Volume 53, Number 10 · June 8, 2006
Unparallel Lives
By Robert L. Herbert
The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism
by Ross King
Walker, 448 pp., $28.00
Ernest Meissonier: Master in His Genre
by Constance Cain Hungerford
Cambridge University Press, 276 pp., $110.00 (1999)
Ross King's new book is the third in which he writes on moments in art history. His first two, Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture (2000), and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling (2003), were well-regarded best sellers. He is not an art historian (he has a Ph.D. in English literature, and has published two novels), but this proves to be an advantage when he addresses the years between 1863 and 1874 in The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism. He revitalizes the familiar history of early Impressionism by comparing Édouard Manet (1832–1883) with Ernest Meissonier (1815–1891), a little-remembered painter who was the most successful and highly rewarded French artist of the 1860s and 1870s. Meissonier is more than a whipping boy for King, who grants him his own accomplishments, but the contrasts between the two are so striking that King makes us look anew at Manet's well-known art and career. Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir, and others, who eventually formed the core of Impressionism, came to public attention several years after Manet, so King introduces them only gradually as the decade wears on and he never gives them equal attention.
Review, 4240 words
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