"This catalogue accompanies the exhibition Drawing: The Invention of a Modern Medium, on view at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from January 21 through May 7, 2017."

Explores the perception of nature in early 19th-century France. The book centres on a discussion of subjectivity and class and the way in which the process of looking at the countryside reinforced the identity of the metropolitan bourgeoisie - and especially men.

The first English-language monograph on the French dancer and model, Cléo de Mérode and the Rise of Modern Celebrity Culture explores the haunting legacy of this intriguing and glamorous figure, an international celebrity at the dawn of our star-struck modernity. Situating Mérode at a pivotal moment in the history of fame and visual culture, this study probes the neglected prehistory of a visual culture obsessed with celebrities and their images.

While gender has been the subject of extensive critical inquiry, the debate has focused primarily on the human, particularly the female, body. The spaces bodies occupy and the ways in which those spaces are depicted in landscape art has not, however, been subject to investigation. This book is the first sustained attempt to fill this gap in art history.

During the final decades of the ancient regime, prominent collectors in Paris commissioned and collected French paintings of the period, works by Greuze, Fragonard, David and others that together comprised 'l'Ecole Francoise' - the French School. In this book, an art historian discusses six of these collectors and the collections they assembled, showing that private patronage in this period was revitalized by this patriotic desire to collect contemporary art. Colin B. Bailey explains why a taste for modern art emerged at this time and how it was encouraged and fostered. Examining the relationship between artist and patron, he discusses the degree of influence these enlightened patrons and collectors expected to exercise when new works were being commissioned. Bailey shows that collectors of eighteenth-century French painting seem not to have made rigid distinctions between the various genres or styles of the Academy's practitioners. Instead, history paintings and genre paintings - both rococo and neo-classical - were exhibited proudly on their walls as superb examples of the French School.