ABSTRACT
The brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt are most often remembered for the guilty pleasure of glimpsing “le tout Paris” between the bitchily revealing pages of the Journals. 2 Their unerringly detailed gaze scrutinised and critiqued an extraordinary panorama of French cultural exchange throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. In recent years, their novels have also regained currency in post-Clarkian art historical accounts of Realist and Impressionist practice, evidencing the core motifs of paint-erly identity and the model in Manette Salomon, or archetypes of the degenerate Parisienne in Germinie Lacerteux and Edmond's La fille Elisa (see Figure 14.1). Often overshadowed by the more celebrated narrative formulations within the oeuvres of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, these texts simultaneously have provided a less heavily excavated seam for theorising the aims and strategies of literary naturalism. For our purposes here, the interpenetrating creative processes and products of the Goncourts’ activities as writers, collectors and interior designers will be the sources through which to explore several shifts of paradigm within fin de siècle visual and literary aesthetics. Edmond de Goncourt’s engagement with decoration, as both practitioner and as a critic, still offers a highly provocative and instructional case study, especially for design history at the dawn of the twenty-first century, anxiously poised between the rival factions of the history of art and material culture, both desired and despised, much like the contested bibelot which preoccupied Goncourt and his fin de siècle contemporaries. Caricature of Edmond de Goncourt, L'Eclipse, 21 May 1876. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203939680/9ceb79b3-f9a4-4359-b807-ff39f2e7abf3/content/fig14_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
