Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting (Metropolitan Museum of Art Series) - Hardcover

Tinterow, Gary; Lacambre, Geneviève

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300098804 ISBN 13: 9780300098808

Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003

Synopsis

In 1804, at the dawn of the French Empire, there were no more than a handful of Spanish paintings in public collections in France. During the course of the nineteenth century, however, French collectors and museums assembled substantial holdings of works by such Spanish masters as Velázquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Murillo, and Goya. At the same time, French writers and artists―among them Delacroix, Géricault, Courbet, Millet, Bonnat, Degas, and, especially, Manet―came to understand, appreciate, and even emulate Spanish painting of the Golden Age.

This beautiful book features over 150 works by French and Spanish artists, charting the development of this cultural influence and mapping a fascinating shift in the paradigm of painting: from Idealism to Realism, from Italy to Spain, from Renaissance to Baroque. Above all, it vividly demonstrates how direct contact with Spanish painting fired the imagination of nineteenth-century French artists and brought about the triumph of Realism in the 1860s, and with it a foundation for modern art.

American artists of the second half of the nineteenth century often turned to Europe for training and inspiration. Whistler, Cassatt, Eakins, Chase, and Sargent all traveled to Spain for firsthand exposure to its artistic heritage and experienced the thrill of discovering Spanish painting. Also included in this volume are works by American artists that clearly reflect the pervasive influence of and taste for Spanish painting.


Published in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art

About this title

About the Author

Gary Tinterow is Engelhard Curator of 19th-Century European Painting in the Department of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Reviews

Masterfully untangling one of the strands of modern painting, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Tinterow and the Mus‚e d'Orsay's Lacambre bring together 729 illustrations (380 in color) from the Louvre and the Prado. Through an assemblage of magnificent works, from Velazquez's Las Meninas and Manet's Boy with a Sword to works by Zurbaran, Goya, Cassatt and Chasseriau, they chart the influence of Spanish on French (and, via Paris, American) artists from the mid-19th century to 1915 and trace the institutional routes Spanish art traveled. Among the 11 essays from various scholars, two appendixes and a chronology of the included work are Tinterow's overview of art during Napoleon's empire, Maria de los Santos Garcia and Javier Portus Perez's essay on the Prado's origins and H. Barbara Weinberg's close views of Whistler, Eakins, Chase, Sargent and Anshutz. Casual readers (and artists) will have enough to take in just having these works systematically presented between the same covers, while the essays connect the dots of influence. The price is steep, but the illustrations are richly printed, and the scholarship is first rate.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300098804
• ISBN 13: 9780300098808
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 592