Hardcover
- Price:
- $60.00/£50.00
- ISBN:
- Published:
- Nov 17, 2026
- Pages:
- 256
- Size:
- 7 x 10 in.
- Illus:
- 71 color + 40 b/w illus.
Imitation Is Suicide: Teacher-Student Disasters in Nineteenth-Century Art
The suicides of painters Léopold Robert and Antoine-Jean Gros in 1835 left a deep imprint on the European imagination. Imitation Is Suicide examines a rash of notorious artist suicides that saw wide publicity in the Romantic era, showing how observers of the period—from visual artists to novelists, art critics, biographers, and numerous others—at once commemorated those deaths and traced their origins to teacher-student relationships gone catastrophically wrong.
Marc Gotlieb also sheds light on figures like Eugène Delacroix—who controversially argued against the authority of tradition in art education and sought to dismantle the prestige of the teacher. And he also explores the pioneering instruction of Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, an influential art teacher who viewed education as recuperative, designed to protect students from external forces that hindered their natural development. Gotlieb traces how the relationship between teacher and student emerged as newly charged and frequently contested terrain, not simply in the teaching studio but also long after instruction had ended. Against the classic scenario that saw masters instruct pupils in their own manner, it now fell to teachers to discourage such imitations. Gotlieb looks at real and fictionalized quarrels between teachers and students, including idealizing imagery around art education that made the case the teacher should stand aside. And he pairs such imagery with accounts of last paintings—works completed prior to an artist’s suicide and thought to betray clues as to the pedagogical character of the crisis that brought an artist’s career to a violent terminus.
With new findings on familiar and lesser-known artists, Imitation Is Suicide demonstrates how the circumstances of an artist’s death, no less than their artistic education, could profoundly shape how their lives and works were interpreted and imbued with meaning.AUTHOR
Marc Gotlieb is Halvorsen Director of the Graduate Program in the History of Art at Williams College. He is the author of The Deaths of Henri Regnault and The Plight of Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting(Princeton)
PRAISE
“By exploring pedagogical encounters, artists’ suicides, and interpretations of last paintings, Gotlieb guides the reader through interwoven histories of artistic influence, identity, education, reputation, and death. A fascinating read.”—Mary Hunter, author of The Face of Medicine: Visualising Medical Masculinities in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris
“An arresting and unusual study that affirms the author as a uniquely informed and sophisticated interpreter of French mainstream art in the nineteenth century. Anyone involved in the history and artistic interpretation of French Romanticism will find much here to intrigue and sustain them.”—Thomas Crow, author of Murder in the Rue Marat: A Case of Art in Revolution.
