The story of an innovative designer and farsighted art entrepreneur and the important role he played in the dissemination of 19th-century Aestheticism This book follows the phenomenal rise of Daniel Cottier (1838-1891) from an apprentice coach painter in Glasgow to the founder of Cottier & Co., a fine and decorative arts business with branches in London, New York, Sydney and Melbourne. This gifted designer and brilliant art entrepreneur keenly spotted one of the key aspects of late nineteenth-century bourgeois culture - its focus on family, home and church - and seized the artistic and commercial opportunities of the building and decorating boom that it brought about. Cottier was a proponent of the Aesthetic movement, an international trend in the history of culture, art and design from the mid-1860s to the late 1890s: he understood the era's desire for beauty and realised the economic possibilities of its commoditisation. Beyond biography, therefore, this book illuminates a significant event of late nineteenth-century cultural history - Aestheticism's cult of beauty meeting with the bourgeoisie's financial ability to possess it. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

This book deals with the theme of landscape in a transversal way, by presenting a set of important works by Gustave Courbet (mainly from the collections of the Gustave Institute and the Courbet d'Ornans Museum) and other 19th century artists - collaborators or friends of Courbet - who have fully embraced nature and the landscape, putting them at the heart of their artistic approaches. Among other things, will be revealed the involvement of Saint-Claude's George Besson (1882- 1971), who worked for the acquisition of Courbet's birthplace - which would later house the museum - then that of Guy Bardone (1927-2015), donor of the collection preserved by the Abbey Museum, who would then be General Secretary of the Courbet Institute for nearly 15 years. Text in English and French.

"This important book will instantly claim a place among the standard works on Courbet. Petra Chu has done an admirable job of tying together art, literature, and history to put Courbet in context in a way that has not been done before. She reveals a Courbet who is ambitious to succeed and who realizes that the new media of nineteenth-century France can be harnessed to his ambition. With this book, Chu brings to fruition a lifetime of studying Courbet and nineteenth-century French art."--Patricia Mainardi, City University of New York

"Petra Chu has worked on Courbet throughout her long and productive career and this book is a capstone of her work, the product of considerable thought, insight, perception, and interpretation. Covering all phases of his evolution, from his earliest self-portraits to his late landscapes, she contextualizes Courbet in new ways and ties him to celebrity and media culture so that we can see how he thought as well as why he reacted in his work as he did. This is no small achievement."--Gabriel P. Weisberg, University of Minnesota

""The Most Arrogant Man in France" is an original study of Courbet's entrepreneurial methods, and as such distinguishes itself from the rest of the voluminous recent writing on the artist. Petra Chu carefully sifts through Courbet's contacts with the press, newly investigates his patronage, and speculates about his appeal to the wider public. The book will interest not just art historians but also general readers since it dissects the intelligence and entrepreneurial flair of a canonical artistic personality who anticipates artists such as Dali and Warhol."--Albert Boime, UCLA

Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West examines how the encounters between China and Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries transformed the arts on both sides of the East-West divide. The essays in the volume reveal the extent to which images, artifacts, and natural specimens were traded and copied, and how these materials inflected both cultures' visions of novelty and pleasure, battle and power, and ways of seeing and representing. Artists and craftspeople on both continents borrowed and adapted forms, techniques, and modes of representation, producing deliberate, meaningful, and complex hybrid creations. By considering this reciprocity from both Eastern and Western perspectives, Qing Encounters offers a new and nuanced understanding of this critical period.

The French Realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819-77), a pivotal figure in the emergence of modern painting, remains an artist whose interests, attitudes, and friendships are little understood. A voluminous correspondent, Courbet himself, through his letters, offers a tantalizing avenue toward a keener assessment of his character and accomplishments. In her critical edition of over six hundred of the artist's letters, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu presents just such a look at the inner life of the artist; her unparalleled feat of gathering together all of Courbet's known letters, many heretofore unpublished and untranslated, is sure to change our evaluation of Courbet's creativity and of his place in nineteenth-century French life. Beginning when Courbet left his provincial home at eighteen and ending eight days before his death in exile in Switzerland, this correspondence enables readers to follow the artist's development from youth to mature artist of international repute. Addressed to such varied and key figures of the Second Empire and the early Third Republic as Charles Baudelaire, Alfred Bruyas, Max Buchon, Champfleury, Pierre Dupont, Theophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Claude Monet, the Comte de Nieuwerkerke, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Jules Simon, Jules Valles, and Francis Wey, Courbet's letters offer numerous insights into the artist's private and public personae, his work, and his participation in the cultural and political life of his day. They will encourage a rethinking of fixed notions about Courbet while they help to form a more nuanced picture of the artist's marketing strategies, his relation to the contemporary media, his deliberate choice of subject matter for Salon paintings, hispreoccupation with photography, and his reasons for participating in the Commune. The correspondence is also important for a better understanding of Courbet's work. The letters reveal that the artist produced an uninterrupted flow of portraits of family and friends, work unaccounted for today that appears to be as crucial to the development of Courbet's art as his larger, better-known paintings. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, a recognized expert on nineteenth-century French art, has spent over ten years collecting, translating, and annotating these letters. Along with her annotations, she has provided this edition with an introduction, a detailed chronology, short biographies of Courbet's correspondents and persons appearing frequently in the letters, a list of paintings and sculptures mentioned in the letters, and an inventory of the letters and their whereabouts. The result is an invaluable cultural resource, as useful as it is readable, as illuminating as it is entertaining.