For Renoir ... painting the landscape meant direct contact with something redemptive, a sensual antidote to the ills of modern life. Perhaps we have become so used to seeing him merely as the painter of life's easy pleasures that we forget that for the great American collector Albert C. Barnes ... Renoir stood alongside Cezanne and Picasso as one of the four founding pillars of modernism, a colourist with a message for humanity to equal Matisse.
Robert Snell, Times Literary Supplement, May 4 2007.
While Renoir deplored the "Haussmannization" of Paris, the new boulevards opened up architectural and social vistas which, like Monet and Pissarro, he found compelling. The tricolour flags of the new Republic appear on the margins of a regatta at Argenteuil in the year of the first Impressionist exhbition, held in the photographer Nadar's studio in 1874.
Robert Snell, Times Literary Supplement, May 4 2007.
Perhaps what all parents want from their children is to feel again that deep, long, almost stationary slowness of time. Another sweet taste of it, please.
Graham Swift, ‘Tomorrow’, p. 2.
Edmund Burke, in his Thoughts on French Affairs (1791), was right to assert that what was fundamentally new about the French Revolution, marking if off from all previous known political upheavals, was not popular participation, class antagonism, economic change, cultural shifts, or social pressures but rather the fact that it was ‘a revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma’.
Jonathan I. Israel, ‘Enlightenment Contested’, p. 4.