"With a wealth of fresh ideas and new interpretive perspectives on familiar pictorial examples, James Rubin provides a lucid, comprehensive account of the cultural significance of impressionist painting. He stresses the artists' interest in modern industry, technology, and productivity--a welcome corrective to our tendency to view this art almost exclusively as commentary on forms of bourgeois leisure. This is the type of book that will serve you well if it is the only one you read on impressionism, but also the one to read if you have already read all the others."--Richard Shiff, The University of Texas at Austin
"James Rubin contends, contrary to the arguments of leading theorists of impressionist painting, that the painters' scenes of leisure and productivity should be read in tandem, for together they signify the impressionists' commitment to progressive modernism." --Dianne Sachko Macleod, author of "Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity"
"Although a wealth of new writing on impressionism continues to appear, images of modern industry, technology, and commerce in the contemporary urban and rural landscape--a large body of evocative and often exquisite impressionist paintings--have received little sustained attention. Rubin's "Impressionism and the Modern Landscape" successfully fills this gap, approaching the new industrial landscape as an image of modern productivity essential for the pursuit of bourgeois leisure. Rubin argues persuasively for the industrial landscapes as a cohesive and revealing body of work, presenting an especially impressive analysis of canvases by Monet."--Mary Tompkins Lewis, editor of "Critical Readings inImpressionism and Post-Impressionism"

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) produced a body of work that strongly appealed to his contemporaries while disconcerting them. Even today, the odd qualities of his work continue to fascinate scholars, critics, and artists. In this handsomely illustrated and elegantly written book, Susan L. Siegfried argues that the strangeness associated with Ingres's paintings needs to be located in the complex and richly invested nature of the work itself, as well as in the artist's very powerful--if often perverse--sense of artistic project. She shows that his major re-thinking of pictorial narrative - in his classical literary, historical, and religious subjects - was as central to his achievement as his distinctive rendering of the female figure in classical nudes and portraits. He was engaged in a complex process of giving visual form to narrative, which he did in new and unusual ways that involved him in a close reading of the texts on which he drew, including authors such as Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Dante, as well as religious narratives and stories about medieval and early modern French history.

Anlasslich des 175. Geburtstags von Max Liebermann wird erstmals der herausragende Bestand seiner Zeichnungen im Kupferstichkabinett der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin vorgestellt. Die Entwicklung Liebermanns als Kunstler allgemein und als Zeichner im Besonderen machen die uberwiegend noch zu Lebzeiten des Kunstlers in der "Sammlung der Zeichnungen" an der Nationalgalerie zusammengetragenen Werke eindrucksvoll erlebbar. Vom selten gezeigten ersten Skizzenbuch der 1860er-Jahre uber Vorstudien zu Gemalden, hollandische Landschaften und Portrats prominenter Zeitgenossen bis hin zu markanten Selbstbildnissen offenbart sich das ganze Spektrum seiner Zeichenkunst. Dass die Zeichnung fur Max Liebermann eine zentrale Rolle spielte, wird im Katalog - dem ersten uberhaupt zum Bestand des Kupferstichkabinetts! - verdeutlicht. Ausstellung 16.12.22 bis 5.3.23, Stiftung Brandenburger Tor, Berlin Highlight anlasslich des Jubilaumsjahrs Max Liebermanns Nahezu der gesamte Zeichnungsbestand des Kunstlers aus dem Berliner Kupferstichkabinett wird erstmalig prasentiert

In 1863, the French painter Ernest Meissonier was one of the most famous artists in the world and the darling of the 'Salon' - that all important public art exhibition held biannually in Paris. Manet, on the other hand, was struggling in obscurity. Beginning with the year that Manet exhibited his ground-breaking Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe and ending in 1974 with the first 'Impressionist' exhibition, Ross King plunges into Parisian life during a ten-year period full of social and political ferment with his usual narrative brillliance. These were the years in which Napoleon III's autocratic and pleasure-seeking Second Empire fell from its heights into the ignominy of the Franco-Prussian war and the ensuing Paris Commune of 1871. But it was also a period in which a group of artists, with Manet in the vanguard began to challenge the establishment by turning to the landscapes and ordinary people they saw around them. The struggle between Meissonier and Manet to get their paintings exhibited in pride of place at the Salon was not just about art, it was about how to see the world.

This 1997 revised and updated biography of the celebrated artist, using the mass of new material which has come to light since Holroyd's two-volume first edition in the mid 1970s, reveals the complete story of John and his circle, from one of our great biographers. John studied at the Slade with his sister Gwen before both of them went to Paris. He lived and worked at feverish speed and his drawings were astonishing for their fluid lyrical line, their vigor and spontaneity. His life became a complex tale of two cities, London and Paris, of two wives and many families. 'The age of Augustus John was dawning,' Virginia Woolf wrote of the year 1908, which saw many portraits of writers and artists and small glowing oil panels of figures in a landscape. His most striking work was done in the years before the First World War and when he died in 1961 his death was treated as a landmark signaling the end of a distant era.

