Abstract

The trenchant scholarship evident in Fried's earlier essays on Couture, Manet and Courbet is equally manifest in this challenging study of the development of French painting in the period 1750-1770. Fried's major thesis is that the central and guiding concern of artists from Chardin to David was the relationship between the viewer of the painting and what is represented in the painting. Those who now concentrate on social and economic determinants of artistic enterprises will be disappointed by Fried's blatantly aesthetic hypothesis that the narrower concerns of the art of painting itself were primary in the mainstream of French painting of this period. But they will be hardpressed to counter the solid evidence that Fried musters in support of his position.