Stéphane Mallarmé

Anatole France’s tongue-in-cheek claim that fashion magazines say more about humanity than novels suggests a separation between fashion, literature, and human experience that is easily challenged by numerous French literary works of the nineteenth century. For to read French literature produced during the period of the Impressionists is to realize that—for numerous novelists, poets,...

~The earliest known works by Manet are copies after the masters—certainly an acceptable and appropriate beginning for an aspiring young artist. A great many of his copies must have disappeared, but what remains attests to Couture’s guidance toward masters of painterly technique : Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Velasquez...

~The Garden was not a Salon painting. The only white dress to show up in Manet’s next Salon was worn by a child, in The Railway (fig. 95). In the Salon of 1874, Manet showed this painting and a little watercolor of Punchinello with a poem...