Stephen F. Eisenman

From Corot to Monet analyses the relationship between Impressionism and Nature from an original and innovative angle. For the first time, the Impressionists not only visually recorded the impact of modernity on the French landscape, but they also embraced a new holistic viewpoint which revealed the dynamism and condition of every social and natural system.

More than 170 works are reproduced, including paintings, works on paper and period photographs, which come from some of the most important museums, galleries and private collections throughout the world (such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the New York Public Library, the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, the Musee Marmottan and the Bibliotheque nationale de France in Paris, the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg). The works trace the development of the representation of nature in French nineteenth-century painting, beginning with the early innovations to classic norms brought about by painters of the Barbizon school, followed by a thorough exploration of the revolution caused by the great masters of Impressionism such as Monet, Sisley and Pissarro, and ending with the chromatic triumph of Monet's Waterlilies.

Stephen F. Eisenman is Professor of Art History at the Northwestern University in Chicago.