Absinthe

The massive fragments of classical sculpture – the hand and foot that the diminutive figure of Fuseli/the artist contemplates with such regret on the opening page of Linda Nochlin’s The Body in Pieces (fig. 5.1) – provide the perfect basis for this...

~~After playing a role in visualizing the French Revolution, color was subject to its own upheaval in the nineteenth century, first in materials, then in making. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, chemistry had replaced alchemy. Building on the classification of the elements and using modern experimental scientific methods,...

~I WANT to begin this chapter with the case study of Gustave Caillebotte, both patron of, and participant in, the Impressionist collective. He was the youngest (born 1848) and most well off of the group, and the most conservative in style and content. His major works attest to a thorough assimilation of the rhetoric of...

At the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881, Jean-François Raffaëlli showed the painting now known as The Absinthe Drinkers for the first time (fig. 81).See...

Even a casual glance at successive editions of guide books to Paris, from their beginnings in the 1840s to the end of the “Belle Epoque,” reveals the striking truth: leisure and entertainment took an ever-increasing place in the life of Paris...