Étienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré (better known as Théophile Thoré-Bürger) (23 June 1807 – 30 April 1869) was a French journalist and
art critic. He is best known today for rediscovering the work of painter
Johannes Vermeer and several other prominent Dutch artists.
Biography
Thoré-Bürger was born in
La Flèche, Sarthe. His career as art critic started in the 1830s, but he was also active as a political journalist. In March 1848 he founded La Vraie République, which
Louis-Eugène Cavaignac soon banned. A year later, in March 1849, he founded another newspaper, Le Journal de la vraie République, which Cavaignac also banned. Consequently, Thoré-Bürger went into exile to
Brussels and continued publishing articles as Willem Bürger. He returned to France after the
amnesty of 1859, dying in Paris ten years later.
Today, Thoré-Bürger is best known for rediscovering the work of
Johannes Vermeer and several other prominent Dutch artists, such as
Frans Hals (he was the first to describe the portrait of Malle Babbe),
Carel Fabritius, and others. Thoré-Bürger's interest in Vermeer began in 1842 when he saw the View of Delft in the
Mauritshuis of
The Hague. Vermeer's name was wholly forgotten at the time; Thoré-Bürger was so impressed with the View of Delft that he spent the years before his exile searching for other works by the painter. He would eventually publish descriptions and a catalogue of Vermeer's work, although many of the paintings he attributed to the master were later proven to have been executed by others.
Dictionnaire de phrénologie et de physiognomonie, à l'usage des artistes, des gens du monde, des instituteurs, des pères de famille, des jurés, etc., 1836
Available online
La Restauration de l'autorité, ou l'Opération césarienne, 1852
Dans les bois, 1856
En Ardenne, par quatre Bohémiens. Namur, Dinant, Han, Saint-Hubert, Houffalize, La Roche, Durbuy, Nandrin, Comblain, Esneux, Tilf, Spa, in collaboration with other writers, 1856
Trésors d'art exposés à Manchester en 1857 et provenant des collections royales, des collections publiques et des collections particulières de la Grande-Bretagne, 1857
Amsterdam et La Haye. Études sur l'école hollandaise, 1858
Çà & là, 1858
Musées de la Hollande, 2 vol., 1858–1860
Études sur les peintres hollandais et flamands. Galerie d'Arenberg, à Bruxelles avec le catalogue complet de la collection, 1859
Musée d'Anvers, 1862
Trésors d'art en Angleterre, 1862
Van der Meer (Vermeer) de Delft, 1866
Published posthumously
Les Salons : études de critique et d'esthétique, 3 vol., 1893
Thoré-Bürger peint par lui-même : lettres et notes intimes, 1900
Available online
^Jowell, Frances Suzman (2003). "Thoré-Bürger's Art Collection: 'A Rather Unusual Gallery of Bric-à-Brac'". Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art. 30 (1/2): 54–119 (61, 68).
doi:
10.2307/3780951.
JSTOR3780951.
^Jowell, Frances Suzman (2001). "From Thoré to Bürger: The image of Dutch art before and after the Musées de la Hollande". Bulletin van Het Rijksmuseum. 49 (1): 43–60.
JSTOR40383198.