The Luncheon (decorative panel)

Writing from Paris in her diary on the last day of 1868, the young American Frances Willard noted her admiration for “the brilliant shop-windows and the almost equally dazzling costumes...

~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...

Gardens were a favorite subject of impressionist painters. Their rich and fecund images of a blooming, apparently natural world, often engulfing the human figures enclosed within it (fig. 9.1), have in their turn become a source of delight today. The huge modern popularity of impressionist renderings of gardens and other landscapes both derives from and fuels a...

In 1886, when Louis Barron published his book on the environs of Paris, the national census showed that only 20% of the inhabitants of the suburbs had been born in the commune they resided in. Another 24% had been born elsewhere in the suburbs or in Paris, so one could say that 44% were natives of the immediate region....