Abstract
There are few French personalities honoured or remembered affectionately in Vietnam today. Among the few are bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin, co-discoverer of the cause of the plague, Yersinia pestis, and the painter Victor Tardieu (1870–1937), co-founder of the fine arts academy, l’École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine [The Fine Arts School of Indochina]. In 2016, both men were acknowledged for their remarkable contributions to the advancement of Vietnam.1 From his laboratory in Nha Trang, Yersin developed an anti-plague serum and laid the foundations of Vietnam’s billion-dollar rubber and coffee industries of today. In Hanoi, Tardieu’s academy gave birth to modern Vietnamese painting, and unwittingly the visual style of the Vietnamese revolutionary propaganda artform...