This ground-breaking book presents a critical study of pictorial narrative in nineteenth-century European painting. Covering works from France, Germany, Britain, Italy and elsewhere, it traces the ways in which immensely popular artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme, Karl von Piloty and William Quiller Orchardson used unique visual strategies to tell thrilling and engaging stories. Regardless of genre, content or national context, these paintings share a fundamental modern narrative mode. Unlike traditional art, they do not rely on textual sources; nor do they tell stories through the human body alone. Instead, they experiment with objects, spaces, cause-and-effect relations and open-ended ambiguity, prompting viewers and reviewers to read for clues in order to weave their own elaborate tales.

Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1803-73) was the outstanding court portraitist of mid-19th-century Europe. For Queen Victoria alone he painted more than 120 works. This lavish book is the first comprehensive survey of Winterhalter's work, with 246 illustrations, including 91 full-page colorplates.

This new edition of 'a book that offers the best available grounding in its huge subject,' as the Sunday Times called it, includes color plates and a revised and expanded bibliography. Professor Hamilton traces the origins and growth of modern art, assessing the intrinsic qualities of individual works and describing the social forces in play. The result is an authoritative guide through the forest of artistic labels-Impressionism and Expressionism, Symbolism, Cubism, Constructivism, Surrealism, etc.-and to the achievements of Degas and Cezanne, Ensor and Munch, Matisse and Kandinsky, Picasso, Braque, and Epstein, Mondrian, Dali, Modigliani, Utrillo and Chagall, Klee, Henry Moore, and many other artists in a revolutionary age.

This one-volume edition contains both text and plates and includes corrections in the text and bibliography made since the books publication in 1987. There are concise monographic chapters on the important artists and movements of the period, with material on each artists life and work, characteristics of style, and the relationship of the artistic movements to historical and intellectual currents of the time. The author covers a wide range of material and his presentation is lucid and perceptive. Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Academics and Salon Painters, and Impressionism are covered, and the following artists are included: David, Gros, Girodet, Grard, Gurin, Prudhon, Goya, Fuseli, Blake, Runge, Friedrich, Turner, Constable, Igres, Gricault, Delacroix, Corot, Rousseau, Daumier, Millet, Courbet, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, and Czanne.