The National Gallery

Dayot, Armand, 1851-1934Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
247K words
Chapters
25

Tags

Foreign Language Books Painting Museum JourneyEuropean ArtPainting CollectionArt HistoryVisual ArtHumanistic CareWestern ThoughtIllustrated GuideBeautiful EssaysTraditional Aesthetics

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.La "National Gallery" by Armand DayotAuthor: Dayot, Armand, 1851-1934,Language: French, Class: N: Fine Arts, Release Date: Mar 27, 2018

Editor's review

This is a work on the National Gallery of France by Armand Dayot, a French art critic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Written in French and classified under Fine Arts (Class N), it has been made available as a free eBook by Project Gutenberg. Its value lies in offering a historical perspective on the gallery and its holdings: readers can see how a critic of the period viewed, described, and evaluated the paintings, and can also use it as French reading material on art. Because it was written long ago, it is not a contemporary guide to the collection but rather a source for the history of art criticism. It suits readers interested in European art history, the cultural history of museums, or French-language art literature, whether read slowly alongside a catalogue of the works or used as supplementary French reading practice.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with the table of contents and chapter titles to grasp which painters and works the author discusses, then read selected sections closely.
  2. Read alongside a catalogue of the collection or online images to help follow the written descriptions.
  3. Readers with weaker French can start with short chapters, reading a little each day and noting new words and terms.
  4. Read it as a source for the history of art criticism, paying attention to the author's aesthetic judgments and period vocabulary.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25

FAQ

Is this book in Chinese or French? Is it hard to read? The original is in French and is a public-domain eBook with no Chinese translation included. Readers with intermediate French or above and some familiarity with art vocabulary will find it fairly smooth going; beginners will need a dictionary and reference materials, so the barrier is relatively high.
Is it the same as the National Gallery's official guide today? No. This is a critical text by an early art critic, reflecting the ways of seeing and aesthetic tastes of its time rather than a contemporary guide to the collection. It is better read as source material for art history and museum history.
Does the book contain many illustrations of paintings? From the available information, this is a public-domain eBook consisting mainly of written commentary, with no mention of high-resolution plates. If you need images for comparison, prepare a collection catalogue or reliable online image resources to read alongside it.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Dayot, Armand, 1851-1934 Author

Armand Dayot (1851–1934) was a French art critic and writer on art history. Public information about him is limited, and the details of his life are difficult to establish with certainty, yet the three works held in this collection reveal the focus of his writing: he was concerned with the collections of major European art museums. He wrote the two-volume guide Le musée du Louvre, devoted to the holdings of the Louvre, and also authored La National Gallery, an introduction to the painting collection of the National Gallery in London. Works of this kind typically take individual objects as their thread, combining background information, stylistic discussion and guidance for visitors in plain language aimed at general readers and art lovers. Dayot's writing reflects the rise of public education in European museums during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when systematic introductions to collections turned specialized art knowledge into accessible narratives. His books remain useful references for understanding museum cataloguing and connoisseurial taste of the period.