The catalogue of the exhibition to be shown at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Winter Park, FL and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA will present a choice selection of 19th century French paintings from the Musee des Beaux - Arts, Reims in order to trace the history of French art from the Romantics, to the School of Barbizon, the circle of Honfleur, and up to Impressionism. The Musee des Beaux - Arts, Reims owns the second largest collection of works by Jean - Baptiste Camille Corot after the Louvre as well as excellent landscape paintings by artists from the Barbizon School. Corot was one of the most significant painters involved with the Barbizonists. Studying the Reims holdings further it seemed evident to edit a catalogue and curate an exhibition that reach from the romantic spirit in French landscape painting to the School of Barbizon on to the group of artists around Eugene - Louis Boudin at Honfleur -- the true cradle of Impressionism -- and lastly to the Impressionists Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Pierre - Auguste Renoir.

This innovative and compelling study reconsiders Whistler's work from the context of his military service and his relationship with 'nature at the margins'. Whistler came from a family of soldiers and engineers; his father, Major George Washington Whistler, was originally a US military engineer. Drawing and mapmaking were important components of the military training that Whistler acquired as an offi cer cadet at West Point Academy in 1851-4 and subsequently in the Drawing Department at the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, where he attempted to realise his father's hopes that he would make engineering or architecture his profession. These infl uences in turn shaped Whistler's attitude towards nature, as expressed in works ranging from his celebrated London 'Nocturnes' to his French coastal scenes - all of which were created after Whistler moved permanently to Europe in 1855. Whistler's close observation of nature and its moods underpinned his powerful and haunting visions of nineteenth-century life. His images explore the contrasts between the natural and man-made worlds: rivers and wharves, gardens and courtyards, the ideal and the naturalistic. And his singular vison was always defi ned by his enduring affi nity with the makers of railways, bridges and ships, the cornerstones of Victorian wealth and trade. Infl uenced by Rembrandt, Whistler's early etchings of London are notable for their focus on line and topographical accuracy. From the 1860s, his enthusiasm for Japanese art, too, infl uenced his attitude to perspective and spatial relations between objects. This led him, in his London Nocturnes, to reduce the external world before him to its bare bones. Whistler's smoky images of warehouses, bridges, harbours and tall ships were designed to showcase a new kind of productive, wealth-generating landscape. It is a view of nature constrained by man-made structures: the shadowy outline of the warehouses and chimneys on the far shore; the mast and rigging of a Thames barge in the middle distance. This absorbing book reassesses a familiar and notoriously colourful artistic fi gure in a fascinating and pertinent new light, and is an important new contribution to our understanding of the Victorian art world and its physical context.

Stretching from Paris to Le Havre, the Seine river and the valley flanking it afford some of France's loveliest views. The ports, holiday homes and artists' houses, the boats, the washerwomen, the windmills, the open-air cafes, the picnics and the bathing supplied French painting with some of its most iconic images, particularly during the Impressionist era, when painting stepped out of the studio and into the world. It was in this period, as the industrial revolution began to get underway and the landscape began to alter accordingly, through the development of railways, ports and factories, that the rural world it threatened became an increasingly popular subject for painting. This volume brings together 60 paintings painted on the banks of the Seine, retracing the history of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism to Fauvism, from Eugene Boudin to Henri Matisse. En route we encounter such familiar figures as Manet, Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley and Caillebotte, but also lesser-known figures such as Armand Guillaumin, Henri Rouart and Maximilien Luce.

First published in 1984. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represent not only era of rapidly changing artistic methods but a crucial evolution in art criticism. This book gathers together a wide-range of the criticism that greeted the work of the Impressionists artists in the English Press. The selected examples of praise and antagonism reflect the sentiments expressed in the comments of prominent newspaper and periodical critics. The selection shows the importance of Impressionist art to English art criticism and wide comprehension of the formal qualities in painting. It also demonstrates how forward-looking critics created new criteria for the discussion of modern painting.

The late 1870s and early 1880s were watershed years in the history of French painting. As outgoing economic and social structures were being replaced by a capitalist, measured time, Impressionist artists sought to create works that could be perceived in an instant, capturing the sensations of rapidly transforming modern life. Yet a generation of artists pushed back against these changes, spearheading a short-lived revival of the Realist practices that had dominated at mid-century and advocating slowness in practice, subject matter, and beholding. In this illuminating book, Marnin Young looks closely at five works by Jules Bastien-Lepage, Gustave Caillebotte, Alfred-Philippe Roll, Jean-Francois Raffaelli, and James Ensor, artists who shared a concern with painting and temporality that is all but forgotten today, having been eclipsed by the ideals of Impressionism. Young's highly original study situates later Realism for the first time within the larger social, political, and economic framework and argues for its centrality in understanding the development of modern art.

