While the Civil War raged in America, another very different revolution was beginning to take shape across the Atlantic, in the studios of Paris: The artists who would make Impressionism the most popular art form in history were showing their first paintings amidst scorn and derision from the French artistic establishment. Indeed, no artistic movement has ever been, at its inception, quite so controversial. The drama of its birth, played out on canvas, would at times resemble a battlefield; and, as Ross King reveals, Impressionism would reorder both history and culture as it resonated around the world.
The Judgment of Paris chronicles the dramatic decade between two famous exhibitionsa€”the scandalous Salon des Refuses in 1863 and the first Impressionist showing in 1874a€”set against the rise and dramatic fall of Napoleon III and the Second Empire after the Franco-Prussian War. A tale of many artists, it revolves around the lives of two, described as "the two poles of art"a€”Ernest Meissonier, the most famous and successful painter of the 19th century, hailed for his precision and devotion to history; and Edouard Manet, reviled in his time, who nonetheless heralded the most radical change in the history of art since the Renaissance. Out of the fascinating story of their parallel lives, illuminated by their legendary supporters and criticsa€”Zola, Delacroix, Courbet, Baudelaire, Whistler, Monet, Hugo, Degas, and many morea€”Ross King shows that their contest was not just about Art, it was about competing visions of a rapidly changing world.
With a novelist's skill and the insight of an historian, King recalls a seminal period when Paris was the artistic center of the world, and a revolutionary movement had the power to electrify and divide a nation.
The Age of Insight is a wonderfully written and superbly researched book that provides a foundation for future work in neuroscience and the humanities. This is an extraordinary book from an international leader in neuroscience and intellectual histo...
Narrator: James Anderson Foster Published: 06/05/2018
"Vivid and remarkably fresh...Philbrick has recast the Pilgrims for the ages." --The New York Times Book Review Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history New York Times Book Review Top Ten books of the Year How did America begin? That simple quest...
Published to great acclaim in 1873, Walter Paters compendium of idiosyncratic, impressionistic essays on the Renaissance gained him a reputation as a daring modern philosopher. Oscar Wilde called it the holy writ of beauty. It was Paters cry of art ...
While the Civil War raged in America, another very different revolution was beginning to take shape across the Atlantic, in the studios of Paris: The artists who would make Impressionism the most popular art form in history were showing their first ...
The Sistine Secrets tells the fascinating story of how Michelangelo embedded messages of brotherhood, tolerance, and freethinking in his painting to encourage "fellow travelers" to challenge the repressive Roman Catholic Church of his time.
Narrator: James Cameron Stewart Published: 08/08/2017
Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with...
Part of the acclaimed Eminent Lives series, Machiavelli is a superb portrait of the brilliant and revolutionary political philosopher—history’s most famous theorist of “warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed”—and the a...
An epic quest exposes hidden truths about Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, the recently discovered masterpiece that sold for $450 million—and might not be the real thing. In 2017, Leonardo da Vinci’s small oil pai...
Refreshing, irreverent, and always straightforward, What Are You Looking At? cuts through the pretentious art speak and asks all the basic questions that you were too afraid to ask.
