How photography served as both source and foil for the birth of impressionism From the first announcement in 1839 of the daguerreotype process at a joint meeting of the French Academy of Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts, photography found itself suspended uneasily between science and the arts, a new technology that offered previously unimaginable possibilities for pictorial representation. While photography's capacity for naturalistic reproduction threatened one traditional function of painting, the camera's artificial eye could offer new models for looking at the world. In the work of pioneering photographers such as Gustave Le Gray, Eugène Cuvelier, Nadar, Atget and André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, impressionist artists such as Manet, Corot, Monet, Pissarro and Degas found new ways of seeing. The key position that photography now occupies in contemporary art has encouraged a renewed interest in photography's historical relationship to the other visual arts. The Impressionists and Photographypursues this line of research. Luxuriously produced and lavishly illustrated, this volume reexamines the lively debate that photography's emergence generated among critics and artists, and offers a critical reflection on the affinities and mutual influences between photography and painting in France in the second half of the 19th century.

The impressionists were born in the horse-and- buggy era but lived during the Industrial Revolution, a time -- like today -- of constant technological change. The Impressionist Art Book brings this period to life through dramatic, full-color photos of the art of such masters as Monet, Renoir, and Degas. A lively text explores photography's influence in changing the way impressionists painted and memorable quotes including Monet's statement "I want to paint the way a bird sings".

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.

A sampling of some of the most famous Irish legends.

"Inspiring Impressionism" explores links between Impressionists and the major European art-historical movements that came before them, demonstrating how often beneath the Impressionists' commitment to capturing contemporary life there lay a deep exploration of the art of the past. Presents Impressionist works by artists including Manet, Monet, Degas, Bazille, Cassatt, and Cezanne alongside those of Raphael, El Greco, Rubens, Velazquez, and others.

Sixty color-ready illustrations of timeless treasures by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters include works by Cassatt, Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Sargent, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others.

Studies the techniques of sixteen great painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, quoting extensively from their writings and examining masterworks in detail