Norman Bryson

Political and cultural history and the arts combine in this engaging account of 1790s France. In 1799, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) exhibited his Intervention of the Sabines, a history painting featuring the ancient heroine Hersilia, he added portraits of two contemporary women on either side of her—Henriette de Verninac, daughter of Charles-François Delacroix, minister of foreign affairs,...

In this classic Reaktion title, Norman Bryson analyses the origins, history and logic of still-life, one of the most enduring forms of Western painting. From Roman wall-painting to Cubism, and from seventeenth-century Dutch still-life to Bryson's conclusion that the persisting tendency to downgrade the genre of still-life is profoundly rooted in the historical oppression of women, Looking at the Overlooked...