Kenyon Cox (1856-1919) studied painting in Paris from the fall of 1877 to the fall of 1882. These edited letters, written to his parents in Ohio, describe Cox's daily routine and explicate French art teaching both in the academic setting of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and in private ateliers, such as those of Emile Carolus-Duran and Rodolphe Julian. The letters are important for insight into this system and into Paris art student life in general. Cox was an academic, committed to learning traditional drawing and composition before establishing his own artistic identity. Most of the students who crowded the ateliers and academics of Paris shared this view, and Cox's experiences and opinions, often pungently expressed, were thus more typical of this great majority than were those of experimenters such as the impressionists, who were gaining notice while Cox was in Paris. He commented frequently on current fads, fancies, and serious developments in the art world during this transitional period. Cox also described his life and travels outside the academy. These letters are a valuable commentary on the culture of late nineteeth-century Europe. He reported on concerts, operas, plays, paintings, and literature, and the varied kinds of life--the look of the land, towns, buildings, and people--he encountered during his summer travels to the Seine valley, northern Italy, and the artist colony in Grez, south of Paris. Art critics, historians, and collectors of traditional and academic art of this period will find this book the beginnings of the traditionalist view for which Cox later became famous. In addition, the letters are an often moving chapter in the development of an intellectually precocious young man from the American Midwest who was determined to become a painter with ideas as well as skill.

As the Belle Epoque dawns, Paris attracts artists from everywhere. One is Jeanette Palmer, daughter of a prominent Ohio family, who has left Vassar College under a cloud of scandal. Amid the city’s great bohemian neighborhoods and teaching studios, Jeanette befriends other female artists, as well as an American Civil War veteran named Edward Murer. She begins to achieve a level of artistic success. And her happiness increases as she and Edward grow more intimate with each other. But Edward is plagued by his demons and addicted to laudanum—and as the world opens its arms to Jeanette, and the society around her is transformed by cultural and scientific innovations, she must resolve a conflict utterly new to so many women: the choice between ambition and love.

Describes the transformation in American art as a vast group of American artists settled in Paris to study with the great French painters, and continued through the twentieth century as French artists began to leave Paris for New York.

John White Alexander, Cecilia Beaux, James Carroll Beckwich, Frank Weston Benson, Nelson Norris Bickford, John Leslie Breck, Dennis Miller Bunker, Mary Stevenson Cassatt, Jefferson David Chalfant, William Merritt Chase, Charles Courtney Curran, Thomas Eakins, Mary Fairchild, Elizabeth Jane Gardner, Abbott Fuller Graves, Ellen Day Hale, Frederick Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Thomas Hovenden, William Morris Hunt, Anna Elizabeth Klumpke, Willard Leroy Metcalf, Hermann Dudley Murphy, Elizabeth Nourse, Charles Sprague Pearce, Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Theodore Robinson, John Singer Sargent, Julius LeBlanc Stewart, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Edmund Charles Tarbell, John Henry Twachtman, Harry van der Weyden, Frederic Porter Vinton, Robert Vonnoh, Julian Alden Weir, James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

Bohemia in America, 1858–1920 explores the construction and emergence of "Bohemia" in American literature and culture. Simultaneously a literary trope, a cultural nexus, and a socio-economic landscape, la vie bohème traveled to the United States from the Parisian Latin Quarter in the 1850s. At first the province of small artistic coteries, Bohemia soon inspired a popular vogue, embodied in restaurants, clubs, neighborhoods, novels, poems, and dramatic performances across the country. Levin's study follows la vie bohème from its earliest expressions in the U.S. until its explosion in Greenwich Village in the 1910s. Although Bohemia was everywhere in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture, it has received relatively little scholarly attention. Bohemia in America, 1858–1920 fills this critical void, discovering and exploring the many textual and geographic spaces in which Bohemia was conjured. Joanna Levin not only provides access to a neglected cultural phenomenon but also to a new and compelling way of charting the development of American literature and culture.

The Art and Thought of John La Farge: Picturing Authenticity in Gilded Age America offers an unprecedented portrait of one of the most celebrated artists of the Gilded Age and opens a window onto nineteenth-century American culture. The book reveals how the work of John La Farge contributed to a rich philosophical dialogue concerning the trustworthiness of human perception. In his struggle against a 'common truth' of iconic symbols presented by a new mass visual culture, La Farge developed a subversive approach to visual representation that focused attention not on the artwork itself, but on the complex, real encounter of artist, subject and medium from which the artwork came. Katie Kresser charts La Farge's efforts to assert his own reality - his own intrinsic uniqueness - in a postwar society that increasingly based personal identity on standardized vocational labels and economic productivity. La Farge's work is contrasted with that of Kenyon Cox, James Whistler and Henry Adams, all of whom (for La Farge) had fallen prey to the crass new visual environment - albeit in very different ways. This innovative study suggests that La Farge dealt with issues still relevant in a world characterized by ubiquitous mass media and the proliferation of 'normative' visions.