The Artist's House at Argenteuil

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....