Woman Reading

While dress has been linked to character and social status in...

~~IN 1889 MARY CASSATT, EVA GONZALÈS’S erstwhile contemporary and fellow Realist, was occupied with the last of four portraits in oil that she painted of her mother, Katherine Cassatt, then aged 74...

During the early evolution of grounds for oil painting, the choice of materials was subject both to aesthetic and practical considerations, and these first and foremost determined ground colour. Only secondarily did permanence and the long-term effects of certain grounds come to be considered...

~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...

~Even after a number of Salon refusals in the second half of the 1870s, Manet still declined to participate in the Impressionist exhibitions. Instead, he looked to other arrangements, among them throwing his own studio...

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...