The Balcony

Until recently, the administration overseeing the street lines of Paris allowed builders—as long as they respected the laws of building height—the liberty of placing balconies, cornices and entablatures as they saw fit. . . .

~Cassatt’s decision to take up residence in Paris in 1874 put an end to the romantic, nomadic life she had led for almost eight years (figure 37). At age thirty, she may have been unconsciously ready for a more...

~~EDOUARD MANET’S Portrait of Mlle E. G., recognised by many critics as a painting of the young artist Eva Gonzalès when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1870,...

ÉDOUARD MANET GREW up on the rue des Petits-Augustins (now the rue Bonaparte), more or less across the street from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts he never attended. The address was a short walk down the quay and across the bridge from the Palais de Justice where Manet’s father worked; indeed, many judges and magistrates lived nearby. As a family of a certain social standing,...

ON 18 March 1872, Edmond de Goncourt paid a visit to Fantin-Latour’s studio to see his latest work-in-progress, a group portrait of avant-garde poets arranged around a table after a meal. A quarrel among Fantin’s sit-ters had left him with a noticeable gap in his composition, still unfilled when his...

By the time Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) began painting majas on a balcony, bullfighters at the ring, and flirting taberneras in the city of Seville, the journey to Spain had become a popular artistic pilgrimage. I began working out these ideas in “Bullfights and...

~As if to signal the demise of the traditional hierarchy of subject matter which placed portrait and landscape on a lower level than ‘history’ painting, Castagnary, in his review of 1867, announced that the portrait demanded the highest faculties of the painter, and represented the culmination of the art of painting. His reason was that ‘With a single portrait of Clouet, Holbein, Van Dyck, Titian, Rigaud, David, you can reconstruct, with the person who served as model, the entire epoch when that person lived.’ Castagnary, Salons, I,...

~In 1932, on the occasion of the centenary of Manet’s birth and his retrospective at the Orangerie, Paul Valéry wrote the following about one of the several portraits of his aunt Berthe Morisot done by Manet between 1868 and 1874 (fig. 75):