Painting-the

Famous for outdoor scenes bathed in light, the impressionists are hard to imagine as dedicated still-life painters. By and large, they weren't. But Monet's rare small paintings of flowers were snapped up by contemporary collectors. And several artists who exhibited with the impressionists, influenced them, or were influenced by them--including Manet, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne--devoted a sizable portion of their oeuvre to the genre. While Impressionist Still Life is a somewhat misleading title--yet another marketing ploy to attract lovers of a popular style, it seems--this book makes a good case for the importance of this intimate genre of painting to major themes and techniques of later-19th-century art. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (September 22, 2001, to January 13, 2002, then traveling to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), this volume is lavishly illustrated and rich in detailed information. Five essays trace themes ranging from the influence of 18th-century painter Jean-Baptiste Chardin on still-life composition and the use of color to the strikingly modern way Cézanne's famous apples devalued subject matter to emphasize the physicality of brush strokes. The stunning paintings featured in full-page plates include some rarely seen canvases, such as Monet's Jar of Peaches from 1866. In this tour de force of illusionism, the flattened look of peaches packed in a glass jar contrasts with fuzzy whole peaches that cast reflections on a marble table scribbled with bold white veins. A genre that could encompass both the luminous intimacy of Eva Gonzalès' White Shoes and the restless drama of Cézanne's Still Life with Ginger Jar and Eggplants turned out to be uniquely suited to individual perceptions of modern life. --Cathy Curtis

It may seem eccentric to gather together paintings according to the season they depict, but this large, handsome volume will make readers wonder why no one thought of it before. Winter is different from the other three seasons, with its extraordinary range of color and light--from subtle grays and pinks to deep blues and yellows--and the distinct absence of that difficult color, green. This book, the catalog of an exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., is a collection of more than 60 large color plates of impressionist paintings. They form a surprising group that presents each painting--even if it is already familiar--in a new way. The paintings are beautiful--Monet's Magpie soaking up the sun as he sits on a fence gate; Caillebotte's lacy iron balcony railing overlooking the Mansard roofs of Paris; Renoir's black-cloaked ice skaters in the Bois de Boulogne--but in this frigid season, the impressionists' penchant for working outdoors is arguably what is most impressive. In the introductory essay, Charles S. Moffett, the former director of the Phillips, deftly traces the artistic history of snow imagery from the Limbourg brothers' Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry through Dutch 17th-century snowscapes, Caspar David Friedrich, and Claude Monet "and a few others," as he wryly quotes another historian's "nod" to the impressionists. There are three other essays--on Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley--by three other scholars, as well as lengthy, readable captions filled with quotes from the artists and discussions of their influences. --Peggy Moorman