Boilly has long been recognized as the most significant painter of everyday life in Napoleonic France. His portraits and genre scenes provide delightful illustrations of the period. In this book, Susan Siegfried argues that Boilly's paintings should be read not just for their documentary detail but also for their wider cultural significance - for the light they shed on social and sexual tensions of the era.
This newest volume in Hudson Hills Press's acclaimed series about leading collections of master drawings presents sixty-eight great sheets, all reproduced in full-color, including many versos, from one of the finest college museums in America.
This work examines the effect of the French Revolution on portrait painting. Portraits were the most widely commissioned paintings in 18th-century France. But most portraits were produced for private consumptions, and were therefore seen as inferior to art designed for public exhibition. The Revolution endowed private values with an inprecedented significance, and the way people responded to portraits changed as a result.
How the urban spectator became the archetypal modern viewer and a central subject in late nineteenth-century French art Gawkers explores how artists and writers in late nineteenth-century Paris represented the seductions, horrors, and banalities of street life through the eyes of curious viewers known as badauds. In contrast to the singular and aloof bourgeois flâneur, badauds were passive, collective, instinctive, and highly impressionable. Above all, they were visual, captivated by the sights of everyday life. Beautifully illustrated and drawing on a wealth of new research, Gawkers excavates badauds as a subject of deep significance in late nineteenth-century French culture, as a motif in works of art, and as a conflicted model of the modern viewer. Bridget Alsdorf examines the work of painters, printmakers, and filmmakers who made badauds their artistic subject, including Félix Vallotton, Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Eugène Carrière, Charles Angrand, and Auguste and Louise Lumière. From morally and intellectually empty to sensitive, empathetic, and humane, the gawkers these artists portrayed cut across social categories. They invite the viewer’s identification, even as they appear to threaten social responsibility and the integrity of art. Delving into the ubiquity of a figure that has largely eluded attention, idling on the margins of culture and current events, Gawkers traces the emergence of social and aesthetic problems that are still with us today.
Smith College art professors Davis and Leshko showcase 100 paintings and sculptures from their institution's vaunted collection, encompassing Americans from Gilbert Stuart to Louise Nevelson and Europeans from Corot to Henry Moore. In the introduction, how and why Smith became steward of such a fine body of work is ascribed to the school's high-minded mission and its generous alumni donors. The rest of the book is divided into two sections, one American and the other European. Each individual full-color reproduction is accompanied by an informative one-page essay and a brief reading list. During several years of renovations at Smith, the items featured in this book are traveling to diverse sites, which should increase the book's appeal. 118 colour & 1 b/w illustrations
