Ever since its invention in 1839, photography has had the ambition of reproducing everything and depicting the overall reality of the world. Given the long exposure times of the daguerrotype, the first photographic journeys were dedicated to landscapes and major monuments. Despite the technical obstacles, the attempt to produce a faithful or composed vision of people, of their singularity, their joys and sufferings, appeared by the end of the 1840s, linked to the realist approach of painting and the humanist philosophers. This book features a selection of documentary photographs including those by Felix Thiollier, which reveal his great human and artistic sensibility-depicting the work of the miners in the Saint-Etienne region. Also included are the photographs taken in Poland at the beginning of the 20th century in a Jewish ghetto, which underline the injustice of the fate of the children and the self-sacrifice of their relatives. The book discusses this new form of visual documentation and how it was embodied in the reproduction of major events, such as the barricades in rue Saint-Maur photographed by Thibault in 1848, and in the highlighting of the philanthropic projects recorded in the visits of Charles Negre to the Asile imperial de Vincennes during the 1850s, and in the photographs of explorers and missionaries by Charnay in Madagascar.

This monograph on Ingres art includes a broad biographical account of his life and the artistic scene he frequented in Paris and Rome. It places his art within the context of 19th-century art movements, from his youth under the Bonaparte regime to the Third Republic.

Photography was by no means an easy medium for reproducing the natural world in the nineteenth century, with different exposures needed to render sky, sea, land or foliage. The pioneers mastered the constraints of their medium, and their works transformed the way we see the landscape. This book traces the stages they went through in mastering landscape photography, using images taken between 1840 and 1890 from the Musee d'Orsay's rich collections of the photography of this period. The book also features an introduction to landscape photography, detailed catalogue entries for each photograph featured, and a selected bibliography.

The Louvre collection of drawings by Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) is one of the finest and most well-balanced there is. It provides an overview, from the beginning to the end of his career, through his different techniques and the variety of his themes, of the light-hearted determined and the feigned roguishness of one of the most popular and most misunderstood French artists. Fragonard shifts from being the most scrupulous observer of nature, whether it be the human figure or landscape, the creator of profoundly moving religious compositions or of frivolously charming interiors, or again the boisterously inventive and unbridled illustrator of Ariosto or Cervantes. He is also one of the most intent and sprightly interpreters of works of the past, and the Louvre collection allows us to have a close look at this fundamental aspect, in particular thanks to several spectacular, utterly personal copies after Rubens and Jordaens. He has verve and conviction in renewing graphic means: his black chalk is minute and vibrant, his red chalk hatched and bounding, his pen dancing, his washes are impulsive or delicate. Ever smiling, ever more serious than he might seem, Fragonard is certainly the most dazzling eighteenth-century French draughtsman.