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.
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