Michael Prodger
Brushes at Twenty Paces
The Judgement of Paris: Manet, Meissonier and an Artistic Revolution
By Ross King
Chatto & Windus 448pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
France’s artists have never been ones to let their country’s fondness for revolution pass them by. Jacques-Louis David was not only a signatory to Louis XVI’s death warrant but forged Neoclassicism into the style of the 1789 Revolution; Antoine-Jean Gros’s daring proto-Romanticism was born alongside the gimcrack glamour of Napoleon’s rule; Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, complete with self-portrait, was the icon of the événements of 1830.
Ross King’s wonderfully rich The Judgement of Paris purports to tell the story of another, artistic revolution, the birth of Impressionism, but it is no coincidence that the years in which the movement came into being were also ones of civil turmoil as Napoleon III’s Second Empire met its bloody
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