The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave The World Impressionism
Ross King

The Judgment of Paris tells the story of two very different painters. In 1863, the French painter Ernest Meissonier was one of the most famous artists in the world. The darling of the Paris Salon—that all-important public art exhibition—he painted historical subjects in meticulous detail and sold his works for astronomical sums to collectors who included the Emperor Napoleon III. Édouard Manet, on the other hand, was struggling in obscurity. Famous today as the father of Impressionism, he was once known only as the painter of a few much-derided canvases depicting absinthe-drinking beggars and bourgeois gentlemen in top hats.

With his usual narrative brilliance and eye for telling detail, Ross King takes the parallel careers of Meissonier and Manet and uses them as a lens for their times. Beginning with the year that Manet exhibited his ground-breaking Dejeuner sur l’herbe and ending in 1874 with the first Impressionist exhibition, King plunges us into Parisian life—on the streets and in the corridors of power—during a ten-year period of social and political ferment. The struggle between Meissonier and Manet to get their paintings exhibited in pride of place at the Salon was not just about art, it was about how to see the world.