The Railway

Writing from Paris in her diary on the last day of 1868, the young American Frances Willard noted her admiration for “the brilliant shop-windows and the almost equally dazzling costumes...

IN LES COMPLEXES FAMILIAUX, which Lacan wrote as an encyclopedia article, he describes the act of desiring as an act of identification with one who already has the desire and suggests that in the process of this identification, the original...

Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, born in Toulouse in 1750, was one of many French artists who went to Italy. These artists wanted to study the works of Renaissance masters and to absorb the flavor of the countryside around Rome that had inspired the great seventeenth-century French painters resident there, Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Valenciennes went to Italy...

In Wilhelmine Germany (1888–1918), art historians and critics often expanded the geographical and chronological parameters of impressionism beyond the confines of late nineteenth-century France. According to this longer history propagated in German circles, impressionism could include the works of Titian, Frans Hals, and Diego Velázquez, as well as ancient Roman murals and Chinese...

~I WANT to begin this chapter with the case study of Gustave Caillebotte, both patron of, and participant in, the Impressionist collective. He was the youngest (born 1848) and most well off of the group, and the most conservative in style and content. His major works attest to a thorough assimilation of the rhetoric of...

~It is important to realize that the vogue for things Japanese included far more than wood-block prints on paper, and that even among these there were great differences in motif and style. Chinoiserie had long been popular for the decorative arts, and as soon as they were available Japanese fabrics, screens, fans, and ceramics all quickly found active European markets. Further, the fine arts—sculpture, painting, and brush drawings—were brought from Japan by discriminating collectors, who may have shared with the Japanese themselves disdain for the cheaper and more popular prints of recent date...

~The Garden was not a Salon painting. The only white dress to show up in Manet’s next Salon was worn by a child, in The Railway (fig. 95). In the Salon of 1874, Manet showed this painting and a little watercolor of Punchinello with a poem...

When Henry Tuckerman came to Paris in 1867, one of the thousands of Americans attracted there by the huge international exposition, he was bowled over by the extraordinary changes since his previous visit twenty years before...