Artistes Pompiers

by James Harding

. 1979, bright clean copy

Genres: Art

136 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1979

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the first books returning us to paintings of French Salon that were neglected until early 1960. The book has an introduction to the Salon and the demise of its paintings in XX century and then briefly introduces three main "themes" of the Salon – “Olympians and Historians”, “Modern Life” and Orientalists. Writing is interesting but really very brief. Most space is consumed by paintings. It is reasonably useful since it introduces many painters and shows their work, but almost all paintings are shown in BW, only 22 are color and the quality of color images is not great. The book also has brief biographies of a good number of salon painters and a list of winners of Prix de Rome.