Geraniums and the River

Nicholas Penny

• The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers by T.J. Clark
  Thames and Hudson, 338 pp, £18.00, April 1985, ISBN 0 500 23417 5
• Cellini by John Pope-Hennessy
  Macmillan, 324 pp, £85.00, October 1985, ISBN 0 333 40485 8
• Alessandro Algardi by Jennifer Montagu
  Yale in association with the J. Paul Getty Trust, 487 pp, £65.00, May 1985, ISBN 0 300 03173 4

‘Impressionism became very quickly the house style of the haute-bourgeoisie,’ T.J. Clark observes at the close of The Painting of Modern Life. Few seem to have resisted the invitations of Madame Verdurin or to have hesitated to adopt the pseudo-Rococo frame with whitened gilding. Renoir, in particular, who had begun his career decorating porcelain, ended it providing upper-class wall-ornaments. Clark perhaps has him chiefly in mind when he sternly (but cryptically) declares that there are ‘ways’ in which the ‘dissolution’ of Impressionism ‘into the decor of Palm Springs and Park Avenue is well deserved’. The paintings upon which he prefers to concentrate his attention and which seem to win his approval are by Monet, Degas, Seurat and Manet – especially those works by Manet which puzzled or offended.