French Painting 1830–1920

by Valentin Grivet

With over 450 works, this volume deals with the most important trends and groups in French painting from the middle of the 19th century to the first years of the 20th naturalism, realism, impressionism, postimpressionism, symbolism or the Nabis. This is development is illustrated in the most beautiful paintings by Corot, Monet, Degas, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Bonnard and many other painters.

Genres: Art

504 pages, Hardcover

Published July 1, 2020

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another impressive large-format coffee-table book from Koenemann's Art Periods and Movements series. With its 500+ pages, it attempts to cover French art in its peak of 19th to early 20th century. Starting in 1830 allows the book to skip Neoclassicism and Romanticism and, despite its declaration to cover art up to 1920, it skips most of the early 20th century “isms” as well. The book attempts to loosely cover the rest of the movements in the following order: Belle Epoque, Naturalism, Realism, pre-Impressionism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Gaugin/Nabis, and Symbolism. With this list, it is easy to notice that the book exclusively focused on the movements, which were considered as most important 40 years ago and skips a large portion of French art, which was defined by Salon for the whole 19th century. It ignores dominant movements such as academism, historicism, orientalism, and religious paintings, and, to a large extent, focuses on movements that rebelled against the Salon and eventually won their fight. While it makes the book considerably outdated in the context of modern literature, its focus on the most popular movements helps to pack the golden age of French art into 500 pages. An interesting exception from this rule is the Belle Epoque section, which presents a slice of French art much less known to most readers. Most of the section is focused on rarely shown paintings of Beraud and Tissot, with a bit of Gervex, Blanche, and Besnard.
The biased presentation of French art is not limited to the choice of the key sections but also affects the choice of artists in each of the sections. Instead of presenting a broad sample of artists within each selected movement, the book tells a lot about a few. In other words, in each section, the book only shows the work of very few, mostly best-known, representatives of each movement, but for these few, it shows a lot of paintings. For example, in Impressionism, we see a lot of Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, Morisot, Caillebotte, and nothing else. With that, the book doesn’t open any new horizons or attempt to educate but rather shows what the prospective reader can easily recognize, which is probably smart for a coffee-table book. Despite all these limitations, it is a nice book with large-scale plates, good printing, and (minimal) textual content available in 6 languages. It is a good value for its current price. If you want to have only one book on this period of French art, this might be the book.