The Painter's Eye

Description

Between 1868 and 1897 Henry James wrote a number of short essays and reviews of artists and art collections; these essays were published in magazines such as Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Weekly and in newspapers such as the New York Tribune . They included James’s comments on Ruskin, Turner, Whistler, Sargent, and the Impressionists, among many others. Thirty of these essays were collected and first published in a modern edition in 1956, accompanied by John Sweeney’s introduction, which sketches James’s interest in the visual arts over a period of years, focusing on the ways in which painting and painters entered his work as subjects. Susan Griffin’s new forward places James’s observations in a contemporary context. Some of the novelist’s judgements will seem wrong to today’s readers: he was critical of the Impressionists, for example. But all of these essays bear the stamp of James’s critical intelligence, and they tell us a great deal about his development as a writer during those years.