Patrick Noon – författare

After years of wartime stand-off, the period of high Romanticism (1820–1840) was one of fervent cultural exchange between France and Britain. In the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, British artists contributed regularly to Paris Salons, shared studios with French colleagues, collaborated with Parisian print publishers, and served as drawing masters to the French aristocracy. Tourists from both countries criss-crossed the channel. Watercolour painting, in which the British excelled, caught the imagination of French painters and collectors for the first time, and France was swept by enthusiasm for British literature: the publication of Scott's historical romance Ivanhoe in 1819 caused as much a sensation in Paris as the exhibition of Géricault's painting The Raft of the Medusa did in London the following year.Although some British influence on French painters is generally acknowledged, its full extent has never been the subject of a major exhibition. Conceived by Patrick Noon, Constable to Delacroix brings together works by such major figures as Constable, Corot, Delacroix, Géricault, Lawrence, Ingres, Bonington, Turner, Venet and Wilkie. These icons of Romanticism both reflected contemporary cultural exchanges and helped set the agenda of modernism for later generations. This fully illustrated catalogue is authored by Patrick Noon with Stephen Bann, David Blayney Brown, Rachel Meredith, Christine Riding and Marie Watteau.

Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828) was prehaps the most important British landscape painter of his era after Turner and Constable. Although his career spanned less than 10 years, his dazzling virtuosity propelled him immediately to the forefront of the Romantic movement in both France and England. Even after his early death his art continued to influence decades of French artists and critics, most notably Delacroix, Corot and Baudelaire. This illustrated book is a study of Bonington and also a comprehensive survey of his works. In the first half of the book, Patrick Noon discusses Bonington's life and work, focusing on the important role he played in the international romantic movement, defining the unique attributes and development of his style, and offering an interpretive analysis of his art. This section is illustrated with over 60 works by Bonington, by the old masters he admired, and by many of his contemporaries. The second half of the book consists of colour reproductions of 140 of Bonington's paintings, water-colours and prints as well as 25 works by French and English artists with whom he was most closely associated.The works of art are accompanied by discussions of chronology, attribution, dossible influence and meaning.

Only twenty-five at the time of his death in 1828, young Richard Parkes Bonington nevertheless was a seminal figure in the development of modernism in nineteenth-century French painting. This catalogue raisonné of his oil and watercolor paintings represents the first attempt to establish and present the artist’s complete known oeuvre. Drawing on 25 years of research, Patrick Noon catalogues, analyzes, and reproduces 400 artworks now indisputably attributed to Bonington. Many of these paintings have never before been published. The book sets Bonington’s achievement in the context of the intellectual, social, and artistic ferment of high romanticism in Paris and London, and it shows the profound effect of his style on his friend and contemporary, Eugène Delacroix, and many others. Noon’s detailed and accurate study will inform all future discourse on Bonington and his remarkable legacy.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art