French art historians

Jacques Thuillier, (March 18, 1928, Vaucouleurs, Meuse – October 18, 2011, Paris) was a French art historian specializing in 17th-century French painting.
Thuillier was an honorary professor at the Collège de France, where he taught history of artistic creation from 1977 to 1998. He was a renowned specialist of French painting and, alongside the late Anthony Blunt, a leading authority on Nicolas Poussin. He published seminal works on the leading French painters of the time, including Simon Vouet, Georges de La Tour, the Le Nain brothers, Laurent de La Hyre, Sébastien Bourdon, Jacques Blanchard and Lubin Baugin. His publications on those painters often took the form of both an exhibition catalogue and a catalogue raisonné based on extensive archival research.
An avid collector, Thuillier donated, while still alive, along with his brother Guy Thuillier, his collection of drawings (2,000) and engravings (13,000) to the Museum of Fine Arts of Nancy and part of his collection of paintings to the art museum at Vic-sur-Seille. He donated to the city of Nevers part of his archives, his library, a collection of drawings and engravings, and his collections of photographs, thus making the Nevers Médiathèque into a documentation centre for French painting of the 17th century. Another part of these archives and manuscripts is held at the INHA (fr), in Paris.

Michel Laclotte (Saint Malo, France, 27 October 1929 – Montauban, 10 August 2021) was a French art historian and museum director, specialising in 14th and 15th century Italian and French painting.

Michel Pastoureau (born 17 June 1947) is a French professor of medieval history and an expert in Western symbology.

Laurence Bertrand Dorléac (born January 14, 1957) is a French art historian specializing in contemporary art, a professor and an author. She was elected president of the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques in May 2021. She is located in Boulogne-Billancourt, France.

Jacques Élie Faure (French pronunciation: [ʒak eli fɔʁ]; 4 April 1873 in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, France – 29 October 1937 in Paris) was a French medical doctor, art historian and essayist.
He is the author of the History of Art, considered a historiographical pillar in the discipline.

Rose Antonia Maria Valland (1 November 1898 – 18 September 1980) was a French art historian, member of the French Resistance, captain in the French military, and one of the most decorated women in French history. She secretly recorded details of the Nazi plundering of National French and private Jewish-owned art from France; and, working with the French Resistance, she saved thousands of works of art.

Jean-Gaspard-Félix Laché Ravaisson-Mollien (French: [ʁavɛsɔ̃ mɔljɛ̃]; 23 October 1813 – 18 May 1900) was a French philosopher, 'perhaps France's most influential philosopher in the second half of the nineteenth century'. He was originally and remains more commonly known as Félix Ravaisson.His 'seminal' 'key' work was De l’habitude (1838), translated in English as Of Habit. Ravaisson's philosophy is in the tradition of French Spiritualism, which was initiated by Pierre Maine de Biran (1766–1824) with the essay "The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking" (1802). However, Ravaisson developed his doctrine as what he called 'spiritualist realism' and 'spiritualist positivism', and – according to Ravaisson scholar Mark Sinclair – can be thought of as founding 'the school of contingency'. His most well known and influential successor was Henri Bergson, with whom the tradition can be seen to end during the 1930s; although the 'lineage' of this 'philosophy of life' can be seen to return in the late twentieth century with Gilles Deleuze. Ravaisson never worked in the French state university system, in his late 20s declining a position at the University of Rennes. In 1838 he was employed as the principle private secretary to the Minister of Public Instruction, going on to secure high-ranking positions such as Inspector General of Libraries, and then the Curator of Classical Antiquities at the Louvre. Later in his life he was appointed as the President of the Jury of the Aggregation of philosophy in France, 'a position of considerable influence'. Ravaisson, was not only a philosopher, classicist, archivist, and educational administrator, but also a painter exhibiting under the name Laché.

Gustave Geffroy (1 June 1855 – 4 April 1926) was a French journalist, art critic, historian and novelist. He was one of the ten founding members of the literary organisation Académie Goncourt in 1900.
Geffroy is noted as one of the first historians of the Impressionist art movement with his publication of Histoire de l'impressionnisme in 1892. He knew and championed Monet, whom he met in 1886 in Belle-Île-en-Mer while travelling for research on prisons of the Second Empire. Monet introduced him to Cézanne, who painted his portrait in 1895.
He contributed to the newspaper La Justice from 15 January 1880, and came to know its founder, Georges Clemenceau, who in 1908 appointed him director of the Gobelins tapestry factory, a position he held until his death.
Geffroy was born and died in Paris; he is interred at the Cimetière de Montrouge. A street in Paris's 13th arrondissement, close to the Gobelins Manufactory, bears his name.

René Huyghe (3 May 1906 – 5 February 1997) was a French writer on the history, psychology and philosophy of art. He was also a curator at the Louvre's department of paintings (from 1930), a professor at the Collège de France and from 1960 a member of the Académie Française. He was the father of the writer François-Bernard Huyghe.

Émile Mâle (French: [emil mɑl]; 2 June 1862 – 6 October 1954) was a French art historian, one of the first to study medieval, mostly sacral French art and the influence of Eastern European iconography thereon. He was a member of the Académie française, and a director of the Académie de France à Rome.