A leading critic and historian of nineteenth-century art and society explores in nine essays the interaction of art, society, ideas, and politics.

* The Invention of the Avant-Garde: France, 18301880 * Courbet, Oller, and a Sense of Place: The Regional, the Provincial, and the Picturesque in 19th-Century Art * The Imaginary Orient * Camille Pissarro: The Unassuming Eye * Manets Masked Ball at the Opera * Van Gogh, Renouard, and the Weavers Crisis in Lyons * Lon Frdric and The Stages of a Workers Life * Degas and the Dreyfus Affair: A Portrait of the Artist as an Anti-Semite * Seurats La Grande Jatte: An Anti-Utopian Allegory