Réseaux et académies d'art au siècle des Lumières en province. Edited by AnnePerrin Khelissa and ÉmilieRoffidal. Paris: Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte/Centre Allemand d'histoire de l'art. 2024. 428 p. €80 (hb). ISBN 978‐3985010790/Heidelberg: ar

Studies of eighteenth-century French art are typically so dominated by developments in Paris that it is easy to get the impression that the Acadmie royale de peinture et de sculpture was the only such institution in the country at the time.Founded in 1644, the Acadmie royale enjoyed significant privileges and unrivalled prestige.Its members included all of the eighteenth-century French artists who still enjoy a certain renown today.Nevertheless, the period from 1740 saw a proliferation of art academies and drawing schools across France, with the foundation of some 60 institutions not only in major cities such as Bordeaux, Marseille, and Strasbourg but also as far afield as Dunkirk and Pau, Lorient and Annecy.A substantial body of recent scholarship has explored the contribution that these institutions made to the teaching of drawing in France, with the focus on the development of design skills for use in manufacturing and decoration.The present volume, by contrast, seeks to situate provincial art academies and drawing schools within the cultural and social context of Enlightenment France by exploring the dense networks that connected them not only with each other but also with other types of establishment, from learned societies to masonic lodges (a drawing school might be sponsored by an academy of literature and science formed of local worthies, for example).The book's editors characterize art institutions as sites of sociability that brought together a wide range of social types, including artists, students, artisans, amateurs, patrons, scholars, manufacturers, and officials, at events such as drawing classes, art exhibitions, and prize-giving ceremonies.No less significant in their analysis, however, are practices such as exchanges of letters, awards of associate membership, and gifts of art works, by means of which both institutions and individuals forged connections, shared knowledge, and acquired prestige on a regional, national, and even transnational level.At four hundred twenty-eight pages, with four synoptic texts by the editors and fifteen contributions by other authors, together with numerous appendices, the book is a substantial achievement.It is the result of a large-scale seven-year research project, ACA-RES (Les acadmies d'art et leurs rseaux dans la France prindustrielle).The project website (https://acares.hypotheses.org/)makes available a large body of additional material, including brief histories of the most important art institutions, proceedings of three study days staged under the aegis of the project, a digital library of relevant publications, and a virtual exhibition.Work on a database of all of the archival documentation gathered by the project is reportedly ongoing.The full text of the book can be freely downloaded from the arthistoricum.netwebsite.Given its scale, it is possible here only to discuss a few of the contributions.The first half of the book examines the development, functioning, and significance of academic networks through a series of case studies focusing on particular institutions and individuals.In the case of the drawing school at Lyon, which was founded to serve the needs of the local textile industry, the institution's usefulness to the city was not simply a matter of practical training but, so Lesley Miller argues, had as much to do with the professional networking that it facilitated, the cultural prestige that it brought, and the opening out to a wider world that it fostered.Conversely, Stphanie Trouv's study of the career of the Bordeaux-born painter Pierre Lacour shows how he was able to flourish professionally on his return there, after training in Paris and Rome, thanks to his integration into Bordeaux's network of cultural institutions, including the art academy, of which he became successively a member, professor, and rector.However, association with a provincial academy could also be beneficial to Paris-based artists who had little chance of becoming a member of the highly exclusive Acadmie Royale.The latter