Impressionism and Post-Impressionism at the Dallas Museum of Art offers a series of intimate case studies in the history of 19th-century European art. Inspired by a series of public lectures given at the Dallas Museum of Art between 2009 and 2013, the volume comprises twelve beautifully illustrated essays from leading academics and museum specialists. Opening with a new reading of one of Gustave Courbet's great hunting scenes, The Fox in the Snow, and ending with an exploration of a group of interior scenes by Edouard Vuillard, each essay stands alone as a richly contextualized reading of a single work or group of works by one artist. The authors approach their subjects from a range of methodological perspectives, but all pay close attention to the experience of making and viewing works of art. Distributed for the Dallas Museum of Art

Today we view Cezanne as a monumental figure, but during his lifetime (1839-1906), many did not understand him or his work. With brilliant insight, drawing on a vast range of primary sources, Alex Danchev tells the story of an artist who was never accepted into the official Salon: he was considered a revolutionary at best and a barbarian at worst, whose paintings were unfinished, distorted and strange. His work sold to no one outside his immediate circle until his late thirties, and he maintained that 'to paint from nature is not to copy an object; it is to represent its sensations' - a belief way ahead of his time, with stunning implications that became the obsession of many other artists and writers, from Matisse and Braque to Rilke and Gertrude Stein. Beginning with the restless teenager from Aix who was best friends with Emile Zola at school, Danchev carries us through the trials of a painter tormented by self-doubt, who always remained an outsider, both of society and the bustle of the art world. Cezanne: A Life delivers not only the fascinating days and years of the visionary who would 'astonish Paris with an apple', with interludes analysing his self-portraits - but also a complete assessment of Cezanne's ongoing influence through artistic imaginations in our own time. He is, as this life shows, a cultural icon comparable to Marx or Freud.

The personality of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) - a 9th-century combination of dropout, rebel, and genius - and the source of his enormous achievement continue to fascinate people as deeply as his vivid, wildly painted canvasses of sunflowers, peasants, and starry nights. In this first and only in-depth study of the relationship between van Gogh's psychological development and his art, Albert J. Lubin, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry (Emeritus) at Stanford University and a practicing psychoanalyst, draws on the tremendous wealth of information available about van Gogh to explore his personal conflicts in the context of the forces that molded him: familial, historical, cultural, religious, artistic, and literary. Dr. Lubin approaches van Gogh not as a mysterious mix of sick eccentric and martyred artist, but as a complete man who transformed his suffering into a phenomenal body of work. Lubin's daring psychological insights and art criticism create a compelling portrait that allows us to better understand, and more fully appreciate, van Gogh's artistic triumph over his inner torment.

Of the six Impressionist painters whose first exhibition scandalized and fascinated Paris in 1874, Berthe Morisot was the only woman. She reached a pinnacle of artistic achievement despite the restraints society placed on her sex, adroitly combining her artistic ambitions with a rewarding family life. Anne Higonnet brings fully to life an accomplished artist and her world.

Across almost 50 years, Winston Churchill produced more than 500 paintings. His subjects included his family homes at Blenheim and Chartwell, evocative coastal scenes on the French Riviera, and many sun-drenched depictions of Marrakesh in Morocco, as well as still life pictures and an extraordinarily revealing self-portrait, painted during a particularly troubled time in his life. In war and peace, Churchill came to enjoy painting as his primary means of relaxation from the strain of public affairs.

In his introduction to Churchill: The Statesman as Artist, David Cannadine provides the most important account yet of Churchill's life in art, which was not just a private hobby, but also, from 1945 onwards, an essential element of his public fame. The first part of this book brings together for the first time all of Churchill's writings and speeches on art, not only Painting as a Pastime, but his addresses to the Royal Academy, his reviews of two of the Academy's summer exhibitions, and an important speech he delivered about art and freedom in 1937.

The second part of the book provides previously uncollected critical accounts of his work by some of Churchill's contemporaries: Augustus John's hitherto unpublished introduction to the Royal Academy exhibition of Churchill's paintings in 1959, and essays and reviews by Churchill s acquaintances Sir John Rothenstein, Professor Thomas Bodkin and the art critic Eric Newton. The book is lavishly illustrated with reproductions of many of Churchill's paintings, some of them appearing for the first time. Here is Churchill the artist more fully revealed than ever before.

