The Life and Works art series collects the world's greatest artists and art movements into a handsome set of monographs Each book features a biography of an artist or an explanation of the movement, followed by 50 magnificent, individually commentated reproductions Each is an affordable treasure, sure to please every seasoned critic and newcomer to the beauty of great art.

Examines the use of cafes, opera houses, dance halls, theaters, racetracks, and the seaside in impressionist French paintings

"Drawing on scientific studies of pigments and materials, artists' treatises, colourmen's archives, and contemporary and modern accounts, Anthea Callen demonstrates how raw materials and paintings are profoundly interdependent. She analyses the material constituents of oil painting and the complex processes of 'making' entailed in all aspects of artistic production, discussing in particular oil painting methods for landscapists and the impact of plein air light on figure painting, studio practice and display. Insisting that the meanings of paintings are constituted by and within the cultural matrices that produced them, Callen argues that the real 'modernity' of the Impressionist enterprise lies in the painters' material practices."--BOOK JACKET.

Presents fifty of the most important works from the early nineteenth to the turn of twentieth centuries in colour.

With over 400 color illustrations, this authoritative introduction covers every major development in the visual arts, from Impressionism to Post-Modernism.