This stunning examination of the last years of Édouard Manet's life and career is the first book to explore the transformation of his style and subject matter in the 1870s and early 1880s. The name Manet often evokes the provocative, heroically scaled pictures he painted in the 1860s for the Salon, but in the late 1870s and early 1880s the artist produced quite a different body of work: stylish portraits of actresses and demimondaines, luscious still lifes, delicate pastels, intimate watercolors, and impressionistic scenes of suburban gardens and Parisian cafés. Often dismissed as too pretty and superficial by critics, these later works reflect Manet’s elegant social world, propose a radical new alignment of modern art with fashionable femininity, and record the artist’s unapologetic embrace of beauty and visual pleasure in the face of death. Featuring nearly three hundred illustrations and nine fascinating essays by established and emerging Manet specialists, a technical analysis of the late Salon painting Jeanne (Spring), a selection of the artist’s correspondence, a chronology, and more, Manet and Modern Beauty brings a diverse range of approaches to bear on a little-studied area of this major artist’s oeuvre.

Excerpt from Manet, 1942: Yearbook of North Quincy High School, Massachusetts About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Often called the father of Impressionism, Édouard Manet was on the forefront of the art world during the mid-1800s. His paintings often looked like one scene of a larger picture, a technique he borrowed from photographs. Readers learn about Manet’s life and work, including Monet in His Floating Studio, a painting featuring Manet’s friend the artist Claude Monet. Details and interesting facts about each piece are called out to the reader, such as the reflections on the water in The Banks of the Seine at Argenteuil. Additional information is found in a timeline and fact boxes of famous quotes.

From the Classicism of Jacques-Louis David to the Realism of Courbet and the Early Impressionism of Renoir, this book outlines the course taken by painting and sculpture in Europe during the 19th century. Faced with the untidy sprawl of individualism which followed the French Revolution and threw up isolated geniuses like Goya, the author nevertheless charts the currents in what was predominantly a century of Naturalism and also - whilst artists were increasingly preoccupied with the inner man - of great landscape-painting when Friedrich, Corot and the Impressionists proper added light and atmosphere to the former achievements of the great Dutch masters.

"Fried put forward a highly original, beholder-centered account of the evolution of a central tradition in French painting from Chardin to Courbet."--P. [4] of cover.

Friends, rivals, and at times antagonists, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas maintained a pictorial dialogue throughout their lives as they both worked to define the painting of modern urban life. Manet/Degas, the first book to consider their careers in parallel, investigates how their objectives overlapped, diverged, and shaped each other’s artistic choices. Enlivened by archival correspondence and records of firsthand accounts, essays by American and French scholars take a fresh look at the artists’ family relationships, literary friendships, and interconnected social and intellectual circles in Paris; explore their complex depictions of race and class; discuss their political views in the context of wars in France and the United States; compare their artistic practices; and examine how Degas built his personal collection of works by Manet after his friend’s premature death. An illustrated biographical chronology charts their intersecting lives and careers. This lavishly illustrated, in-depth study offers an opportunity to reevaluate some of the most canonical French artworks of the nineteenth century, including Manet’s Olympia, Degas’s The Absinthe Drinker, and other masterworks.

Manet, a founding father of modernism, is one of the towering figures of 19th-century art. In this volume, Carol Armstrong looks closely at Manet's works to uncover a view not only of the artist but also of modernity itself. As she places his art within frameworks of colour, the feminine Other (the Manette in Manet), and consumerism, Armstrong seeks to expand and revise our understanding of this artist as a painter of modern life.