Free topic: Léon-Joseph-Florentin Bonnat

Greetings! This post heralds the end of Spring Semester 2012 and the beginning of Summer 2012. Traditionally, this transition time includes the tri-annual Cleaning Off The Desk. I am surrounded by a myriad of papers and catalogs, memos and reports. Filing needs to happen. Among the formal documents is an array of sticky notes, those colorful squares that capture the random jottings that take place over the course of the semester, as I reach haphazardly for any bit of something to write on while listening to phone messages or trying to capture facets of a researchers' topic.
Of course, writing this blog post might count as "procrastinating" but I prefer to think of it as process. And besides, dear reader, I offer up a juicy topic for you. Hastily scribbled on one of those post-it notes: Bonnat.

Meaning, Léon-Joseph-Florentin Bonnat of course. I recount assisting a student who had the usual assignment: go to a museum, select a work of art, write about the artwork.

Here I could diverge into a possibly interesting discussion about the difference between viewing and responding to art, versus viewing and researching art. But I won't.

I will focus on one of my favorite themes: how a good reference source can quickly help you establish how easy or difficult it is going to be to handle your topic. Let's use Bonnat as our example.

Give yourself two points if you guessed I was going to immediately go to Oxford Art Online. Play along with me and open the entry if you will. The entry gives a concise overview of Bonnat as portrait painter and art collector. The bibliography though, is the area to closely scrutinize to decide how to proceed. If you are an undergraduate not majoring in art history, you might well be steered to a topic that has more writing in English about it. If you are a graduate student with some facility in reading French, you might well be on your way to an under-researched topic that might suit your ambitions. To be specific, the only book-length biographies of Bonnat listed in the bibliography are:

A. Fouquier: Léon Bonnat: Première partie de sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris, 1879) C.-M. Widor: Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Léon Bonnat, Acad. des B.-A. (Paris, 1923) R. Cuzacq: Léon Bonnat (Mont-de-Marsan, 1940)

Now, if you are that giddy graduate student, we can quickly consult "Proquest" Dissertations database and WorldCAT to see if there are any book length biographies in English of this very important portrait painter. Are there?

Go look yourself, I can't do everything for you, clearly this office isn't going to organize itself!