The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers

Nineteenth-century American artists were more cosmopolitan than generally is acknowledged, claims Weinberg. A prime example is Thomas Eakins, too often ``treated as a purely American isolatio, like Walt Whitman.'' But expatriate Eakins, as Weinberg notes, was molded in the atelier of French painter Jean-Leon Gerome, who moved easily from intimate, witty history painting to photographic realism to exotic contemporary works. A curator at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Weinberg detects Gerome's influence in Eakins's Arcadian images, in Julian Alden Weir's Americanized impressionism, and in Abbott Thayer's portrait of a voluptuous angel with immense, naturalistic wings. John Singer Sargent, Cecilia Beaux, Elizabeth Jane Gardner, James McNeill Whistler and Robert Henri are among the dozens of other Americans who studied in France. This hefty, gloriously illustrated study makes a major contribution by restoring the work of these artists to the cosmopolitan context in which they painted. (Apr.)