Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe)

The ground for this style had been prepared three decades earlier by the artists of the Barbizon School, who left their studios for the forest of Fontainebleau near Paris...

Manet has been a focus of attention for art historians during the past decade. In an important sense...

~~EDOUARD MANET’S Portrait of Mlle E. G., recognised by many critics as a painting of the young artist Eva Gonzalès when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1870,...

~From the beginning of Paul Cézanne’s painting...

~“‘ILLUSIONS,’ SAID MY FRIEND, ‘are as innumerable, perhaps, as the relations of men to each other and of men and things.’”Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, trans. Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1970), 64–67. I am...

~~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,...

~Striving away from naturalism to achieve style, abandoning the republican consensus to appeal to an elite, denying the inclusive for the exclusive, was a strategy rather more insecure than is perhaps typically understood. There was an increasing lack of momentum in avant-garde...

~By the nineteenth century ‘the nude’ had loosened its connections with history painting and become a category in itself. Previously, whether playing out a role in a Christian or Pagan drama, the nude figure was either necessary to the narrative or played an allegorical role representing innocence or virtue...

~Part one is a tale of two exhibitions, one monograph, and one novel. The first of the two...

​In earlier chapters Expressionism was described as post-Nietzschean and post-Victorian; it now must be defined as Post-Impressionist as well. Expressionism comes not only after and out of Impressionism, but is also to some extent its countermovement...

James McCabe, the American visitor, was convinced that Louis Napoleon had enacted Meryon’s “Loi Solaire.” His account of Second Empire Paris is especially revealing when placed alongside Henry Tuckerman’s. Tuckerman saw through the sheen of imperial splendor to the authoritarian power it disguised....