The National Gallery's collection encompasses the neoclassicism of Jacques-Louis David as well as the naturalism of the Barbizon painters. The works of Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, such as the Gallery's famous portrait of Madame Moitessier, are precursors to the classical style that dominated later in the century. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's verdant landscapes, Honoré Daumier's political satires, and Jean-François Millet's realism are also included in this richly illustrated volume.

During the nineteenth century, France experienced an unprecedented growth in the visual arts, and Paris was its center. French art became a universally accepted benchmark, spreading its many ground-breaking developments -- the radicalism of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, the daring of Art Nouveau, and the innovations of Haussman's new urban landscape -- far beyond its borders, and in return receiving numerous influences from broad. During this extraordinary rich and productive period, French art also benefited from the synthesis of the past with the innovations of the present, resulting in an artistic output whose legacy is still being felt today. This chronological history, richly illustrated and recounted by experts from France's preeminent museums, charts the growth of this fruitful -- and revolutionary -- period in the history of world art. -- From publisher's description.

Published on the occasion of a series of exhibitions that will travel throughout North America, Europe, and Asia from Feb. 2011 to Feb. 2014.

"Using words and works of both pupils and masters of the French Academy of Beaux-Arts, this fascinating book provides a wealth of information about the environment and studio practices of French official art from 1830 to 1890. Albert Boime describes the training of new pupils in the Academic ateliers, from the time they began and were set to copy engravings and casts to their copying of the old masters in the Louvre to their work before the live model and landscape painting out-of-doors. Boime's account includes not only a history of the transition from guild-controlled arts sanctioned by the church to an academic system sponsored by the state but also a reassessment of the positive role played by the Academy's teaching program in the evolution of the independent movements of the nineteenth century"--Publisher's description.

These paintings - dreams of nature as a web of life in which human beings occupy a peripheral role - overwhelmed Rousseau's contemporaries with their novel light effects, original perspective, and "sheer profusion of visual sensation." While Baudelaire considered them superior to even Corot's works, they baffled art critics and have never fit convincingly into the received categories of naturalism, "pre-Impressionism," or modernism."--Jacket.

Presents a collection of more than one hundred French impressionist paintings found in the Art Institute of Chicago.