Features portraits dating from the early 19th century to the Second World War. This book offers anecdotes and insights into the personalities of both the artists and their patrons, providing a panorama of the settings in which the portraits were created, from French chateaux and English country houses to American mansions and Russian palaces.

‘A lover of light’: in 1912, a French critic used these words to describe the great Danish painter Peder Severin Krøyer, who had close ties to the French art scene for more than two decades. Krøyer first visited Paris in 1877, and his many letters clearly show the impact French art had on Krøyer’s own development as a painter, on the artists’ colony in Skagen, and on Danish art history in general. In Krøyer and Paris. French Connections and Nordic Colours, art historians Mette Harbo Lehmann and Dominique Lobstein describe Krøyer’s artistic development from the Golden Age tradition favoured by the Danish academy to Naturalism and the Modern Breakthrough. They show how inspiration from France can be traced in his painting technique and his open-air paintings from Skagen, revealing how French Naturalism made its mark on Krøyer’s distinctive style. Krøyer and Paris has also been published in Danish.

This book is a celebration of the famous painting which launched Sargent as a fashionable portrait painter and made Lady Agnew's name as a society celebrity. The story of Sargent and Lady Agnew is recounted in the essay and catalogue by Julia Rayer Rolfe, Librarian at the National Gallery of Scotland. Three leading scholars in the fields of fine art, history and music have contributed essays which serve to put the portrait into a wider context: Kenneth McConkey, Professor of Art History at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle; David Cannadine, Professor of History at Columbia University, New York, and Wilfrid Mellers, Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of York.

The Musée d'Orsay is a national museum devoted to the art of the second half of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th, between the emergence of realism in 1848 and the beginnings, in 1905 of fauvism, and the bold distortion of form and the str