Paris Art - Impressionism

Condition: New

Like New 448 unmarked pages, published 2007. Fascinating and well researched Art History book.
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 1874 with the first 'Impressionist' exhibition, Ross King plunges us into Parisian life during a ten-year period full of social and political ferment with his usual narrative brilliance. 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.

'A crowded canvas - like, say, Manet's Music in the Tuileries Gardens - full of diverse characters.' MARTIN GAYFORD, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

'A brilliant book, a micro-history that feels like a macro-history... A good read and a good history; as unusual a pairing as its twin subjects.'

Wonderfully rich... With great deftness [King] tracks the careers of both men in the decade leading up to the most important exhibition history of art, the Impressionist group show of 1874.