The decades following the 1973 publication of Alessandro Conti’s Storia del Restauro have seen considerable scholarly interest in the development of restoration in France in the second half of the eighteenth century. A number of technical treatises and biographies of restorers have offered insight into restoration practice. The Restoration of Paintings in Paris, 1750–1815, however, is the first book to situate this work within the broader historical and philosophical contexts of the time. Drawing on previously unpublished primary material from archives in Paris, Berlin, Rome, and Venice, Noémie Étienne combines art history with anthropology and sociology to survey the waning decades of the Ancien Régime and early post– Revolution France. Initial chapters present the diversity of restoration practice, encompassing not only royal institutions and the Louvre museum but also private art dealers, artists, and craftsmen, and examine questions of trade secrecy and the changing role of the restorer. Following chapters address the influence of restoration and exhibition on the aesthetic understanding of paintings as material objects. The book closes with a discussion of the institutional and political uses of restoration, along with an art historical consideration of such key concepts as authenticity, originality, and stability of artworks, emphasizing the multilayered dimension of paintings by such important artists as Titian and Raphael. There is also a useful dictionary of the main restorers active in France between 1750 and 1815.

This examination concentrates on the beginnings of Neoclassicism and explores the philosophical and scientific underpinnings of the Enlightenment, in which Pajou played an important part.

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867), arguably the most important French landscape artist of the mid-nineteenth century and a leader of the so-called Barbizon School, occupies a crucial moment of transition from the idealizing effects of academic painting to the radically modern vision of the Impressionists. He was an experimental artist who rejected the traditional historical, biblical, or literary subject matter in favor of “unruly nature,” a Romantic naturalism that confounded his contemporaries with its “bizarre” compositional and coloristic innovations. Lavishly illustrated and thoroughly documented, this volume includes five essays by experts in the field. Scott Allan and Édouard Kopp alternately examine Rousseau’s diverse techniques and working procedures as a painter and as a draftsman, as well as his art’s mixed economic and critical fortunes on the art market and at the Salon. Line Clausen Pedersen’s essay focuses on Mont Blanc Seen from La Faucille, Storm Effect, an early touchstone for the artist and a spectacular example of the Romantic sublime in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek’s collection. This catalogue accompanies an eponymous exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from June 21 to September 11, 2016, and at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek from October 13, 2016, to January 8, 2017.