Theophile Gautier, Orator to the Artists

Book excerpt: "Theophile Gautier a envoye avec un feuilleton plus de trois mille personnes dans latelier de M. Ingres, wrote Champfleury in 1848. For artists, critics and readers alike, Gautier was the essential figure in French art journalism in the mid-nineteenth century. During the short-lived but pivotal period of the Second Republic, when the new administration was committed to reforming all the institutions of the fine arts, Gautier deployed the full resources of his brilliant, flexible and authoritative writing to support and direct these developments in ways compatible with his commitment to an idealist aesthetic, itself under growing pressure from alternative trends in an increasingly competitive art market. This first study of all Gautiers art journalism written during the Second Republic provides a long overdue reassessment of Gautiers importance in French nineteenth-century visual culture."