If you close your eyes and think of Paris during the Belle Époque, the City of Light does not appear in the amber tones of faded photographs, although cameras were much in use by that time. It is scenes of everyday life, rendered in the bright colors and liberated brushstrokes of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists, that form our collective memory. This visual monopoly, in fact, is a significant triumph of the Impressionist movement.
It is harder than you think to define the moment when artists began to leave history painting behind. Christopher Lloyd, the former keeper of the Queen’s pictures and one of the curators of “Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec”—opening today at the Royal Academy of Arts, in London—takes up the question in his essay in the exhibition catalogue. He refers to a seminal essay by Charles Baudelaire, written in 1863, “The Painter of Modern Life.” Here Baudelaire described his ideal artist, Monsieur G (Constantin Guys), in a paragraph that reads like an impassioned call to arms.
