The result of forty years of study and expertise, it also includes our important discoveries, justified either by their provenance or by historical, scientific or technical cross-checks on which our analyses and opinion are based. Such as the Portrait of Verlaine, Woman Ironing, Still Life with Grapes and Nuts, Portrait of Renoir, Monotonous Chant, End of a Summer Day, Family Portrait and Young Woman with Peonies...

Through Bazille's abundant correspondence, we discover an endearing personality, his solid Montpellier roots, his fidelity to his family and his culture, which is reflected in his Protestant education. It is the purpose of our abundantly illustrated biography of the man and the artist to follow his evolution which will lead him to prefer art to medicine and to take his own path in the history of art. This new publication also provides the latest information on the exhibitions and bibliography of his work.

All texts are published in English and French. The names of Bazille's works are all translated into English. We have kept the French name for the other works.

A Posthumous Glory

But has Bazille really found his true place? On closer inspection, nothing is less certain. His merit, certainly, is now recognized. But art historians, because they only discovered him late, at the beginning of this century, have deliberately placed him in a perspective that is largely posterior to his own; they have often associated him with aesthetic trends that were perhaps not his own or were only partially his own, and have included him in a movement in which he had not fully participated. In 1874, a handful of young painters who had never felt that they belonged to or desired to establish a school, and had never bothered to adopt a shared doctrine, were derisively called Impressionists; and this term, as it fittingly enough reflected what they were all striving to express, their supporters, like themselves, accepted it.

There is no reason to believe that Bazille, had he lived at the time, would have accepted it as well. If we look at the Impressionists as a group of artists who rebelled against the all-powerful official academicism and intended to renew painting, then Bazille was certainly part of it. He was even at its center, since he contributed with his energy and generosity to keeping it alive; he worked in close affection and camaraderie with Monet, Renoir and Sisley, even offering lodging to the first two on occasion. But, as an avant-garde painter with them, Bazille, through another facet of his nature, is in love with tradition; he is aware of his debt to the masters who preceded him in his own century. Moreover, as a comrade-in-arms of the devotees of the Northern light, he is a painter from the South who sees other things under a different sky. Therefore, without underestimating the strength of his ties to them, we can also situate him in a pictorial continuity that is alien to them.

His place is therefore much more complex than his friendship and work relationships alone might lead us to believe. Bazille seems to us to be situated, in a variable equilibrium, between several movements of his time. So, rather than imposing conclusions which, in any case, can only be very nuanced, we thought it preferable to offer you all the data on which a judgment can be made.

It is not surprising to see a growing body of paintings and drawings by Bazille that our research, analysis and investigations have led us to attribute to the artist. These works that we have carefully studied allows our view of the painter's work to evolve. As our research continues, this evolution will continue over time. Thus, the history of art is renewed and cannot be static or limited to the past.

Michel Schulman

Acknowledgments