This is a fascinating look at one of the defining images of the Impressionist movement. Manet Paints Monet focuses on an auspicious moment in the history of art. In the summer of 1874, Edouard Manet (1832-1883) and Claude Monet (1840-1926), two outstanding painters of the nascent Impressionist movement, spent their holidays together in Argenteuil on the Seine River. Their growing friendship is expressed in their artwork, culminating in Manet's marvelous portrait of Monet painting on a boat. The boat was the ideal site for Monet to execute his new plein-air paintings, enabling him to depict nature, water, and the play of light. Similarly, Argenteuil was the perfect place for Manet, the great painter of contemporary life, to observe Parisian society at leisure. His portrait brings all the elements together - Manet's own eye for the effect of social conventions and boredom on vacationers, and Monet's eye for nature - but these qualities remain markedly distinct. With this book, esteemed art historian Willibald Sauerlander describes how Manet, in one instant, created a defining image of an entire epoch, capturing the artistic tendencies of the time in a masterpiece that is both graceful and profound.

"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"

A century after the death of Paul Gauguin, our knowledge of his life and work has made huge strides.
The present work covers the youth and early maturity of this pioneering artist and attempts a summation. It also offers a complete catalogue of the paintings, in the process thoroughly updating the original Wildenstein catalogue of 1964. These first two volumes take the reader through to the end of 1888, a year of profound upheavel in French painting. That was the year in which Gauguin and his friends, by a collaborative effort, arrived at Synthetism and, by rejecting representation in depth, freed Western painting of laws that had governed it since the Renaissance.
But Synthetism was also a form of primitivism. The society in which Gauguin lived was--already--a technical and materialist one, which contained the seeds of all that the 20th century became. Gauguin was one of the first to seek, in reaction to this civilization, a form of inspiration deriving from the timeless origins of humanity.
Although these two volumes are the product of rigorous research, they are studded with illustrations and are by no means intended for specialists alone. Commentary on each work offers a step-by-step analysis of Gauguin's artistic development, while reconstructing the artist's experience and the aesthetic and socio-cultural issues of his times.
The lively detail of the chronology describes the events of Gauguin's life, along with those of his friends; thanks to extensive research in unpublished archives, it also casts completely new light on Gauguin's ancestry.
The introduction offers an analysis of the period and an in-depth portrait of this great artist.
This exhaustivework is carefully designed so that each entry and insert can be read in isolation, though a system of cross-referencing ensures the continuity of the work and restores the overall trajectory of Gauguin's development.

In this delightful memoir, Jean Renoir, the director of such masterpieces of the cinema as "Grand Illusion" and "The Rules of the Game," tells the life story of his father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the great Impressionist painter. Recounting Pierre-Auguste's extraordinary career, beginning as a painter of fans and porcelain, recording the rules of thumb by which he worked, and capturing his unpretentious and wonderfully engaging talk and personality, Jean Renoir's book is both a wonderful double portrait of father and son and, in the words of the distinguished art historian John Golding, it "remains the best account of Renoir, and, furthermore, among the most beautiful and moving biographies we have."
Includes 12 pages of color plates and 18 pages of black and white images.

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.

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features Vincent van Gogh's 'Bedroom at Arles'. Vincent van Gogh sought refuge from Paris in February 1888. He set off for Arles to satisfy his yearning to experience the colours of the South. Initially, he took up lodgings at a local hotel but shortly after, he rented the famous Yellow House on Place Lamartine, nestled in between the rail tracks and river on the north side of town. This famous painting depicts his bedroom in the house.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The scope of Rimbaud's Impressionist Poetics is even broader than the title suggests: not only does Aimee Israel-Pelletier demonstrate Rimbaud's affinities with Impressionism, but she also relates him to realism and to the cultural and political climate of late nineteenth-century France, a watershed period in the history of vision and poetry; not only does she deal with Rimbaud's poetics, his theories of vision, but she also reinforces her compelling argument with ample discussion of his poems. Indeed, these incisive analyses illustrate the interaction of the visual and verbal languages at the most basic level, making her book at once comprehensive and concrete. Her argument is consistently lucid and uncluttered, her style straight-forward and jargon-free, resulting in a book that will prove attractive to experts in all of the many fields with which it intersects, yet accessible to the general reading public. In short, this fascinating study is also a great read. William J. Berg, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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.

