The Impressionist Print
The Impressionist Print

Author: Michel Melot

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1996-01-01

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0300067925

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A print can sometimes tell us more than a painting about the history of art. Michel Melot illustrates his thesis in this book, analysing relationships between artists, the art market, the critics, collectors and political institutions. This fresh approach reveals Impressionism not as a sort of miracle, but as a response to economic and social upheaval. This original view of a key movement in the history of art allows the reader to understand its decisive effect on all the subsequent generations who have contributed to maintaining the tradition of the belle epreuve.

The Purchase of the Past
The Purchase of the Past

Author: Tom Stammers

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-06-25

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1108807224

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Offering a broad and vivid survey of the culture of collecting from the French Revolution to the Belle Époque, The Purchase of the Past explores how material things became a central means of accessing and imagining the past in nineteenth-century France. By subverting the monarchical establishment, the French Revolution not only heralded the dawn of the museum age, it also threw an unprecedented quantity of artworks into commercial circulation, allowing private individuals to pose as custodians and saviours of the endangered cultural inheritance. Through their common itineraries, erudition and sociability, an early generation of scavengers established their own form of 'private patrimony', independent from state control. Over a century of Parisian history, Tom Stammers explores collectors' investments – not just financial but also emotional and imaginative – in historical artefacts, as well as their uncomfortable relationship with public institutions. In so doing, he argues that private collections were a critical site for salvaging and interpreting the past in a post-revolutionary society, accelerating but also complicating the development of a shared national heritage.