The Eighteenth Century French Paintings
National Gallery Catalogues

The National Gallery’s collection of eighteenth-century French paintings was last catalogued over sixty years ago. Since then it has been transformed both in size and quality by the addition of works by Danloux, David, Fragonard, Peyron, Subleyras and Vernet among others. The collection, including Boucher, Chardin and Watteau, now encompasses the work of over 30 artists. Taking account of recent scholarship and undertaking new research, Humphrey Wine has looked afresh at these paintings, expanding on their provenance, in many cases incorporating information on their political and social context and fleshing out the lives of identified sitters.

New information based on re-examination of each picture is combined with technical photographs and comparative illustrations. The introductory essay considers the attitude of eighteenth-century Britons to the French and to paintings by French contemporaries, and notes many of the French eighteenth-century paintings then passing through London’s salerooms.

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.