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.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depictions of New England flooded the American art scene. Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Theodore Robinson, and Julian Weir, and other well-known artists produced images of quaint villages, agricultural labor, scenic rural churches, and the distinctive New England landscape. Julia B. Rosenbaum asks why and how a range of artists including Impressionist and Modernist painters and sculptors and exhibitors fashioned this particular vision of New England in their work. Against the backdrop of industrialization, immigration, and persistent post-Civil War sectionalism, many Americans yearned for national unity and identity. As Rosenbaum finds, New England emerged as symbolic of cultural and spiritual achievement and democratic values that served as an example for the nation. By addressing the struggles for national unity, the book offers a new interpretation of turn-of-the-century American art. Ultimately, Visions of Belonging demonstrates how the local became so important to the national; how art was crucial to the formation of national identity; and how internal nation building takes place within the realm of culture, as well as politics. And even as later artists, such as Georgia O'Keeffe, challenged New England's cultural hegemony, the appeal of linking regional identity to national ideals continued in distinctive ways.Beautifully illustrated with color plates and almost sixty halftones, Visions of Belonging explores the interplay between art objects and the shaping of loyalties and identities in a formative phase of American culture. It will appeal not only to art historians but also to anyone with an interest in nineteenth-century studies, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, American studies, New England history and culture, and American cultural and intellectual history."

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.

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

A recently discovered plaster of Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen is critically challenging our understanding of Edgar Degas' most famous work. Documentary and technical evidence confirm that the plaster was cast from Degas' Little Dancer before the wax sculpture was extensively reworked after 1903. The plaster thus records Degas' wax as it appeared when it shocked the Parisian art world at the sixth Impressionist exhibition of 1881. It reveals a far more revolutionary work than the reworked Little Dancer wax and the posthumous Hebrard bronzes we know today. The plaster shows why Joris-Karl Huysmans, in 1881, raved that Degas' Little Dancer was "the only truly modern attempt I know of in sculpture" and why the work left Whistler in a state of near delirium. The plaster reveals Degas at his most innovative by introducing a radical idea of posing a lowly 'opera rat' as a revered figure by giving her an iconic pose, then locking her into a square vitrine, thus emphasizing her symmetrical, four-sided stance. It is now clear that in his Little Dancer Degas anticipated radical ideas that came to define key aspects of modern art, dramatically impacting his most noted peers, including Whistler, Manet, Seurat and Sargent. Even twentieth-century masterpieces by Duchamp, Giacometti, Oldenburg, Warhol and Hirst reflect, albeit indirectly, Degas' masterful innovations."

There are some collectors who through foresight and dedication have built truly outstanding art collections and shared them widely as part of public museums. Among these were Samuel Courtauld in London and Rasmus Meyer in Bergen. At the heart of each man's collection were single artists who were their greatest passions: for Courtauld it was Paul Cezanne and for Meyer, Edvard Munch. This unique collaboration between KODE art museums in Bergen and The Courtauld in London, celebrates these two remarkable collectors and two great artists by showing masterpieces by Cezanne in Bergen and Munch in London. The Courtauld is home to some of the most important paintings by Cezanne, such as The Card Players and Montagne Sainte-Victoire. "Cezanne. Masterpieces from The Courtauld at KODE Art Museum" is the story about how collectors and artists became aware of Cezanne. This publication not only presents ten key works from The Courtauld along with Cezannes from Norwegian collections, it also brings them together with eye witness accounts from the early years of his profound influence, seen through the lens of the Norwegian art scene around 1900. With essays by Barnaby Wright, Oystein Sjastad and Karen Serres and an introduction by Line Daatland. Forewords by Petter Snare and Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen.

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.