Richard Thomson

"In an innovative approach, Richard Thomson considers Claude Monet's paintings of buildings in their environment, offering a reappraisal of an artist more often associated with landscapes, seascapes and gardens. Buildings fulfilled various roles in Monet's canvases; some are chiefly compositional devices while others throw into sharp contrast the forms of man-made construction against the irregularity of nature, or suggest the absent presence of humans....

"Illustrated with 370 color plates, Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre is the first major work to present the artist's oeuvre in the context of Montmartre's lively art scene from roughly 1885 to 1901. Accompanying an exhibition of the same name at the National Gallery of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, the book features the important paintings, drawings, prints, and posters Toulouse-Lautrec made on Montmartre subjects. It also includes masterpieces...

Inspired by the work of Realist painters such as Gustave Courbet and Francois Bonvin, Henri-Edmond Cross's earliest paintings were compositions in dark, somber colors. Following his involvement with the avant-gardist circle around Georges Seurat, he gradually adopted the Neo-Impressionist technique and began to develop a unique visual vocabulary. After his move to the Mediterranean coast in 1891, Cross's palette became increasingly lighter, resulting...