Regnault
Regnault names 2 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Regnault ALEXANDRE GEORGES HENRI, a French painter
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
ALEXANDRE GEORGES HENRI, a French painter; born in Paris, Oct. 30, 1843, the son of HENRI VICTOR REGNAULT (q.v.). His aptitude for drawing manifested itself very early, and he was continually sketching the animals in the Jardin des Plantes. He studied art under Lamothe and Cabanel; and, after two unsuccessful attempts, gained the prix de Rome (the Rome prize) in 1866. He executed there a remarkable portrait of Madame Duparc, and his historical subject of "Automedon Breaking the Horses of Achilles," and drew on wood illustrations for Way's "Rome. " In 1869 he painted an equestrian portrait of General Prim, now in the Louvre, and in 1870 "The Execution Without Judgment Under the Moorish Kings of Granada" to be found in the same collection . Other works of 1870 are "Judith" and "Salome." He returned to Paris on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War; and though exempt from military service, he volunteered as a private soldier , and was killed at Buzenval , Jan. 19, 1871.
Regnault HENRI VICTOR, a French scientist
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
HENRI VICTOR, a French scientist; born in Aix-la-Cha pelle, Prussia, July 21, 1810. A shopman in a Paris bazaar, he entered the Polytechnic School, and, after the two years' course, came out as a mining engineer. He became a professor in Lyons, whence, in 1840, he was recalled to Paris as a member of the Academy of Sciences, in consequence of some important discoveries in organic chemistry. He filled chairs in the Polytechnic School and the College of France, and became in 1854 director of the imperial porcelain manufactory of Sèvres. He devoted himself to the determination of important physical data, the Royal Society of London awarded him their Rumford medal and the Copley medal (1869 ). He published an "Elementary Course in Chemistry" (1871). He died Jan. 20 , 1878.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both biographies still stand as Collier's set them out in 1921, and the pairing of father and son remains the strongest thing about the entry: Henri Victor's Sèvres laboratory was wrecked in the Franco-Prussian War at almost the moment his son Alexandre was killed at Buzenval in January 1871, and the older man did little research afterwards. What has moved is the standing of the work. Henri Victor's painstaking measurements of gas density, vapour pressure and specific heat — which showed real gases departing from Boyle's law — were the reference data of nineteenth-century thermodynamics and were still being reprinted in engineers' steam tables long after his death, but they have been wholly superseded by modern determinations; his name now survives mainly in histories of thermometry. Alexandre's big canvases, credited to the Louvre in 1921, are exhibited today at the Musée d'Orsay, which took over French nineteenth-century painting when it opened in 1986, and "Execution Without Judgment Under the Moorish Kings of Granada" is now read as much for its Orientalist assumptions as for its brushwork.
Written for this edition, 2026.