The Nineteenth Century French Paintings, Volume 1: The Barbizon School
National Gallery Catalogues

The National Gallery houses a notable collection of pictures associated with the Barbizon School, including works by Courbet, Daubigny, Millet and Rousseau and a significant and representative collection of pictures by Corot, ranging from an early oil sketch made during his first trip to Italy in 1825-8 to late studio landscapes. Among the paintings by Corot are two recent acquisitions, the monumental Italian Woman, or Woman with Yellow Sleeve (L'Italienne) from the estate of Lucian Freud, and The Four Times of Day, a group of panels painted around 1858 which were later owned by Frederic, Lord Leighton. 

Catalogue entries examine all aspects of the paintings, from subject to stylistic significance (particularly within the artist's oeuvre), to condition and conservation history. Two accompanying essays examine the development of landscape painting in France, and trace the passionate collecting of these pictures in the United Kingdom well into the twentieth century. The nineteenth century witnessed the introduction of many new pigments and a gradual development away from traditional painting techniques, particularly among landscape painters. Entries on the paintings are richly informed by new technical research into supports, materials and artists' techniques, information which is further explored in an introductory essay on the methods and materials of the Barbizon group.

These catalogue entries are the result of a pilot project to set up a process that takes the desktop publishing files that were sent to press, converts them to a more flexible digital format, and transforms them into web pages and other formats. This is a complicated process, as we are dealing with large and complex texts: these five trial entries alone come to 111,250 words.

We have tried to stay as close to the original texts and arrangements as possible, whilst also creating online entries that are self-contained: everything you need to understand the entry should be in that page, so sections like bibliographies, lists of abbreviations, glossaries, appendices and the explanation of how the catalogue works have been brought into the entry webpage from elsewhere in the catalogue. Because of the conventions followed in the original texts regarding references, we have had to assemble bibliographies from various sources: this is why entries may be formatted differently, or be briefer or more discursive than you might expect. We are investigating how we might improve this in the future.

Editorially, we have corrected obvious typos. We have also acquired new versions of the various images, which means that the credit lines have had to be updated to match the image suppliers' current requirements. Current collection images are temporary derivatives, which we hope to replace with a more refined system allowing access to higher-resolution or zoomable version in due course. Images, which often fell in the middle of running text in order to sit well on the page, have been moved to the next paragraph break after their original position - with the exception of the main image of the painting in catalogue, which has been moved to the head of the entry. (This explains why the page numbering may indicate empty pages.) Otherwise, we have not updated the texts to reflect current opinion: they reflect the state of knowledge at the time they were written. However, we are investigating ways in which curators can add a supplementary update.

Following assessment of this pilot, we hope to continue work on more entries, and to further develop our online publishing pipeline. In the meantime we hope you find them useful, and would welcome any feedback you might have.