In this best-selling book Elizabeth Murray discusses the development and maintenance of Claude Monet's Giverny estate as well as Monet's color theories, design elements, and use of light and shade. Richly illustrated with Murray's lush photographs of the present-day Giverny gardens, Monet's Passion also offers full-color illustrations of the gardens drawn to scale and four Giverny-based garden plans that can be executed anywhere.

In 1890, Jean Forgeron, an art student of Edgar Degas, comes to Giverny, France, to work in the gardens of artist Claude Monet and to study with him for a time. Nearly three years later, he returns once more to work and study, but also hoping to form another kind of partnership: the young painter is looking for love. At the same time, a pair of young ladies from the suburbs of Philadelphia have come to France to study art. Luisa Magdalena Slagle and Emille Martha Tveger intend to become students of Monet themselves. Though Jean is intrigued by the pair, they are uninterested. Instead, Luisa and Emille elect to form a Boston marriage while abroad together, in spite of the disapproval from both their families. Meanwhile, the three young people explore the French countryside and learn from a group of brilliant impressionist artists, building their skills and preparing for their lives ahead. In this historical novel, three young artists set out to study their craft with impressionist masters in nineteenth-century France while dealing with matters of the heart.

In September 1998 Kyle Griesman departed for Paris. Six years and eight European trips later, his life has been drastically altered. Interspersed with his irreverent and unapologetic humor, Merci, Bonjour and More chronicles two of these sojourns to France. You’ll experience how it feels to be stranded in a tunnel on a Paris subway train alone in the dark. Kyle explains why he never carries large denominations of cash. It seems no one can make change for you. You’ll see what it’s like being evacuated from your hotel room in the middle of the night due to a fire. Among others, you’ll meet an 87 year old woman in Normandy who befriended Kyle while painting on a cold windy day in her village. He introduces us to a group of artists that he painted with and roamed the Normandy countryside with. While turning obstacle after obstacle into adventures he embraces the people, the culture, and the wonders of France.

From Manet's earliest depictions of the Tuileries Gardens in Paris to Monet's late waterlilies painted at Giverny, the Impressionists had an ongoing love affair with gardens. As places of rest, relaxation, and beauty, gardens were the Impressionist subject par excellence. This beautifully illustrated volume is the first consideration of this beloved theme in the Impressionists' work. Here the artists' fascination with gardens, parks, and flowers is explored in the context of the contemporary craze for horticulture and the changing political and cultural landscape in France. Drawing on archival sources such as horticultural journals as well as literature, poetry, and correspondence, the book describes how gardens, simultaneously modern and imbued with nostalgia, were central to the Impressionists' discovery of their distinctive plein-air (out-of-doors) style. At the same time, by bringing to life the 19th-century tradition of ?oral symbolism and exploring how it infiltrated the work of key Impressionists, the book gives familiar works radical new interpretations. This vital contribution to our understanding of the Impressionist world is sure to delight art and gardening enthusiasts alike.

"The play-based learning and individualized strategies in this practical book build on the wide range of literacy skills present in the kindergarten classroom. This resource explores simple ways to use traditional learning centres to provide children with real and authentic reasons to listen, speak, read, write, and view. Teachers will find a wealth of resources for creating meaningful learning experiences, including: answers to often-asked questions; milestones to inform teaching instruction; activities and games for both individuals and groups, and literacy extensions that involve children with quality literature, authentic artifacts, and recordings This highly readable book will support teachers as they move beyond worksheets and nurture students on their journey to lifelong literacy."--Publisher.

Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur, as described in his 1863 essay "The Painter of Modern Life," remains central to understandings of gender, space, and the gaze in late nineteenth-century Paris, despite misgivings by some scholars. Baudelaire’s privileged and leisurely figure, at home on the boulevards, underlies theorizations of bourgeois masculinity and, by implication, bourgeois femininity, whereby men gaze and roam urban spaces unreservedly while women, lacking the freedom to either gaze or roam, are wedded to domesticity. In challenging this tired paradigm and offering fresh ways to consider how gender, space, and the gaze were constructed, this book attends to several neglected elements of visual and written culture: the ubiquitous male beggar as the true denizen of the boulevard, the abundant depictions of well-to-do women looking (sometimes at men), the popularity of windows and balconies as viewing perches, and the overwhelming emphasis given by both male and female artists to domestic scenes. The book’s premise that gender, space, and the gaze have been too narrowly conceived by a scholarly embrace of Baudelaire’s flâneur is supported across the cultural spectrum by period sources that include art criticism, high and low visual culture, newspapers, novels, prescriptive and travel literature, architectural practices, interior design trends, and fashion journals.

In Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema, Daisuke Miyao explores the influence of Japanese art on the development of early cinematic visual style, particularly the actualité films made by the Lumière brothers between 1895 and 1905. Examining nearly 1,500 Lumière films, Miyao contends that more than being documents of everyday life, they provided a medium for experimenting with aesthetic and cinematic styles imported from Japan. Miyao further analyzes the Lumière films produced in Japan as a negotiation between French Orientalism and Japanese aesthetics. The Lumière films, Miyao shows, are best understood within a media ecology of photography, painting, and cinema, all indebted to the compositional principles of Japonisme and the new ideas of kinetic realism it inspired. The Lumière brothers and their cinematographers shared the contemporaneous obsession among Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists about how to instantly and physically capture the movements of living things in the world. Their engagement with Japonisme, he concludes, constituted a rich and productive two-way conversation between East and West.