Paris And the Countryside: Modern Life in Late 19th-century France

It has long been observed that the French Impressionists and their followers heeded Charles Baudelaire's call to paint "modern life." The exhibition catalogue explores what the very notion of a modern life, in its many facets, meant in late-nineteenth-century France, both in Paris and outside it. Gabriel P. Weisberg's essay touches on a range of issues that together capture, from a distinctly human viewpoint, something of the richness and complexity of life in Paris at the time. Using the objects secured for the exhibition, he discusses aspects of urban modernity that diversely affected rich and poor; created opportunities for women as artists, tastemakers, and consumers; spawned and/or sustained an array of performing arts, both highbrow and popular; and embraced the influx of non-French culture.In her essay, Jennifer L. Shaw offers a thorough overview of the rise of modernism in French landscape painting as it paralleled the desire of artists to demonstrate, through their techniques and choice of subjects, that they belonged to a new era of picture making. Her interpretations of the wide range of landscape paintings in the exhibition bring to life the surprisingly many faces of the French countryside, only fairly recently connected to Paris by train, including travel and leisure, industry and pollution, and artists' colonies and retreats. The scope of this catalogue should inspire viewers and readers to understand something of the vitality of the era as it was experienced by artists and viewers at the time, and in so doing perhaps draw fresh attention to a body of work that has become seemingly all too familiar.