of a Savage, ed. Daniel Guérin, trans. Eleanor Levieux (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 145.
8. André Barret, “Les Frères Lumière,” in Les Frères Lumière et les premières photographies en couleurs (Paris: André Barret, 1989), 9.
9. Daniel Jon Mitchell, “Reflecting Nature: Chemistry and Comprehensibility in Gabriel Lippmann’s ‘Physical’ Method of Photographing Colours,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 64 (December 20, 2010): 319–37.
10. Press clipping (ca. 1911–14), in Dossier actualité—Les Débuts du cinéma (no. 104), Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, Paris. On Jules Gervais-Courtellemont’s “Visions d’Orient” lecture series, see Emmanuelle Devos, “Jules Gervais-Courtellemont à la salle Charras: De la photographie au cinématographe,” 1895: Revue de l’Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma, no. 56 (December 1, 2008): 54–63.
11. Before perfecting the autochrome color photography process, the Lumière brothers experimented with Gabriel Lippmann’s interferential method and then developed their own patented indirect trichromatic process, called CHROMA-ALL, which also produced photographs viewed by projection. Starting around 1898, color slides produced using this second method were commonly shown to audiences before film viewings. For more information on the Lumière brothers’ trichromatic color photography process and slideshows, including viewers’ enthusiastic praise of the images’ faithfulness to reality, see Gabriel Veyre, Gabriel Veyre, opérateur Lumière: Autour du monde avec le cinématographe; Correspondance, 1896–1900, ed. Philippe Jacquier and Marion Pranal (Lyon: Institut Lumière, 1996), especially 108.
12. For more information on “spectacular realities” in fin-de-siècle France, see Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
13. André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 2 vols. (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967–71); Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 141–48; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); Hassan el-Nouty, Théâtre et pré-cinéma: Essai sur la problématique du spectacle au XIXe siècle (Paris: Éditions A.-G. Nizet, 1978); Schwartz, Spectacular Realities.
14. Arago, “Le Daguerréotype.”
15. Nathalie Boulouch, “Albert Londe positions autochromistes,” Études photographiques, no. 6 (May 1999), accessed January 15, 2013, http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/187.
16. Virginie Chardin, introduction to Paris en couleurs de 1907 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 13 (emphasis added).
17. “Incroyables photos de Paris des années 1900 et . . . en Couleurs,” Le Huffington Post, accessed June 7, 2014, www.huffingtonpost.fr/2013/02/07/photos-paris-couleur-1900_n_2643352.html.
18. On the stereotypically “colorful” aspect of autochromes, see, for example, Nathalie Boulouch, “Les Autochromes: The Revelation of Colors,” accessed May 19, 2014, www.autochromes.culture.fr/index.php?id=2&L=1. In her study of American Farm Security Administration photographers’ use of color photography, Sally Stein comes to similar conclusions about the restricted, stereotypical use of color. Sally Stein, “The Rhetoric of the Colorful and the Colorless: American Photography and Material Culture Between the Wars” (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1991).
19. Jacques-Henri Lartigue, The Autochromes of J. H. Lartigue, 1912–1927 (New York: Viking Press, 1981), n.p.
20. In their theoretical writings, Neo-Impressionists strategically underplayed the difference between optical mixture and additive mixture.
21. Étienne Wallon, “Autochromie et trichromie,” Bulletin de la Société française de photographie 24 (1908): 391–92.
22. The relative importance of realism, luminosity, synthesis, and harmony in the art of Seurat, Signac, Pissarro, and other Neo-Impressionist artists is still a matter of art historical debate, the details of which are too complex and specialized to summarize here. However, the fact that science—in particular, physics and psychophysiology—played a central role in these artists’ thinking has not, generally speaking, been disputed. According to Paul Smith, however, the importance of luminosity in the art of Seurat has traditionally been overemphasized by art historians. Paul Smith, introduction to Seurat Re-viewed (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 3.
23. Nathalie Boulouch, “Antonin Personnaz ou l’aventure d’un autochromiste,” Histoire de l’art, nos. 13–14 (1991): 72. See also Nathalie Boulouch, “La photographie autochrome en France, 1904–1931” (PhD dissertation, Université de Lille III, 1994).
