Through the lens of seven scholars, this book examines fine art and commercial design as they both reflected and helped create the vibrant culture of public spectacle in late nineteenth-century Paris. Posters and prints circulated across the city, as the new art form of cinema flourished, all part of a diverse urban climate of leisure that was particularly French. These rich visual materials served to promote the careers and talents of such celebrities as Jane Avril, Loie Fuller, and Sarah Bernhardt. Alphonse Mucha and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec developed the potential of color lithography to meet the demands of these stars, while fine artists ranging from Edgar Degas andedouard Manet to Pablo Picasso andedouard Vuillard focused on such spectacles as the racetrack, ballet, cafe-concert, theater, and opera, asserting them as defining elements of Parisian modernity in this image-saturated milieu.

In the late nineteenth century Tahiti embodied Western ideas of an earthly Paradise, a primitive utopia distant geographically and culturally from the Gilded Age or Belle Epoque. Stimulated by fin de siecle longings for the exotic, a few adventurous artists sought out this Eden on the South Seas - but what they found did not always live up to the Eden of their imagination. Bringing three of these figures together in comparative perspective for the first time, "Vanishing Paradise" offers a fresh take on the modernist primitivism of the French painter Paul Gauguin, the nostalgic exoticism of the American John LaFarge, and the elite tourism of the American writer Henry Adams. Drawing on archives throughout Europe, America, and the South Pacific, Childs explores how these artists, lured by romantic ideas about travel and exploration, wrestled with the elusiveness of paradise and portrayed colonial Tahiti in ways both mythic and modern.