The hidden masterpiece: the story of a painter who, depending on one's perspective, is either an abject failure or a transcendental genius--or both.

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Excerpt from The Magic Skin, Vol. 2: The Hidden Masterpiece The initial idea of Balzac's "Comedie Humaine" was derived from Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's doctrine of the unity of composition. He proposed to analyze society as the great philosophical anatomist had analyzed the zoological kingdom, and to explain the differences between classes of men and women by demonstrating the influence of environment in modifying a common humanity. In order to carry out this colossal undertaking it was necessary to dissect society, to examine its various states and elements, both separately and together, to catalogue with laborious and patient thoroughness all the manifold tendencies, influences, external and internal agencies, which in myriad combinations operate to produce the phenomena called in the aggregate civilized life. He did not regard himself as a writer of romances, but as a social historian, or, as he himself put it, as the secretary of French society, which acted its own history while he took notes of all that passed before his eyes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."