This wonderful book is a catalogue of an exhibition organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Reunion des Musees Nationaux, Paris. The artists represented include Monet, Cezanne, Renoir, Seurat, Gauguin, Manet, Signac and Pissarro. But this book is not merely a catalogue - it stands alone as an excellent and readable book about the artistic and social worlds of the artists. The essays are interesting and mercifully free of inaccessible jargon, so the generalist really can learn something about the context of the Impressionist movement, the paintings themselves and the artists.
An example: the opening of the essay `The Impressionist Landscape and the Image of France: " When the Impressionists began to paint the French landscape in the 1860s, they were not alone. Several satirical writers had already counted more landscape painters than tourists or peasants in their travels through the French countryside, and the official Salon exhibitions held annually in Paris were all but dominated by French landscapes. Books and manuals about landscape painting for both amateur and professional artists abounded, and if there was a national genre in French art, it was surely landscape. The painters were joined by a legion of printmakers, draftsmen, and popular illustrators in an almost frantic collective attempt to record the national physiognamy."
The essays are:
`Impressionism in Context' - includes information on the conception of the exhibition, the grouping of paintings etc; `The Impressionist Landscape and the Image of France' (extract above) which includes reference to contemporaneous politics, writing, national movements such as rejection of historical France, the concept of nature of the Impressionsts etc; `The French Landscape Sensibility'; `The Cradle of Impressionism' - about the Seine landscape and villages; `The Urban Landscape' - Paris; ` Rivers, Roads and Trains'; `Pissarro, Cezanne and the School of Pontoise'; `Private and Public Gardens'; `The Fields of France' (lots of haystacks!); `Impressionism and the Sea'; `The Retreat from Paris'; `Impressionism and the Popular Imagination'. An appendix essay is `The Landscape in French Nineteenth-Century Photography'. The paintings are grouped under each of the themes represented by the essays.
Another standout feature of the book is the amount of contextual detail accompanying each work of art. So, for example, the first work presented is Beach at Honfleur by Claude Monet. The colour reproduction is good quality, and takes a full page. The accompanying text on the facing page explains what Monet was doing , how the painting came to be painted.
A marvellous book, a valuable addition to any personal library. I would place it in the `must have' category for an art collection in a secondary school or college library where Art is a course of study, and public libraries - because of its simultaneous accessibility and depth of information - it goes so much further than a book merely of reproductions.
