ABSTRACT
Among Parisian intellectuals in the 1860s and 1870s, Hippolyte Taine had a reputation as a dynamic and sometimes controversial writer. He was prolific and polymathic, producing works of history and literary history, philosophy and psychology, criticism and journalism. In 1865, fresh from the publication of his well-received Histoire de la littérature anglaise, he initiated a series of lectures at the École des Beaux-Arts on the history of art which over the following five years were published in brief synopses under the title Philosophie de l’art. Through his lectures, Taine developed a systematic sociological approach to art history unprecedented in its breadth and rigor. Objectivity, empirical observation and careful documentation were positivist values that, according to Taine, could advance the study of history and culture to the level of progress and modernity attained by the natural sciences. By 1913 Philosophie de l’art was in its fourteenth edition, and had been translated into English, German, Danish, and Russian.
