THE LIBRARY OF the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris conserves an unpublished manuscript version of the Procès-verbaux of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. This little-known document, entitled ‘Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (1648–1722). Etablissement, statuts, réglements, comptes-rendus des séances, présentation et réception des membres’, contains new information about the institution’s functioning during the Regency of Orléans. Notably, it lists previously unknown winners of quarterly drawing competitions in the years 1715–21 and gives a more detailed account of the concurrent painting competitions. It also throws fresh light on the early academic careers of several major eighteenth-century painters such as Chardin and Vanloo.

IN 1971 Didier Bodart published the journal of a French painter living in Florence in 1821 whose identity was unknown but who, as the diary revealed, was in frequent and close contact with Ingres during the early months of the latter’s four-year stay in the city. The journal is thus cited as evidence of Ingres’s day-to-day existence at this period: the anonymous painter first visited him on 27th April 1821 and admired his portrait of the Russian chargé d’affaires Count Gouriev; he borrowed Flaxman’s Tragedies of Aeschylus from Ingres, took advice about his own work and accompanied him to the studio of Lorenzo Bartolini; he arranged for Jean-Pierre Gonin, a Swiss merchant, to commission two portraits from Ingres for a sizeable price; he was pleased that Ingres approved of his View of Florence from the Cascine which he showed him; and he walked with him in the Boboli gardens. Bodart gleaned some information about the painter’s background from internal evidence: a landscapist working in watercolour and oils, he also produced fixés – small paintings in oil on taffeta applied to a sheet of glass – which he sold to foreigners passing through, or residing in, Florence; a list of paintings, dated 12th November, also figures in the diary. When he began the diary on 1st January 1821, the writer had recently moved to Florence from Rome, since he soon noted the arrival from Rome of the case containing his paintings and studies. Indeed, as we shall see, he had probably met Ingres in Rome, where the latter had been based since 1806.

TO BEGIN BY considering two paintings, both entitled Le Peintre et son modèle, dated 1920 and 1944 respectively (Figs.20 and 21), is a fruitful introduction to the two painters who are the subject of this article. The earlier work is by André Lhote (1885–1962), the Bordeaux-born painter who had his first solo show in Paris in November 1910, exhibited in the milieu of Cubism, became the regular art critic for the Nouvelle Revue française from 1919 and, in 1925, opened his own academy to consolidate a career as an esteemed pedagogue whose atelier instruction guided numerous artists in their early years. The second, later painting is by Jean Bazaine (1904–2001) who, after studying painting, sculpture and art history, in addition to making various forays into writing, showed his work and published regular art criticism throughout the 1930s before becoming a major figure in the so-called Nouvelle Ecole de Paris after 1944. Both paintings present a glimpse into the private studio of each artist and, presumably, into their individual working practices, articulated through the dialogue between artist and model, subject and object. In Lhote’s demonstrative canvas, the artist is emphatically male; his jutting pipe and scythe-shaped palette confront the nude female model posing by the side of the easel. On the canvas reappears the model’s transformed body, her warm flesh become dull, monochrome, geometrically angled and flattened into planes, to the extent that one wonders if the painted figure is to be condemned rather than admired.

PHILIP CONISBEE, Senior Curator of European Paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, died on 16th January 2008 at his home in Washington. He was among the most prominent members of a group of British art historians who moved to the United States in the 1980s. In his adopted country (he became a U.S. citizen in 1994) he broadened his scholarship, earlier focused on eighteenth-century French painting, to embrace a wider range of French art, from Georges de La Tour to Paul Cézanne, as well as other national schools, such as Danish painting of the Golden Age and German Romanticism. Tall, urbane and witty, Philip was an influential scholar and a great public advocate for art. From 1973 onwards he was a valued and prolific contributor to THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE.