Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: Spring 2006

En garde: Manet's Portrait of Emilie Ambre in the Role of Bizet's Carmen
by Therese Dolan
In painting Emilie Ambre, Manet may have seized the occasion to foreground mutual concerns shared with the composer Georges Bizet regarding the performativity of their mediums. Both the musician and the artist found themselves castigated for their harshness of tones, their depiction of lower-class figures, and their embrace of realist strategies.

"This man is Michelangelo": Octave Mirbeau, Auguste Rodin and the Image of the Modern Sculptor
by Claire Black McCoy
"I tell you, Monsieur, this man is Michelangelo and you don't know him." With those words Octave Mirbeau introduced his readers to Auguste Rodin, and the sculptor became known popularly as France's modern Michelangelo.

The Essence of Line: French Drawings from Ingres to Degas [exh cat] by William R. Johnston et al.

Reviewed by Petra Chu

Italian Memorial Sculpture, 1820-1940: A Legacy of Love by Sandra Berresford et al.

Reviewed by Nancy Scott

Cézanne and Provence: The Painter in His Culture by Nina Maria Athanassoglou-Kallmyer

Reviewed by Charles Stuckey

The Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt: Reinventing an Old Master in Nineteenth-Century France by Alison McQueen

Reviewed by Amy Von Lintel

Gustave Doré, oeuvres de la collection du Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg

Reviewed by Gabriel P. Weisberg

Girodet (1767-1824)

Reviewed by Brooks Beaulieu

Jean Charles Langlois 1789-1870. Le Spectacle de l'histoire

Reviewed by John Zarobell

Gauguin's Vision

Reviewed by Aimée Brown Price

Jensen | The Journal des Dames et des Modes

The Journal des Dames et des Modes: Fashioning Women in the Arts, c. 1800-1815
by Heather Belnap Jensen
As the leading women's journal in Napoleonic France, the Journal des Dames et des Modes provides an excellent case study on the formation of the modern woman artist, critic and spectator. In elaborating the contentious nature of its material, the author reveals how the journal laid out the discursive patterns for future discussions on women in the arts.

Ambiguity of Home: Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin's Return Home, c. 1909
by Adrienne Kochman
During a rare visit to her Russian homeland in 1909, Marianne Werefkin experienced a poignant personal encounter with the life she had chosen to leave behind. The author examines how issues of outsidership, Werefkin's position as a woman artist, and as an aristocrat, all informed her haunting composition, Return Home.

Eugène Delacroix's Portrait of Charles de Verninac, 1825-26
by James H. Rubin
With this commentary by James Rubin we inaugurate a new feature of the journal entitled "New Discoveries." Its purpose is to bring to light unknown works of nineteenth-century art—recent acquisitions by museums, works in private collections, and paintings, sculptures or important pieces of decorative arts that have surfaced on the art market.