Renaissances

Abstract EF. S. Pattison’s two-volume The Renaissance of Art in France (1879) was followed by a biocritical study in French, Claude Lorrain, Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres in 1884; Pattison published at least a hundred signed articles and reviews between 1869 and 1884. Emilia Dilke wrote Art in the Modern State—on French art and the state under Louis XIV—and her four volumes on French art in the eighteenth century, covering painting, sculpture, engraving, drawing, architecture, furniture, and decoration, as well as essays, reviews, and contributions to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.1 Pattison/Dilke’s works on French art extend from the ®fteenth century through and beyond the Salon des Reèfuseès; Colin Eisler claimed, “To this day, no other scholar can be said to have been so profoundly cognizant of ®ve hundred years of French art as this Englishwoman, who was largely self-educated in the ®elds of her professional activity.”2 Pattison/Dilke’s range is unnerving. Her work drew on source texts and scholarly works in many languages and historical knowledge of Italy, Germany, early Christianity, and ancient Greece.