Family Portrait (The Bellelli Family)

As this volume of Facture demonstrates so vividly, much of Edgar Degas’s (1834–1917) art emerged from a willed engagement with technical complexity and the difficulties it presented...

~Carte portraits of more than one figure, although much rarer than single-figure cartes, were produced during the Second Empire for a number of reasons. The primary one was that members of a family wanted to record their relationship at a given time and to compare and contrast the physical features of different generations. Of course, separate photographs of family...

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...