OTHER RECENT BOOKS • THIS memorial volume is a model of
its kind. It is hard to know which most to praise—the 'definitive cataloguing of the Collection with its many corrections to previous slipshoddery, Douglas Cooper's introductory examination of the back- ground of taste against which must be judged Courtauld's ' passionate interven- tion ' in the Twenties, or the typography and production of the book as a whole. In a brilliantly depressing essay Mr. Cooper traces with scholarly malice and a wealth of new material the history of English taste in relation to French painting between 1860 and 1920. It is a superlative perform- ance, very fully documented, which deals abundantly with that "forty years of resist- ance in the name of ' beauty ' " to French impressionism, post-impressionism and sub- sequent movements in Paris, which reached its nadir between 1880 and 1900. The eventual rush of new ways of seeing, all in a jumbled flurry many years after they had been assimilated by other countries, has bewildered and bedevilled English taste right up to the present day. Besides survey- ing the many contacts between French and English artists, and relevant critical com- ment at various levels, much information is included about the collecting habits of the British (most notable amongst them being Sir William Burrell, Miss Gwendoline Davies and Sir Hugh Lane in Scotland, Wales and Ireland respectively !). Professor Anthony Blunt contributes a memoir on Courtauld as a collector, and 116 works are reproduced in black and white.
M. H. M.
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