Imitation Is Suicide

A groundbreaking cultural history of calamitous teacher-student relationships at the heart of nineteenth-century French painting and efforts to fix them

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.