ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network Research Forum:

From Print to Prose: The Goncourt Brothers and the Language of Etching

Dr. Rachel Skokowski, Janet Turner Print Museum, California State University, Chico

Wednesday 25 February 2026

 1700 (GMT) // 1800 (CET) // 1200 (EST) // 0900 (PST)

Known as novelists, diarists, art historians, and collectors, Jules and Edmond de Goncourt were also printmakers, producing nearly 100 etchings from 1859 until Jules’s untimely death in 1870. Over the same decade, the brothers were active participants in the French etching revival, a movement that brought together artists and writers to theorize printmaking in new ways. This talk identifies new intersections between prints and prose in the Goncourts’ wide-ranging work. Using an interdisciplinary approach that centers the embodied processes of etching and writing, this research explores how consideration of the brothers’ firsthand experience with printmaking sheds new light on pressing questions about reproduction, imitation, and originality in nineteenth-century French art.

Rachel Skokowski is the Director of Galleries and Curator of the Janet Turner Print Museum at California State University, Chico. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and she holds an MSt from Oxford and a BA from Princeton University. Her first book, The Goncourt Brothers and the Language of Etching, was published by Oxford University Press in November 2025. Her research on nineteenth-century French print culture has previously appeared in Nineteenth-Century French Studies and the Australian Journal of French Studies.