JUST HOW MUCH the study of nineteenth-century French art has changed almost beyond recognition may be judged by a comparison between the present issue and this Magazine’s first special issue on the subject, published in June 1938. The latter carries a self-congratulatory Editorial on the affirmative role played by the Burlington in the acceptance in England of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, well ahead of ‘official and academic opinion’. The two main articles are extraordinarily broad-brushed: Douglas Cooper surveys French portraiture from Neo-classicism to Cézanne; and a young John Rewald writes on ‘Camille  Pissarro: His Work and Influence’. A more focused note is struck by D.S. MacColl defending Jacques-Louis David against English indifference; there is a useful summary of works by Degas in American collections; and a flamboyant article by Michel Florisoone on the rise of the individual temperament versus the claims of ‘collectivism’ and universal taste.

In the current issue, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism are scarcely glimpsed and single works of art are the focus of three of the articles. What provides continuity, however, is that the chief authors (with the exception of Florisoone) both in 1938 and in the pages that follow are British or American. Although the Burlington receives contributions from French writers, they are rarely on dix-neuvième subjects, which was not the case in the Magazine’s earliest years. This shift to a mostly Anglo-American scholarly concentration (already beginning in the late 1930s) came about in the 1950s and 1960s.

The story goes something like this. Nineteenth-century French artists had friends and sympathetic critics who, as Vasaris of the ateliers, published memoirs and personal biographical studies. From them we obtain much detail of character, working habits and social ambience (Henri Delaborde’s Ingres and Alfred Sensier’s Millet are typical ‘life-and-works’ of this kind); and occasionally some valuable obiter dicta are offered (as in Emile Bernard’s and Ambroise Vollard’s studies of Cézanne). A little later a few short monographs are followed by œuvre catalogues (a grand tradition continued by Wildenstein). For general studies of the period – readable, opinionated and straying little beyond the high road from David to Cézanne, even positively ignoring the byways – the general public between the wars had works by, among others, R.H. Wilenski, Clive Bell and James Laver – an appreciative cross-Channel phalanx – to satisfy the growing appetite for this astonishingly rich century. French studies of the period were, generally speaking, poetic, formalist or documentary, sometimes all unhappily merged together; they were rarely freshly interpretative (Pierre Francastel was an exception; and so too, at times, was Elie Faure).

Then came John Rewald, German-born, to be sure, but, from 1941, an American citizen. His documentary approach, carried out with Teutonic thoroughness in Third Republic France, led to his celebrated History of Impressionism (1946), a work that had no parallel in French writing on the subject. He was a renowned sleuther and recorder, catching much elusive material on the wing, from the friends and descendants of his protagonists, which was then woven into a lucid narrative. Later writers, often with very different views, were beholden to him for this massive foundation stone of fact (and that of his pendant volume on Post-Impressionism of 1956). For a while Rewald’s progressive, modernist agenda held sway (as did his friend Alfred Barr’s for twentieth-century art). ‘He was’, as Joseph Rishel wrote, ‘completely unsympathetic to revisionist art history’. In later years he deplored the increasing scholarly burrowings among French provincial worthies and the dead wood of forgotten Salon painters. And while by no means insensible to the social and political complexities of the age about which he wrote, the new art history was not for him.

It should not be forgotten that in the popularising decade of the 1950s, someone as eminent as Rewald had no hesitation in contributing to the several cheaply available series of books on art and artists. In these, plates of uncertain colour replaced the black-and-whites of such earlier series as the Studio’s ‘World Masters’ or Lund Humphries’s ‘Gallery Books’. The Fontana Pocket Library of Great Art published its first twelve volumes in the mid-1950s, eight of them being devoted to French nineteenth-century art; among the authors were Rewald, Robert Goldwater and Sam Hunter. The texts are notable for insight and information, in contrast to earlier French pocket series such as Braun’s Collection des Maîtres in which flowery exegesis was often the norm. For readers now of a certain age, these series (and later ones from Phaidon including, for example, John Richardson’s Manet, and Thames & Hudson’s World of Art, including Frank Elgar’s Vincent van Gogh, both books from 1958) provided a reliable first taste of the French nineteenth century. Noticeably, however, there was very little on Cassatt or Morisot; nothing on Puvis or Moreau. And one could scarcely find references to gender and sexuality, class and prostitution, landscape and nationalism or an analysis of inland waterway traffic in the Ile de France.

From the late 1960s and 1970s scholarship in the hands of American and British historians of the nineteenth century turned away from the suave survey and the ‘bourgeois’ monograph to the highly particularised examination of context and reception (George Heard Hamilton’s 1954 Manet and His Critics was a notable early example of reception history). Pioneers such as T.J. Clark and Linda Nochlin were followed in this search for creative alternatives by a host of academics and museum curators who have investigated every aspect of the century from Neo-classical homoeroticism to Post-Impressionist misogyny, usually with fruitful, but sometimes with bizarre, results (few will forget the vision of Mme Cézanne’s breasts floating as clouds above Mont Sainte-Victoire). In France, such interpretative literature has been minimal against a continuing backdrop of catalogues raisonnés, exhibition histories, connoisseurship and editions of letters and writings. The intellectual shortcomings in much French aca­demic art history were recognised in France itself when the Institut national de l’Histoire d’Art (INHA) was finally inaugurated in 2005, in part to combat this narrowness of approach.2 We have yet to see the positive results of this incentive and can only hope that when they materialise the Burlington will be a beneficiary.