This volume accompanies the first American retrospective of the work of Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758-1823), a renowned French court painter and draftsman. A contemporary of Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), Prud'hon won acclaim during the years spanning the French Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration for his graceful paintings of allegorical and mythological subjects and for his handsome portraits. Here, 60 paintings and 100 works on paper are reproduced and illuminated by individual commentaries.

Moreover, the book explores Prud'hon's prescient comprehension of a dawning art market among the newly powerful middle class while tracing the sources of his more traditional imperial patronage. In surveying the breadth of Prud'hon's graphic output, Drawing an Elusive Line includes more than 150 drawings by the artist, some little known or previously unpublished."--Jacket.

The National Gallery's collection encompasses the neoclassicism of Jacques-Louis David as well as the naturalism of the Barbizon painters. The works of Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, such as the Gallery's famous portrait of Madame Moitessier, are precursors to the classical style that dominated later in the century. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's verdant landscapes, Honoré Daumier's political satires, and Jean-François Millet's realism are also included in this richly illustrated volume.

Drawing upon a wealth of original research and entertaining anecdotal material, Guffey unearths the roots of the term “retro” and chronicles its evolving manifestations in culture and art throughout the last century.

Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings were aesthetic, intellectual, and economic touchstones in the Parisian art world of the Revolutionary era, but their importance within this framework, while frequently acknowledged, never attracted much subsequent attention. Darius A. Spieth’s inquiry into Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art reveals the dominance of “Golden Age” pictures in the artistic discourse and sales transactions before, during, and after the French Revolution. A broadly based statistical investigation, undertaken as part of this study, shows that the upheaval reduced prices for Netherlandish paintings by about 55% compared to the Old Regime, and that it took until after the July Revolution of 1830 for art prices to return where they stood before 1789.

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