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The extensive international art collection of the now virtually forgotten Rotterdam collector Fop Smit Jr (1815-1892) included as many as 240 contemporary European genre paintings and several works by renowned artists of the Barbizon School. After Smit's death, his collection was divided among his family. The recent discovery of a two-part album containing photographs of the works of art he owned made it possible to reconstruct his collection for the first time. Based on extensive provenance and archival research, his collection is analysed and placed in the context of collecting contemporary art in Rotterdam and the Netherlands in the 1870s and 1890s. This reveals that Smit's collection differed from the prevailing Dutch taste at that time. It was distinctly internationally oriented as well as larger than most other Dutch collections. Moreover, Smit did not combine paintings with works on paper or old master art, as was customary. Other Rotterdam collectors exhibit an international orientation similar to Smit's. This is partly because, like him, they were advised by Rotterdam art dealers such as Jos de Kuyper, Jan van Mastenbroek and Willem Hendrik Köhler. In his collecting pursuits, Fop Smit was guided by his mercantile ethos. He was a shipowner and came from a successful family of shipbuilders. In addition, he owned stocks and bonds at home and abroad worth several million guilders. His collection and motives for collecting dovetailed with the development of the growing international art market, in which Smit can be considered as one of the new, upper-middle-class collectors in a position to compete with other industrialists and for whom money was no object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among major political, economic and intellectual conflicts, a genuine revolution took place in the applied arts during twenty years of the second half of the nineteenth century, notably in French tableware. The discovery of Japanese art coupled with the noticeable pursuit of artistic freedom sparkled intense experimentation and amazing creativity in the production of objects able to meet the wishes of a changing public. After dealing with the concept of Japonisme, this essay proposes to examine what happened within the French manufacture of faience and porcelain between 1866 and 1886. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The art photography of Fuchikami Hakuyō and his circle in Japanese Manchuria is commonly and benignly treated as hybridized modernism, a product of the bending of conventional 1930s Japanese styles (pictorialist, constructivist, realist) through contact with the unfamiliar and the exotic. As such it is deemed reflexive in relation to the stimuli of a new land and peoples, but disconnected from the political, economic, and social processes of imperialism and colonialism in Northeast China. The following article uses both structuralist and post-structuralist theoretical approaches to challenge this interpretation, arguing that through the skillful erasure of colonial violence and disruption, the lyrical images of villages, agriculturalists, and factories produced by Fuchikami and his Manshū Shashin Sakka Kyōkai (Manchuria Photographic Artists Association) participate directly in processes of state construction in Manchukuo. The development of a quasi-documentary pastoral aesthetic by Fuchikami and the Manchuria photographers is given close attention in the analysis, particularly as it relates to the influence of French Barbizon school painting on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses changes in American painting style before and after the American Civil War. According to the article, during a 30-year period the focus of American painting changed from realistic depictions of nature and nationalist themes that celebrated America to more cosmopolitan, stylistic, and meditative paintings that were influenced by European styles such as Impressionism and the Barbizon School. Examples given include the works of Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, William Merrit Chase, and Thomas Eakins.

The article offers information on Alfred Sensier. According to the article, his biographies of Theodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet cultivated friendship with other artists and other famous figures such as Diaz, Dupré and Troyon, among others, who were later to achieve celebrity as members of the Barbizon school. Sensier was born in Paris, France in 1815 and was appointed Chef de Bureau des Musées during the Second Republic. He has a private collection of paintings and drawings and has emerged as an amateur dealer.