Luxe, Calme et volupté

~If Frédéric Bazille’s Peonies paintings confirmed Manet’s foundational imagery of Laure as part of a free black presence in 1860s Paris, it was in the late work of Henri Matisse (1869–1954) that the legacy of Manet’s Laure...

~~Beginning in the 1880s, painters introduced color that did not represent visual reality. Turning away from materialism and what they often described as decadent urban society, these painters delved inside themselves for ways to express the values they held dear. Although disassociated from institutional religion, Paul Gauguin and...

Camille Pissarro’s Two Young Peasant Women (fig. 20) was first shown to the public in late January 1892. It was part of a wide-ranging exhibition of Pissarro’s past and recent work – the kind we would now call a retrospective – put on at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, in a fashionable shopping street just off the boulevard des Italiens. The catalogue for the show invited the visitor to look at Pissarro’s paintings chronologically, or with a sense of how paintings done in the previous few months …