A Romance with the Landscape - Realism to Impressionism (Paperback)

Nineteenth-century France produced a cadre of artists whose first impulse was to escape the turmoil of Paris and seek refuge in the countryside, where they created an art grounded in their fresh responses to the natural world. Such artists as Charles Emile Jacque and Jean-Francois Millet discovered a quiet heroism and even a spiritual quality in those working the land, while others, like Julien Dupr, featured attractive young laborers toiling in picturesque settings that did not hint of hard work or the often harsh realities of agricultural labor. Social and political ideologies are coded into the landscape in subtle ways in many paintings. Rarely seen paintings from public and private collections illustrate the metamorphosis from the neoclassical ideal to the Modern over the course of the nineteenth century through the lens of landscape art. Contributors include Gabriel P. Weisberg and Janet Whitmore.