A spectacular overview of French painting from Delacroix to Cézanne, along with superb Danish Golden Age paintings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are presented in this lavish volume, which accompanies a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada. The works, which are from the collection of the Ordrupgaard Museum near Copenhagen, showcase various stages in the careers of painters such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Paul Gauguin, C.W. Eckersberg, and Vilhelm Hammershøi. While French impressionist, postimpressionist, and Danish works are the book's focus, other--often contradictory--art movements of 19th-century France, including the Barbizon School and realism, are also well represented, and all the paintings are fully described and illustrated.

In this engrossing book, Hollis Clayson provides the first description and analysis of French artistic interest in women prostitutes, examining how the subject was treated in the art of the 1870s and 1880s by such avant-garde painters as Cézanne, Degas, Manet, and Renoir, as well as by the academic and low-brow painters who were their contemporaries. Clayson not only illuminates the imagery of prostitution-with its contradictory connotations of disgust and fascination-but also tackles the issues and problems relevant to women and men in a patriarchal society. She discusses the conspicuous sexual commerce during this era and the resulting public panic about the deterioration of social life and civilized mores. She describes the system that evolved out of regulating prostitutes and the subsequent rise of clandestine prostitutes who escaped police regulation and who were condemned both for blurring social boundaries and for spreading sexual licentiousness among their moral and social superiors. Clayson argues that the subject of covert prostitution was especially attractive to vanguard painters because it exemplified the commercialization and the ambiguity of modern life.

- Approximately 125 masterworks by some 35 artists situate Canadian art within the global phenomenon of Impressionism- A detailed chronology explores the multifaceted ways in which Canadians contributed to the evolution of ImpressionismFollow these Canadian artists as they travel abroad and return home again, over a series of journeys taking place during the last decades of the nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth. Approximately 125 masterworks by some 35 artists situate Canadian art within the global phenomenon of Impressionism and present a fresh perspective on its reception in the arts of Canada. Adopting a thematic approach, comprehensive essays demonstrate the commitment of these pioneering artists to an innovative interpretation of foreign and familiar surroundings, imbued with an Impressionist vocabulary. A detailed chronology explores the multifaceted ways in which Canadians contributed to the evolution of Impressionism and to the advent of modernity in their homeland. This book accompanies exhibitions at the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich (DE), July - November 2019; Fondation de l Hermitage, Lausanne (CH), January - May 2020; Musée Fabre, Montpellier (FR), June - September 2020; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (CA), November 2020 - April 2021.

"Examines the problematic serial nature of ... [Pissarro's] urban works"--Foreword.

"The vibrant late paintings of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) are considered by many to be among his finest achievements. Working in a small converted bedroom of his villa in the south of France, Bonnard suffused his late canvases with radiant Mediterranean light and dazzling color. Although his subjects were close at hand-usually everyday scenes taken from his immediate surroundings, such as the dining room table being set for breakfast, or a jug of flowers perched on the mantelpiece - Bonnard rarely painted from life. Instead, he preferred to make pencil sketches in small diaries and then rely on these, along with his memory, once in the studio." "This volume, which accompanies the first exhibition to focus on the interior and related still-life imagery from the last decades of Bonnard's long career, presents more than seventy-five paintings, drawings, and works on paper, many of them rarely seen in public and in some cases, little known. Although Bonnard's legacy may be removed from the succession of trends that today we consider the foundation of modernism, his contribution to French art in the early decades of the twentieth century is far more profound than history has generally acknowledged. In their insightful essays and catalogue entries the authors bring fresh critical perspectives to the ongoing reappraisal of Bonnard's reputation and to his place within the narrative of twentieth-century art."--Jacket

Art in Context: Gender, Race, and Labour -- Making and Materiality -- 'Writing' Degas

In Odd Man Out, Carol Armstrong offers an important study of Edgar Degas's work and reputation. Armstrong grapples with contradictory portrayals of Degas as "odd man out" within the modernist canon: he was a realist whom realists rejected; a storyteller in pictures who did not satisfy novelist-critics; a painter of modern life who was not a modernist; a member of the impressionist group who was no impressionist. Armstrong confronts these and other paradoxes by analyzing the critical vocabularies used to describe Degas's work. By reading several groups of the artist's images through the lens of a sequence of critical texts, Armstrong shows how our critical and popular expectations of Degas are overturned and subverted. This is a reprint of the book first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1991.