Written at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, this is the story of Angela Murray, a young black girl from Philadelphia who discovers she can pass for white.

"This original book examines how the ambitions of artists in eighteenth-century France were affected by public opinions about the arts--the tastes of the art critics, of the state, and of the crowds who visited art salons. Among the many artists whose work is discussed and portrayed are Watteau, Greuze, and David"--Publisher's description.

"Explores the role of private art collections in the cultural, social, and political life of early eighteenth-century Paris. Examines how two principal groups of collectors, each associated with a different political faction, amassed different types of treasures and used them to establish social identities and compete for distinction"--Provided by publisher.

In Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France, Julie Anne Plax engages in an interdisciplinary examination of several categories of Watteau's paintings--theatrical, military, fetes, and the art dealer. Arguing that Watteau consistently applied coherent strategies of representation aimed at subverting high art, she shows how his paintings toyed ironically with conventions and genres and confounded traditional categories. Plax connects these strategies to broader cultural themes and political issues that Watteau's art addressed throughout his career, thereby revealing the substantial unity of his oeuvre.

A narrative history of the founding of the Louvre that also explores the ideological underpinnings, pedagogical aims, and aesthetic criteria of this, the first great national art museum.

Hearing History is a long-needed introduction to the basic tenets of what is variously termed historical acoustemology, auditory culture, or aural history. Gathering twenty-one of the fields most important writings, this volume will deepen and broaden our understanding of changing perceptions of sound and hearing and the ongoing education of our senses. The essays stimulate thinking on key questions: What is aural history? Why has vision tended to triumph over hearing in historical accounts? How might we begin to reclaim the sounds of the past? With theoretical and practical essays on the history of sound and hearing in Europe and the United States, the book draws on historical approaches ranging from empiricism to postmodernism. Some essays show the historian of technology at work, others highlight how With theoretical and practical essays on the history of sound and hearing in Europe and the United States, the book draws on historical approaches ranging from empiricism to postmodernism. Some essays show the historian of technology at work, others highlight how military, social, intellectual, and cultural historians have tackled historical acoustemologies. Investigating soundscapes that include a Puritan meetinghouse in colonial New England, the belfries of a French village at the close of the Old Regime, the court hall of Elizabeth I, and a Civil War battlefield, the essays vary just as widely in their topics, which include noise as a marker of social and cultural differences, the privileging of music as the sound of art, the persistence of Aristotelian ideas of sound into the seventeenth century, developments in sound related to medical practice, the advent of sound-recording technology, and noise pollution.

This fascinating and elegant book tells the story of five painters at the center of events in Revolutionary France: Jacques-Louis David and his first cohort of precocious pupils, including the meteoric Jean-Germain Drouais and the astonishingly gifted but deeply troubled Anne-Louis Girodet. Written by a major art historian, it interprets in a new and original way the relationships between these men and the paintings they created. This new edition includes a revised introduction and incorporates the fruit of recent new research. "Crow combines excellent formal and stylistic analysis of particular paintings with close attention to the psychological complexities and political and social contexts of the artists’ lives. He delves deeply into David’s and his students’ thematic choices, compositional strategies and personal relations in order to make his overarching political and aesthetic arguments.”--Lynn Hunt, New Republic "A magisterial contribution to the history of art.”--Richard Cobb, The Spectator

The spectacular transformation of Paris during the 19th century into a city of tree-lined boulevards and public parks both redesigned the capital and inspired the era’s great Impressionist artists. The renewed landscape gave crowded, displaced urban dwellers green spaces to enjoy, while suburbanites and country-dwellers began cultivating their own flower gardens. As public engagement with gardening grew, artists increasingly featured flowers and parks in their work. Public Parks, Private Gardens includes masterworks by artists such as Bonnard, Cassatt, Cézanne, Corot, Daumier, Van Gogh, Manet, Matisse, Monet, and Seurat. Many of these artists were themselves avid gardeners, and they painted parks and gardens as the distinctive scenery of contemporary life. Writing from the perspective of both a distinguished art historian and a trained landscape designer, Colta Ives provides new insights not only into these essential works, but also into this extraordinarily creative period in France’s history.

The notion of a personal self took centuries to evolve, reaching the pinnacle of autonomy with Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am' in the 17th century. This 'personalisation' of identity thrived for another hundred years before it began to be questioned, subject to the emergence of broader, more inclusive forms of agency. Simulated Selves: The Undoing Personal Identity in the Modern World addresses the 'constructed' notion of personal identity in the West and how it has been eclipsed by the development of new technological, social, art historical and psychological infrastructures over the last two centuries. While the provisional nature of the self-sense has been increasingly accepted in recent years, Simulated Selves addresses it in a new way - not by challenging it directly, but by observing changes to the environments and cultural conventions that have traditionally supported it. By narrating both its dismantling and its incapacitation in this way, it records its undoing. Like The Invention of the Self: Personal Identity in the Age of Art (to which it forms a companion volume), Simulated Selves straddles cultural history and philosophy. Firstly, it identifies hitherto neglected forces that inform the course of cultural history. Secondly, it highlights how the self is not the self-authenticating abstraction, only accessible to introspection, that it seems to be; it is also a cultural and historical phenomenon. Arguing that it is by engaging in cultural conventions that we subscribe to the process of identity-formation, the book also suggests that it is in these conventions that we see our self-sense - and its transience - best reflected. By examining the traces that the trajectory of the self-sense has left in its environment, Simulated Selves offers a radically new approach to the question of personal identity, asking not only 'how and why is it under threat?' but also 'given that we understand the self-sense to be a constructed phenomenon, why do we cling to it?'.

From 1770 to 1789 a succession of highly publicized cases riveted the attention of the French public. Maza argues that the reporting of these private scandals had a decisive effect on the way in which the French public came to understand public issues in the years before the Revolution.