Impressions

Sensations

Glossary

Ecole des Beaux-Arts: The state-run school of fine art governed by the Acadmie des Beaux Arts. Artists were trained in the study of Classical art and the human form in the manner of the antique and Renaissance masters like Raphael

Alla prima: Technique whereby an artist completes a painting in one session without having provided layers of underpainting

Local colour: The 'actual' colour of objects such as the greenness of grass or the yellowness of lemons

Author's Biography

Rebecca Virag is an independent art historian based in Cambridge. She studied nineteenth-century French and British art and architecture at Reading University and later, at post-graduate level, at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She has recently completed a Ph.D. thesis at the Courtauld Institute about the impact of evolution theory and eugenics on the work of British artists working in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century.