From Toulouse to Saint-Tropez: the region’s painters and visiting painters, 1885-1905

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 19^th 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.