Jean-Baptiste Pierre LeBrun's life was marked by his intense interest in art, first as an artist, and then from 1770 until his death in 1813, as an art dealer/connoisseur and as a participant in the transformation of the Louvre into a national museum during the French Revolution. He managed to accommodate whichever regime assumed power, from monarchy to republic to empire. He married the artist Elisabeth Vigée in 1776 and together they figured prominently in the pre-revolutionary cultural world of Paris. LeBrun travelled widely, buying art for his gallery and contributing to a number of aristocratic collections. His expertise in attributions of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings was acknowledged internationally, while his reference work on the subject was considered the most comprehensive ever written. LeBrun, the grand-nephew of the illustrious artist Charles LeBrun, became one of the most successful art dealers in Paris. He played an active role in the politics of art between 1789 and 1802, serving as an expert-commissioner in restoration at the national museum. His inventories of artworks, confiscated from all over Europe by Napoleon's armies, have provided a valuable record of the development of the French national museum. In addition, his inventories have been useful in the identification and recovery of Nazi confiscations during World War II. LeBrun's accomplishments during a tumultuous period of political and artistic change present evidence of his contributions to the concept of the modern art museum, notably in the areas of conservation, restoration, and arrangement.

Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings were aesthetic, intellectual, and economic touchstones in the Parisian art world of the Revolutionary era, but their importance within this framework, while frequently acknowledged, never attracted much subsequent attention. Darius A. Spieth’s inquiry into Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art reveals the dominance of “Golden Age” pictures in the artistic discourse and sales transactions before, during, and after the French Revolution. A broadly based statistical investigation, undertaken as part of this study, shows that the upheaval reduced prices for Netherlandish paintings by about 55% compared to the Old Regime, and that it took until after the July Revolution of 1830 for art prices to return where they stood before 1789.

Royal collections of artworks, books, and manuscripts were transformed into national institutions following the French Revolution in 1789 to serve as visible symbols of the new republic. Scholars, specialists, government officials, and patriots faced vandalism, war, and the Terror to establish great national institutions accessible to the public - the Louvre and the Bibliotheque Nationale - living monuments of French patrimony.

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.

The struggles and achievements of forty-six notable women artists of the early modern period, as documented by their contemporaries, are uniquely brought together in this anthology. The life stories presented here are foundational texts for the history of art, but since most are found only in rare volumes and few have been translated into English, until now they have been generally inaccessible to many scholars. Originally published in biographical compendia such as Vasari's Lives of the Artists, the writings included here document not only the lives of relatively well known women artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi and Sofonisba Anguissola, but also those who have languished in obscurity, like Anna Waser and Li Yin. Each life story is preceded by a brief introduction to the artist as well as to her biographer, and the texts themselves are annotated to provide necessary clarification. Beyond their documentary value, these stories provide fascinating insight as to how men commonly characterized women artists as exceptions to their sex, and attempted to explain their presence in the male-dominated realm of art. The introductory chapter to the book explores this intriguing gender dynamic and elucidates some of the strategies and historical context that factored into the composition of these lives. The volume includes an appended index to women artists' life stories in biographical compendia of the period