Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin: Impressionism & Post-Impressionism
BOOKS & IDEAS
TUE 15 DEC AT 4PM
Join us for a special art-historical event bringing together two Edinburgh authors to present their new books on two renowned French artists who were both contemporaries and rivals.
Frances Fowle, Emeritus Professor of Nineteenth-Century Art at the University of Edinburgh, will introduce the life and work of Claude Monet through his letters. She is co-author of a new anthology in English of the artist’s correspondence, published by Thames & Hudson to mark the centenary of Monet’s death.
Belinda Thomson, President of the Société des Amis de l’Institut français d’Écosse, will present her book Gauguin’s Ultimate Collector: Gustave Fayet and the Art Market, published by Bloomsbury to coincide with this autumn’s major exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, Gustave Fayet, Collector-Designer, Icons of Modern Art.
The event forms part of the celebrations marking the centenary of the death of Claude Monet (1840–1926) and the death of Gustave Fayet (1865-1925)
The first major English-language publication dedicated to Monet’s letters, expertly selected and richly illustrated with his paintings.
Claude Monet’s letters – to his friends, family, fellow artists, patrons and gallerists – offer an unmatched glimpse into the artist’s life, revealing his passions, anxieties and frank opinions, and expanding our view of his working life and practice. From his formative years to fame at the end of his life, this selection of letters is accompanied by profiles of his correspondents, expert introductions and comprehensive annotations. Illustrated with some of Monet’s best-known paintings, contemporary photographs and reproductions of some of the letters themselves, his world is revealed in words and images as never before.
Gauguin’s Ultimate Collector: Gustave Fayet and the Art Market explores the remarkable commercial and personal relationship between Paul Gauguin and Gustave Fayet, the collector and entrepreneur whose championing of Gauguin’s work helped secure the artist’s legacy.
By the time they began corresponding around 1900, Gauguin had rejected Western materialism and was living in self-imposed exile in French Polynesia, far from the Paris art world. Although he had used his experience as a collector to help market his own work, he struggled with third-party dealers and had yet to establish himself as a leading figure of the modern art movement. Fayet, meanwhile, was a collector and wine grower. What, then, drew the artist to a man so rooted in the South of France? Belinda Thomson presents a comparative biographical narrative that reveals the unique dynamic between the two, exploring the psychological motivations behind their relationship against the backdrop of emerging modernism at the end of the 19th century.
Tickets: Members free; Non-members £7. Advance booking recommended at www.ifecosse.org .
Location: Institut français d’Écosse, W Parliament Sq, Edinburgh EH1 1RN
A Tale of Three Cities: Monet in Rouen, London and Venice
PAST EVENT
(THURS 10 SEPT AT 6PM)
Professor Richard Thomson FRSE, Watson Gordon Chair of Fine Art (1996-2018), University of Edinburgh.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the death of painter Claude Monet (1840–1926). To commemorate this occasion, Professor Richard Thomson will present a lecture on behalf of the the Society of Friends of the Institut français d’Écosse.
In his fifties and sixties, Claude Monet (1840-1926) painted in three very different cities. His work in Rouen concentrated on the great medieval cathedral, culminating in an exhibition in 1895. Several campaigns in London focussed on the extraordinary light effects of the industrially polluted atmosphere, and were exhibited in 1904. During his 1908 trip to Venice he painted famous sites as well as back canals, showing the series four years later. Together his paintings of the three cities show fascinating and contrasting aspects of this great painter’s work, which will be discussed in the wider context of the period with some comparison to other painters.
Tickets: Members free; Non-members £7. Advance booking recommended at www.ifecosse.org .
Location: Institut français d’Écosse W Parliament Sq, Edinburgh EH1 1RN
Sir Ian Rankin in Conversation with Professor Siân Reynolds
PAST EVENT (THURS 4 JUNE AT 6PM)
As a fund-raising event our patron, Sir Ian Rankin, kindly agreed to take part in an informal discussion about translation with Professor Siân Reynolds as his interlocutor and literary agent Jenny Brown in the chair. With over a million Francophone readers, no fewer than ten different translators have been involved in translating the Rebus novels into French. But from his experience of working in France and attending conferences worldwide, Sir Ian noted an imbalance, with patchy reciprocal willingness to translate foreign language crime fiction into English. Siân brought to bear her fascinating experience as translator of Georges Simenon and Fred Vargas from French into English. Touching on what was gained and lost in translation, and how poorly remunerated translation is, we heard about the degree of control and interaction between translator and author. There were some amusing anecdotes about differences, misunderstandings and mistakes relating to demotic speech, idiosyncratic parlance or local knowledge. The audience of 60 strong, including some new to the Institut français d’Ecosse, had an enlightening and enjoyable evening and a total of over £800 was raised towards the cultural programmes of the IFE. Our heartfelt thanks to all the participants.
‘Engraved on Man’s Skin’: The Auld Alliance, Much More than a Military Alliance
TALK
PAST EVENT (THURS 23 OCT AT 3PM)
‘For this bond was not written on parchment but engraved on the living flesh of man’s skin, not in ink but with their mixed blood.’
As the Society of Friends’ contribution to the various Auld Alliance celebrations held at and around the Institut on Thursday 23rd October, we invited art historian Dr Bryony Coombs to give a lecture drawn from the subject of her book. Her lecture,’“Engraved on Man’s Skin”: The Auld Alliance, Much More than a Military Alliance’, introduced us to four representative figures from the early modern period whose lives and patronage of the arts gave valuable insights into the workings of this ancient Franco-Scottish alliance at the political, military, religious, or dynastic level. It was well attended (around 50), and the questions and buzz of chat afterwards showed how appreciative the audience was. Our thanks to Bryony, whose focused topic admirably complimented the historical sweep of the lecture that followed by Professor Clarisse Godard-Desmarest, President of the Association franco-écossaise, France.
Dr Bryony Coombs is Renaissance Teaching Fellow at The University of Edinburgh lecturing on the art of the northern Renaissance. Her first monograph entitled, Visual Arts and the Auld Alliance: Scotland, France and National Identity c.1420-1550 was published by Edinburgh University Press in September 2024 and has been shortlisted for the Berger Prize.
Location: Institut français d’Écosse W Parliament Sq, Edinburgh EH1 1RN
From Toulouse to Saint Tropez: regional painters and visiting painters, 1885-1905
TALK
PAST EVENT (THURS 29 MAY AT 6PM)
Richard Thomson was Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art (1996-2018) at the University of Edinburgh, to which he remains attached in retirement. He has published widely on late 19th century French art, his most recent book being The Presence of the Past. Modernity and Continuity in French Art, 1870-1905 (2021). He has also curated many exhibitions in Britain and abroad, including the major retrospectives on Toulouse-Lautrec (1992) and Monet (2010-11) at the Grand Palais, Paris.
His lecture will cover the ‘discovery’ of the Midi and the Mediterranean coastline at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries by painters, a process made possible by the spread of the railways. He will set that against the often rather little-known work being done by painters native to Provence and the Languedoc, showing the quality of their art. The lecture will cover well-known figures such as Paul Cezanne and Paul Signac and unfamiliar ones such as Henri Martin and Achille Laugé. It will explore tensions between Paris and the regions, interplay between artists from north and south, and the often arresting (and sometimes amusing) results that arose.