Pool Phoebe. Impressionism

Oxford University Press, 1967. — 292 p.The World of Art is a series that ranges through the entire field of art in all its aspects. Its aim is to present books on the main periods, cultures, and artists, from the ancient world to the most current movements.
Each volume is written by an acknowledged authority and contains a large number of color and black and white illustrations which form an essential complement to the text.
Impressionism was one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of painting. The young Impressionists of the 1860s and '70s in France not only abandoned the conventional theories of academic painting, but opened the way to the future. In 1874 a group of experimental and virtually unknown artists, including Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley, held a highly unsuccessful exhibition of their revolutionary works in Paris, defying the hidebound traditionalism of the official Salon. Yet within little more than a decade, the origmality of their approach to painting proved a vital challenge to all preconceptions of style, subject-matter, color, and technique. That challenge was to become the premise of modern art. Phoebe Pool has written a valuable survey which relates the Impressionists to both their predecessors and their heirs. She shows how they were influenced, and to some degree anticipated, by the less academic of the established artists such as Delacroix, Courbet, and the painters of the Barbizon school. Special attention is given to Manet and Degas who, though drawn to Impressionism and closely associated with individual Impressionists, never became totally committed to the style. Though short-lived, Impressionism engendered the paintings of Cezanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, whose connection with the movement is also discussed.
Phoebe Pool was born in London and read for a degree in modern history at Oxford. Later she embarked on a course of study at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she specialized in nineteenth-century French painting. She later lectured at the University of Reading. Her interest in the interrelationship between the painters, writers, and social background of a given period and country led her to study the milieu of Picasso in Barcelona and Paris, and in collaboration with Sir Anthony Blunt she wrote Picasso the Formative Years.