In 1891, Paul Gauguin (1848 1903) arrives on the French Polynesian island of Tahiti. In this lush paradise, he is liberated from the concerns of the city-dwelling European. He is free: to love, to sing, and to create. In Copenhagen, Gauguin's wife enjoys no such freedom. She would rather forget her odious husband and his degenerate artwork. Instead, in a city resistant to the avant-garde, she is tasked with selling a collection of his extravagantly priced Tahitian paintings. When they finally go on sale in Paris, shortly after Gauguin's return sales are catastrophic. For Monet, Renoir, and the rest of the old guard, nothing indicates that these bizarre, visionary works are of any lasting significance. Gauguin: The Other World is a revelatory biography of an artist whose qualities as a man won him few admirers in his own lifetime, but whose talents as a painter would have an enormous influence on the art of Picasso, Matisse, and many more.

Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Though they were often ridiculed or ignored by their contemporaries, astonishing sums are paid today for the works of these artists. Their dazzling pictures are familiar - but how well does the world know the Impressionists as people? In a vivid and moving narrative, biographer Sue Roe shows the Impressionists in the studios of Paris, rural lanes of Montmartre and rowdy riverside bars as Paris underwent Baron Haussman's spectacular transformation. For over twenty years they lived and worked together as a group, struggling to rebuild their lives after the Franco-Prussian war and supporting one another through shocked public reactions to unfamiliar canvasses depicting laundresses, dancers, spring blossom and boating scenes. This intimate, colourful, superbly researched account takes us into their homes as well as their studios and describes their unconventional, volatile and precarious lives, as well as the stories behind their paintings.

Throughout his career, Henri Matisse used imagery as a means of engaging critically with poetry and prose by a diverse range of authors. Kathryn Brown offers a groundbreaking account of Matisse's position in the literary cross-currents of 20th-century France and explores ways in which reading influenced the artist's work in a range of media. This study argues that the livre d'artiste became the privileged means by which Matisse enfolded literature into his own idiom and demonstrated the centrality of his aesthetic to modernist debates about authorship and creativity. By tracing the compositional and interpretive choices that Matisse made as a painter, print maker, and reader in the field of book production, this study offers a new theoretical account of visual art's capacity to function as a form of literary criticism and extends debates about the gendering of 20th-century bibliophilia. Brown also demonstrates the importance of Matisse's self-placement in relation to the French literary canon in the charged political climate of the Second World War and its aftermath. Through a combination of archival resources, art history, and literary criticism, this study offers a new interpretation of Matisse's artist's books and will be of interest to art historians, literary scholars, and researchers in book history and modernism.

Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and others began as Impressionists but soon extended their explorations of the world around them to create highly personal work. With their foundations in the bright colours of Impressionism and the break from traditional representational art, the Post-Impressionists worked alone but collectively created the bridge into the expressionism of the 20th Century. Their delightful and evocative masterpieces are celebrated in this gorgeous new book.

Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany is the first English-language examination of this German impressionist painter whose long life and career spanned nine decades. Through a close reading of key paintings and by a discussion of his many cultural networks across Germany and throughout Europe, this study by Marion Deshmukh illuminates Liebermann's importance as a pioneer of German modernism. Critics and admirers alike saw his art as representing aesthetic European modernism at its best. His subjects included dispassionate depictions of the rural Dutch countryside, his colorful garden at the Wannsee, and his many portraits of Germany's cultural, political, and military elites. Liebermann was the largest collector of French Impressionism in Germany - and his cosmopolitan outlook and his art created strong antipathies towards both by political and cultural conservatives throughout his life.

Were late nineteenth-century gender boundaries as restrictive as is generally held? In Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Paintings: Work Place/Domestic Space, Kirstin Ringelberg argues that it is time to bring the current re-evaluation of the notion of separate spheres to these images. Focusing on studio paintings by American artists William Merritt Chase and Mary Fairchild MacMonnies Low, she explores how the home-based painting studio existed outside of entrenched gendered divisions of public and private space and argues that representations of these studios are at odds with standard perceptions of the images, their creators, and the concept of gender in the nineteenth century. Unlike most of their bourgeois contemporaries, Gilded Age artists, whether male or female, often melded the worlds of work and home. Through analysis of both paintings and literature of the time, Ringelberg reveals how art history continues to support a false dichotomy; that, in fact, paintings that show women negotiating a complex combination of professionalism and domesticity are still overlooked in favor of those that emphasize women as decorative objects. Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Paintings challenges the dominant interpretation of American (and European) Impressionism, and considers both men and women artists as active performers of multivalent identities.

This collection of Paul Cezanne's letters provides an insight into his thoughts and work.