Crossing the Channel

Crossing the Channel

Tate Britain curator Caroline Corbeau-Parsons reports on the conference Crossing the Channel: French Refugee Artists in London (1870-1904).

On 25–26 January, the PMC and Tate Britain jointly organised a conference to expand on the themes of the exhibition Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile (1870–1904). The proceedings opened at Tate Britain with a highly stimulating keynote by MaryAnne Stevens, Impressionists–Impressionism–London, which investigated London’s role in the development of Impressionism and as a commercial platform for that group of artists.

Detail of James Tissot, The Ball on the Shipboard, c. 1874. Tate Britain, London. Digital image courtesy of Tate.

The Tate show primarily focuses on Anglo-French networks in London at the time of the Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune, and the contribution of French refugee artists to representations of London. As well as paintings, it includes photography, works on paper, and a significant amount of sculptures. The PMC conference on 26 January was an opportunity to go further and consider the impact of refugee artists on other media and practices. The breadth of topics covered was particularly striking, and the speakers represented diverse backgrounds, coming from France, the UK, and the USA, with specialisms in paintings, prints, sculpture, and ceramics. This interdisciplinary approach gave rise to fresh perspectives, for instance, on the picturesque and antipicturesque in the work of Pissarro and Sisley. The conference was a platform for new research on major figures such as Dalou and Tissot, but ground-breaking papers were also delivered on little-known but central figures in Anglo-French artistic networks. These included the painter and ceramic artist Jean-Charles Cazin, the porcelain artist Mark-Louis- Emanuel Solon (who introduced pâte-sur-pâte in England), the collector Kaye Knowles, and the printmaker Auguste Delâtre. These discussions opened up exciting new lines of enquiry for nineteenth-century studies. In their role as chairs, MaryAnne Stevens, Rebecca Wallis, Stephen Bann, and Andrew Stephenson expertly contextualised these papers to offer a much-enriched picture of artistic practices, the art market, and collecting in the late nineteenth century. The conference was brought to a close with thought-provoking remarks by Anna Gruetzner Robins, who put forward the idea that the group of artists coming from the Petite Ecole were the YBAs of the nineteenth century, and posited that Alphonse Legros’ Tinker may have been the starting point of naturalism in Britain. The atmosphere was particularly congenial, and delegates commented on how much they learnt from other disciplines on the day.