Nature as Muse: Inventing Impressionist Landscape par Christoph Heinrich (review)

the work offers an instructive account of the first third of the French pilgrimage route, significantly enhanced by the photography of Alison Harris. It has definite appeal for the general reader with an interest in French travel. The author seeks to evoke the past in remote sections of Burgundy, a historically rich region where the spirits of ancient inhabitants may still be sensed by modern pilgrims. Southeast Missouri State University Alice J. Strange Heinrich, Christoph. Nature as Muse: Inventing Impressionist Landscape. Denver: Art Museum, 2013. ISBN 978-0-914738-91-6. Pp. 167. $35. Heinrich presents fifteen essays about paintings on display at the Denver Art Museum’s Passport to Paris exhibit (Oct. 2013–Feb. 2014). As his title indicates, he focuses on the development of Impressionist landscape painting from its forerunners in the early nineteenth century to Post-Impressionists like Cézanne and Van Gogh as well as American artists who were followers of Monet and other Impressionists. He points out the influence of artist and teacher Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes at the beginning of the century. Although working in the classical tradition of Poussin and Claude Lorrain,Valenciennes offered the innovative recommendation that artists start with the direct observation of nature en plein air before completing their works in the studio. As the century progressed, French painters went outdoors more and more to seek inspiration and eventually came to compose their actual works in the presence of the sites they were depicting. The first of these were the artists associated with the Barbizon group who made the Forest of Fontainebleau their studio. Théodore Rousseau and Charles-François Daubigny sought the hidden poetry of the paysage intime. Millet celebrated the dignity and piety of the peasants who worked the land. Corot sought truth in nature as filtered through feeling. The Realist Courbet presented his unsentimental observation of the raw earth.Among other precursors, Boudin took French painting to the sea. He evoked the luminosity of water and sky but also portrayed the figures of fashionable bathers from Paris. Like Baudelaire, Manet thought that the artist must capture both eternal beauty and the fleeting, ephemeral beauty of modern life. Heinrich is conscientious about recognizing the stylistic differences between the different Impressionists as well as their similarities. He is also sensitive to the evolutions in vision and technique in the course of their individual careers. Heinrich traces Monet’s obsession with the observation of light and atmosphere, or the “enveloppe” as the artist called it. Monet sought to capture nature in its instantaneity as filtered through the artist’s vision. Heinrich also studies the increasing tendency toward coloristic abstraction in Monet’s later series paintings like his Water Lilies. Pissarro always depicted a natural landscape touched by the human presence and shared Zola’s opinion that art is based not only on the observation of nature but also on the human sensation of the artist. Open to the prevailing trends of 246 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 Reviews 247 the day, he even practiced for a time the divisionism, or pointillisme, of Seurat and Signac. Renoir also peopled his landscapes with human figures and forged a merging of nature and humanity in light and color. Sisley made it his mission to capture the atmospheric conditions of light in the sky and the sky’s reflections on land, water, and human habitation. Caillebotte used the same daring perspectives and photographic cropping in his pictures of the country that he did in his cityscapes. Finally, Berthe Morisot adapted the techniques of Impressionism to the domestic landscape and familial subjects to which women, including artists, were limited in that era. University of Denver James P. Gilroy Liogier, Raphaël. Le mythe de l’islamisation: essai sur une obsession collective. Paris: Seuil, 2012. ISBN 978-2-02-107884-8. Pp. 213. 16 a. Rédigé dans une langue claire dépourvue de jargon,s’adressant tant au grand public qu’à des spécialistes de l’islam dans le monde occidental, l’ouvrage de ce sociologue des religions livre une analyse incisive de l’islamo-paranoïa ambiante: ses formes, discours et origines historiques, ses scénarios aussi délirants qu’influents, ses soubassements et...