Richard Thomson

The Mediterranean coast of France and Catalonia witnessed the rise and development of modern art over a century, from Cézanne in the 1860s to Matisse, Picasso and Klein in the 1950s and 1960s. These artists and the many more featured here discovered an inexhaustible source of inspiration in this storied region, whose glittering, languid sea stretches out towards the far horizon beneath brilliant azure skies. Indelibly associated with the classical past, this magical land of eternal spring and spiritual renewal came to signify a state of mind, and avant-garde artists sought to convey the vitality and élan it inspired in them through new paradigms of modernist invention.

Tsunamis are among the world’s most dangerous and destructive natural phenomena. The catastrophic tsunami of December 26, 2004 claimed over 300000 lives. These numerous catastrophic tsunamis have caused a significant increase in scientific interest of this natural hazard. About 85% of all tsunamis occur in the Pacific Ocean and are the products of submarine earthquakes around the Pacific Rim, where collisions of tectonic plates form highly active seismic subductive zones. The Great Cascadia Earthquake of January 26, 1700, which occurred near the west coast of Canada, produced a catastrophic tsunami which affected the entire coast of the Pacific Ocean. Assembling data on observed tsunamis and cataloguing historical tsunamis are key problems for scientific examination of tsunami waves, estimation and mitigation of tsunami risk for coastal areas, and improvement of the existing Tsunami Warning Service. The purpose of the present book is to present the historical and modern data on the Canadian coast of the Pacific Ocean and to complete the existing tsunami database. At the same time, the book is intended to present some modern achievements in instrumentation, data analyses, numerical modelling, and estimation of tsunami risk and may be of interest for specialists in wave dynamics, seismology, geophysics, coastal engineering and natural hazard mitigation.

This innovative book introduces a vivid new reading of French art and society at a crucial period of history The study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French art tends to focus on a search for the modern. Richard Thomson presents an innovative approach to a popular period of art history, instead investigating how art in early Third Republic France adapted styles from the past. The classical is the predominant theme, punctuated by other stylistic currents, notably the Rubensian and the Botticellian. It asks, how did these styles—all three derived from foreign art—come to be adapted into French visual culture? How did the Republic customise classicism to its ideological ends? How was classicism manipulated by progressive painters for radical and reactionary readings? The Presence of the Past in French Art 1870–1905? considers artists of very different character and type—from Degas to Henner, Cézanne to Besnard, Roty to Seurat, Dalou to Maillol—as well as a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, medals and celebrity photographs, to open up new vistas of interpretation in this fascinating field.

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The French Republic—with its rallying cry for liberty, equality, and fraternity—emerged in 1870, and by 1880 had developed a coherent republican ideology. The regime pursued secular policies and emphasized its commitment to science and technology. Naturalism was an ideal aesthetic match for the republican ideology; it emphasized that art should be drawn from the everyday world, that all subjects were worthy of treatment, and that there should be flexibility in representation to allow for different voices. Art of the Actual examines the use of naturalism in the 19th-century. It explores how pictures by artists such as Roll, Lhermitte, and Friant could be read as egalitarian and republican, assesses how well-known painters including Degas, Monet, and Toulouse-Lautrec situated their painting vis-à-vis the dominant naturalism, and opens up new arguments about caricatural and popular style. By illuminating the role of naturalism in a broad range of imagery in late 19th-century France, Richard Thomson provides a new interpretation of the art of the period.

A groundbreaking collaboration between the National Galleries of Scotland, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Finnish National Gallery, this catalogue accompanies the first exhibition dedicated to landscapes by the Symbolists, the innovative movement whose artists took a more imaginative and emotional approach to painting and embraced themes such as music, nationalism, science and modernity. It covers a wide range of artists, from forerunners of symbolism, like Böcklin and Whistler, to Mondrian and Kandinsky, who provided the impulse for major 20th-century movements, such as surrealism and abstraction. Works by renowned painters, like Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Munch, are presented alongside lesser known, but equally fascinating artists from the Nordic countries and Eastern Europe.