The Deaths of Henri Regnault

"Authoritative. . . . A welcome reintroduction of an important 19th-century French artist. Highly recommended."-- "Choice" "Engaging."-- "Hyperallergic" "Gotlieb himself acknowledges falling under Regnault's 'spell, ' and, if he does not convince everyone of his subject's powers of enchantment, he nevertheless makes him seem well worth the effort, and tells a good story in the process."-- "Art Newspaper" "Gotlieb's easy tone - scholarly parlance relaxed by down-to-earth interjection - is appropriate to a scholar who seeks to 'attend less to the "what" than to the "how"''....Humour is in any case unavoidable in this tale laced with ironies, but Gotlieb can also create his own, gently purposeful moments, such as the courteously indirect dig at a notable anti-orientalist. Certainly he succeeds in balancing much more than judging, giving rein to his own predilection for Regnault with only the very occasional superlative, or faint suggestion."-- "Art History" "It would be hard to think of another book that encompasses the oeuvre, career, and reputation of a particular artist, let alone one that handles the topic with such archival perspicuousness, better than Marc Gotlieb's study of the ups and downs of Henri Regnault. It is nothing short of a tour de force."--Hollis Clayson, author of Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege (1870-1871) "H-Net France" Gotlieb skillfully positions Regnault as a central artistic and cultural figure in France during his short life and after his death. . .Gotlieb is particularly good at visual analysis of some paintings, like Execution without Judgment. . .The book's reproductions are excellent. . .Gotlieb imparts impressive insights on the end of academic art and the creation of a mythic national hero."-- "H-Net France" "The first English-language book on this mid-nineteenth-century French painter, The Deaths of Henri Regnault will become an important reference with its many leads for art historians to pursue." -- "CAA Reviews" "The Deaths of Henri Regnault stands out, even within a field to which new work is being contributed all the while. The book combines scholarship of exceptional thoughtfulness with a meditation of unprecedented originality on the nature of early death and historical memory."-- "Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture" "The Deaths of Henri Regnault is a terrific achievement--a brilliant and highly original study not just of the short career of an ambitious Orientalist painter, but equally of the complex and fascinating vicissitudes of Regnault's reputation following his heroic death in the Franco-Prussian War. It's hard to know what to praise more--Gotlieb's superb analyses of key paintings in the light of contemporaneous art criticism, his wide-ranging discussion of the larger context of the Orientalist obsession with light, or his painstaking and continually surprising excavation of responses to Regnault's art and death from the 1870s to the present."--Michael Fried, author of Courbet's Realism "H-Net France" "The Deaths of Henri Regnault is a joy to read. Gotlieb portrays Regnault as a rambunctious rebel who sought out the sublime, an artist who escaped the outmoded requirements and inimitable canons of the French academy. At the same time, we learn that Regnault was concerned with some of the same fundamental pictorial problems as his modernist contemporaries. This book shows Regnault to be a critically significant artist, important for advancing the study of nineteenth-century art beyond the conventional academic-modernist divide."--Martha Ward, coauthor of Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France "H-Net France"

Marc Gotlieb is the Class of 1955 Professor of Art at Williams College and director of the Williams College / Clark Art Institute graduate program in the history of art. He is the author of The Plight of Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting.