Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil

~~After playing a role in visualizing the French Revolution, color was subject to its own upheaval in the nineteenth century, first in materials, then in making. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, chemistry had replaced alchemy. Building on the classification of the elements and using modern experimental scientific methods,...

~I WANT to begin this chapter with the case study of Gustave Caillebotte, both patron of, and participant in, the Impressionist collective. He was the youngest (born 1848) and most well off of the group, and the most conservative in style and content. His major works attest to a thorough assimilation of the rhetoric of...

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...

During the early evolution of grounds for oil painting, the choice of materials was subject both to aesthetic and practical considerations, and these first and foremost determined ground colour. Only secondarily did permanence and the long-term effects of certain grounds come to be considered...

Between Olmsted’s era and that of American landscape architects who came of age just before and after World War II, nearly half a century of transformations had passed. Not only had people and their environments been forever changed by the intervening world wars...