Edmond de Goncourt

Friend of Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert and Alphonse Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt was a French writer belonging to the naturalist movement. Eyewitness to the events of the worldly and artistic life of the second half of the nineteenth century, his major work remains the Journal written with his brother, Jules. Beginning in 1850, they collaborated on history books, most notably treating painting, such as Eighteenth Century Art. Impassioned by the delicate beauty of the Japanese woodblock prints, Edmond de Goncourt became, through his monographs on Utamaro and Hokusai, one of the first to reveal the magnificence of this art to the Western world.