Interior, Woman at the Window

~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...

At the Paris Salon of 1882, James Ensor exhibited the canvas now known as Russian Music for the first time outside his native Belgium (fig. 105).See Xavier Tricot, James Ensor, Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, vol. 1 (Antwerp: Pandora Ortelius, 1992), 180. Originally titled Chez Miss, his depiction of a light-filled drawing room, a woman playing a piano, and a seated, listening man had drawn little attention the year before when it hung near Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Les Foins at the Triennial Salon in...

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...