24. Ball, Bright Earth, 177. On the relationship between Ogden Rood’s ideas and the science of psychophysics in general, see Michael Paul Rossi’s excellent dissertation, “The Rules of Perception: American Color Science, 1831–1931” (PhD dissertation, MIT, 2011), chap. 2.
25. Paul Signac, D’Eugène Delacroix au néoimpressionnisme, 3rd ed. (Paris: H. Floury, 1921), 103–4.
26. Ibid., 56.
27. Quoted in Smith, introduction to Seurat Re-viewed, 4.
28. Félix Fénéon, Au-delà de l’Impressionnisme, ed. Françoise Cachin (Paris: Hermann, 1966), 117.
29. The word appears, for example, in a review by Gustave Kahn (1888) quoted in Michael F. Zimmermann, Seurat and the Art Theory of His Time (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1991), 135.
30. Robert Rey, La Renaissance du sentiment classique dans la peinture française à la fin du XIXe siècle (Paris: Les Beaux-Arts—Édition d’études et de documents, 1931).
31. Ibid., 134.
32. Surviving preparatory works for the Grande Jatte include twenty-seven drawings, twenty-seven panels, and three canvases. Michelle Foa covers the synthesizing quality of Seurat’s painting in her recent book, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 66–78. According to Foa, the Grande Jatte stands as a critical reflection on “some of the tableau’s pictorial conventions, such as linear perspective, and as a space within which to devise alternatives to this tradition” (73).
33. Françoise Cachin, “Seurat’s Poseuses: Time’s Workshop,” in Japan and Europe in Art History, C.I.H.A. Tokyo Colloquium, 1991 (Tokyo: Chuo-Koron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1995), 364.
34. Linda Nochlin, “Body Politics: Seurat’s Poseuses,” Art in America 82 (March 1994): 73.
35. Zimmermann, Seurat and the Art Theory of His Time, 76.
36. Gustave Kahn, “Georges Seurat,” in The Drawings of Georges Seurat, trans. Stanley Appelbaum (New York: Dover, 1971), vi.
37. As Cachin explains, in addition to probably hearing about the painting from fellow Neo-Impressionist Camille Pissarro, he is likely to have seen the painting at the international show hosted at the Galerie George Petit in 1887. Françoise Cachin, “Poseuses, 1886–8,” in Georges Seurat, 1859–1891 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991), 277.
38. Seurat and his colleagues were all deeply troubled by the quick deterioration of the paint colors used in his Grande Jatte. Inspired, no doubt, by Charles Henry’s publication on the subject, coauthored with Henry Cros, Signac tried his hand at the demanding ancient hot-wax painting technique known as encaustic to remedy this problem. The result, Woman Combing Her Hair, Opus 227 (1892, private collection), is a provocative mixture of fashionable clothing and decorative household items, including brightly colored Japanese fans, ribbons and a corset, and shiny modern pottery, executed in a medium that, as Henry and Cros put it, “ignores the influence of time.” Henry Cros and Charles Henry, L’Encaustique et les autres procédés de peinture chez les anciens: Histoire et technique (Paris: Rouam, 1884), 86.
39. Foa discusses this idea in relation to both the Grande Jatte and Models in George Seurat, 87–111. This strategic quotation of other artists, especially in the case of Models, is mainly significant because it reveals Seurat’s view of the visual world as being “made up not only of the figures and objects that physically surrounded him but also of various kinds of images and representations that inevitably shaped how he saw and represented his environment” (99–100).
40. Robert L. Herbert and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Neo-Impressionism (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1968), 14–26.
41. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960); Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
42. Herbert and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Neo-Impressionism, 21–23.
43. Alvin Langdon Coburn, “The Future of Pictorial Photography” (1916), in Photographers on Photography, ed. Nathan Lyons (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 53–55.
