Autumn

~Like many a fellow Parisian, Manet enjoyed fancy dress and make-believe. Writing of a party in honor of Zola, George Moore remembered, ‘Manet had persuaded me to go to the Bal de l’Assommoir dressed as a Parisian workman, for he enjoyed incongruities, and the blouse and the casquette, with my appearance and my accent, appealed to his imagination...

~Two years after the show at La Vie Moderne, Manet declared he was a “philosopher of the Folies-Bergère”: he showed the Bar at the Folies-Bergère (fig. 137) at...

James McCabe, the American visitor, was convinced that Louis Napoleon had enacted Meryon’s “Loi Solaire.” His account of Second Empire Paris is especially revealing when placed alongside Henry Tuckerman’s. Tuckerman saw through the sheen of imperial splendor to the authoritarian power it disguised....