Like last year's student riots in Switzerland, the fact that there have recently been historiographical disturbances, sometimes of a heated kind, affecting what have long seemed to be the most placid and amiable of all artistic schools - those of Dutch 17th-century genre painting and of French 18th-century painting in general - may come as something of a shock to those members of the public who do not keep their ears uncomfortably close to the ground. There have been hints, of course - but Philip Conisbee's book is in fact the first to bring to a wide public the new interpretation of French painting in the 18th century that has been quietly gaining ground behind the scenes. Norman Bryson, in a work which will necessarily be much less read, entirely bypasses this particular interpretation, but substitutes a new one of his own which is, in part, dependent on changing views of Dutch art of the 17th century.

LRB 18 March 1982 | PDF Download