Terrace at Sainte-Adresse

~MY ATTEMPT TO RECONSTRUCT some nineteenth-century familial myths around Manet’s art is, at some level, aimed at rescuing an essential feature of Manet’s art from the literalness of a certain brand of art history that concerns itself only with Manet’s subjects and motifs in a material sense. It is, in part, a reminder that the social history of...

The same forces that transformed the suburbs of Paris were also at work along the English Channel. Vacationers, ostensibly seeking nature, poured into fishing villages and larger ports in such numbers that traditional life there was forever altered. “Bathing” along the Channel meant the encounter of two peoples, both undergoing fateful changes: the...