Abstract

This book examines public reception of contemporary French painting in post-Civil War American society. Analyzed from class and regional perspectives, popular responses to Realist and Impressionist painting are shown to articulate conflicting attitudes toward equality and doubts about the fate of democracy in an industrialized society. The methods of art history, reception theory, and social history merge in this study to explain how Americans came to see themselves in foreign art, and how the public gave these images meaning independent of official art criticism and their original French contexts.