View of the Paris World's Fair

IF SOCIETY COLUMNISTS found humor in the topic of the legitimation of bastard children, it...

ON 18 March 1872, Edmond de Goncourt paid a visit to Fantin-Latour’s studio to see his latest work-in-progress, a group portrait of avant-garde poets arranged around a table after a meal. A quarrel among Fantin’s sit-ters had left him with a noticeable gap in his composition, still unfilled when his...

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...

~Of all the qualities of Manet’s art, his picture construction has been least understood. He has been charged with faulty...

~In 1883, three years before he published his artist novel L’Oeuvre, based partly on Manet and on the phantasmatic image of the great Courtesan already found in “Une nouvelle manière en peinture,” Zola wrote the catalogue essay for the...

When Henry Tuckerman came to Paris in 1867, one of the thousands of Americans attracted there by the huge international exposition, he was bowled over by the extraordinary changes since his previous visit twenty years before...