ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the degree to which a coherent understanding of French eighteenth-century visual culture impacted upon British painting at the turn of the century. At a crude level it is about the consumption of an alternative, foreign visual code and the way in which consumption itself becomes a new form of production. It takes as given the background debates about Englishness and the rural. Central to this investigation is the shared understanding of the mind’s process of moving between matter and memory – ideas which around the turn of the century would become popularly associated with Henri Bergson. The dialogue of realities, between the perception of the external world and the life of the mind, was essential to the conceptualization of the art-making process. Allied to this were ideas about style and modernity drawing upon a common visual repository, upon recollections which privileged pre-Revolutionary France.