44. Boulouch, “Albert Londe positions autochromistes.”
45. Jack Howard Roy Coote, The Illustrated History of Colour Photography (Surbiton, UK: Fountain, 1993), 36.
46. Louis Ducos du Hauron and Charles Cros originally introduced the basic principles of a three-color subtractive process in 1869. Based on color printing, this process entailed the creation and synthesis of three separate photographs. At first, du Hauron and Cros believed that the filters used to create the negatives should be blue, yellow, and red. Sometime between 1875 and 1876, they changed their stance, picking instead the standard additive primaries (i.e., violet-blue, green, and orange-red). The first screen processes, which combined the multiple filters onto one plate, were introduced in the 1890s by James McDonough in the United States and John Joly in Ireland.
47. Gimpel quoted in Thierry Gervais, Nathalie Boulouch, and Musée d’Orsay, Léon Gimpel: Les Audaces d’un photographe, 1873–1948 [exposition, Paris, Musée d’Orsay, Galerie de photographie, 12 février–27 avril 2008] (Milan: 5 Continents / Musée d’Orsay, 2008), 52–53.
48. Léon Gimpel, “La Photographie des couleurs à L’Illustration,” L’Illustration: Journal universel, June 15, 1907.
49. Léon Gimpel, “La Plaque autochrome et le reportage,” in Ve Congrès international de photographie: Bruxelles 1910 (Brussels: Établissements Émile Bruyland, 1912), 223–26.
50. Léon Gimpel, “Quarante Ans de reportages photographiques,” unpublished manuscript, 1944, 16–17, Société française de photographie, Paris.
51. F. Honoré, “Les Paradis des roses,” L’Illustration: Journal universel, December 7, 1907.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Mariel Jean-Brunhes Delamarre and Jeanne Beausoleil quoted in Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 19. On Albert Kahn and the history of the Archives de la planète, see Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s “Archives de la planète” (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); François de la Bretèque, “Les Archives de la planète d’Albert Kahn,” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire, no. 70 (April 1, 2001): 156–58; Musée Carnavalet and Musée Albert Kahn, Paris 1910–1931: Au travers des Autochromes et des films de la photothèque-cinémathèque Albert Kahn (Paris: Musée Carnavalet, 1982); and David Okuefuna and Musée Albert Kahn, The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s “Archives of the Planet” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
55. Of the Archives de la planète’s collection of approximately 72,000 autochromes, 5,897 concern Paris. Musée Carnavalet and Musée Albert Kahn, Paris 1910–1931.
57. Quoted in Anne Clark James, “Antonin Personnaz: Art Collector and Autochrome Pioneer,” History of Photography 18 (Summer 1994): 148.
58. Boulouch, “La photographie autochrome en France, 1904–1931,” 25.
59. For example, Léon Gimpel, 14 juillet 1906—Bouquet final du feu d’artifice tiré sur le Pont Neuf en présence de S. M. Sisorvath, roi du Cambodge, Gélatino-bromure, 806-PP-1973, Société française de photographie, Paris.
60. Gimpel, “La Plaque autochrome et le reportage,” 224–25.
61. Gimpel, “Quarante Ans de reportages photographiques,” 58.
62. Vanessa Schwartz and Leo Charney, introduction to Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 1.
63. Louis Lumière and Auguste Lumière, Correspondances, 1890–1953, ed. Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet (Paris: Cahiers du cinema, 1994), 37n1; Jean Vivié, “Deux Grandes Inventions de Louis Lumière,” Bulletin de la Société française de photographie (December 1970), 5, Recueil, Documentation sur Lumière (AD-5000 [Lumière]—Boîte pet fol), Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
64. Vivié, “Deux Grandes Inventions,” 5.
65. Delamarre and Beausoleil quoted in Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom, 19.
66. Ibid.
67. Jean Brunhes, “Ethnographie et géographie humaine,” L’Ethnographie, no. 1 (1913): 39.
68. In the 1870s, German firms, including Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik (BASF) and AGFA, already controlled half of the world market for coal-tar dyes. By the eve of the First World War, German firms accounted for no less than 90 percent of worldwide production. See David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 275; and, especially, John Joseph Beer, The Emergence of the German Dye Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959).
69. Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012).
70. Focusing on the seventeenth century, Jacqueline Lichtenstein’s The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age (1989; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) offers a salutary, eye-opening reprieve from this rigorously formal, internalist narrative. Combined with technological and commercial histories of color, Lichtenstein’s study provided an important model for this book.