Professor Samuel Taylor

The Voltaire Foundation is happy to announce the launch of Voltaire Iconography, a project conceived by Professor Samuel Taylor. We are especially delighted to be celebrating Sam on the special occasion of his 96th birthday.

Sam writes:

“I have worked on Voltaire since student days at Birmingham in the 1950s. A PhD followed (on the Voltaire – Rousseau Quarrel (1957): copies Bham University, and Institut et Musée Voltaire, Geneva, (1957)). To my great regret this remained unpbd., as in 1960 I was appointed Besterman’s research and editorial assistant at Les Délices working with him on the last 40 volumes of the Voltaire Correspondence (1960-63). The research for this was intensive. With not only Voltaire’s but Leigh’s Rousseau correspondence being rewritten, the opportunity to update my own work never arose. However my close textual work on Besterman’s drafts and completion of his research, prepared me for my life-changing discovery of Voltaire’s handwritten revisions to his final, Encadrée, complete works edition. These had lain undiscovered in his personal library in St Petersburg since their transcription by his Wagnière for the forthcoming Kehl edition. The editors’ bowdlerisation of this text was long suspected but my discovery finally, after 200 years, delivered Voltaire’s intended text. The Russian Library director generously agreed to my copying them to allow the current Oxford project to be rerouted to embrace the first authentic text of Voltaire’s Works since his death. Life holds few such opportunities.

Though unintended, my major life project became the photographic collection of all pre-1830 portraits of Voltaire (some 1100 in all) as my travels unearthed them. It rapidly went beyond practicable book-publication and was saved from abandonment only through the invention of personal computers, databases and advanced photography. My schooling fortunately left me with a good scientific grounding and my Physics master had bellowed “Renegade” after me when I opted for Languages. However, he had equipped me with the skills to make my major transfer, to create an appropriate taxonomy and labour over 50 or more years to complete a seemingly impossible task. It is now to appear thanks to the generosity of the Voltaire Foundation under professor Nicholas Cronk.

I have, of course, done other work as an academic: fundamentally revising the objectives and methodology of advanced, communicative language teaching (I was chairman of the NCML), plumbing the evolution of Comedy in France, making the first, major incursion into modern Swiss-French literature, and so on.

It has been the Iconography, however, that has been the focus of my later life and crucially rewritten the histories of the major artistic portraits of Voltaire by Largillière, La Tour, Houdon and Voltaire’s gadfly Huber whilst opening up his massive following in the decorative arts, caricature and revolutionary propaganda. It will escape no one however that, though no art lover himself, Voltaire fastened onto his portrait as a means of communicating with those he was excluded from seeing by exile.”