Portraits in an Office, New Orleans

~~IN 1889 MARY CASSATT, EVA GONZALÈS’S erstwhile contemporary and fellow Realist, was occupied with the last of four portraits in oil that she painted of her mother, Katherine Cassatt, then aged 74...

~First, it is necessary to examine the situation of the various members of the French avant-garde at the time of the establishment of the Commune and their response to it. This in turn cannot be discussed independently of the Franco-Prussian war which immediately preceded the Commune and with which it is inescapably attached. The presence of Prussian...

FANTIN-LATOUR has been the core of every chapter in this book so far. Courbet, Manet, and Degas have all been significant parts of the story, but it is in Fantin’s work that my key arguments have found their root. He has been my focus because his work’s engagement with group dynamics is the most deep and sustained, and because his painting’s best expose the...

The flâneur, the purposeful male stroller, was a principal performer in the theater of daily life in Paris in mid-century, if we judge by his importance in writings of the era. A journalist, writer, or illustrator, he looked about with the acute eye of a detective, sizing up persons and events with a clinical detachment as though natural events could tell him their own...