cover image MANET/VELZQUEZ: The French Taste for Spanish Painting

MANET/VELZQUEZ: The French Taste for Spanish Painting

Gary Tinterow, . . Yale Univ., $75 (592pp) ISBN 978-0-300-09880-8

Masterfully untangling one of the strands of modern painting, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Tinterow and the Musée d'Orsay's Lacambre bring together 729 illustrations (380 in color) from the Louvre and the Prado. Through an assemblage of magnificent works, from Velázquez's Las Meninas and Manet's Boy with a Sword to works by Zurbarán, Goya, Cassatt and Chassériau, they chart the influence of Spanish on French (and, via Paris, American) artists from the mid–19th century to 1915 and trace the institutional routes Spanish art traveled. Among the 11 essays from various scholars, two appendixes and a chronology of the included work are Tinterow's overview of art during Napoleon's empire, María de los Santos García and Javier Portús Pérez's essay on the Prado's origins and H. Barbara Weinberg's close views of Whistler, Eakins, Chase, Sargent and Anshutz. Casual readers (and artists) will have enough to take in just having these works systematically presented between the same covers, while the essays connect the dots of influence. The price is steep, but the illustrations are richly printed, and the scholarship is first rate. (May)