The critically acclaimed national bestseller, now in paperback.

While the Civil War raged in America, another revolution took shape across the Atlantic, in the studios of Paris: The artists who would make Impressionism the most popular art form in history were showing their first paintings amidst scorn and derision from the French artistic establishment. Indeed, no artistic movement has ever been quite so controversial. The drama of its birth, played out on canvas and against the backdrop of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, would at times resemble a battlefield; and as Ross King reveals, it would reorder both history and culture, and resonate around the world.

Praise for The Judgment of Paris:

"The Judgment of Paris tells a well-known story, but one seldom recounted in such vivid detail, or with such a novelistic sense of plot and character...In all, King pulls off a tour de force of complex narrative that readers of his previous books about the Sistine Chapel or Brunelleschi's dome will have come to expect."—Diane Johnson, New York Times Book Review

"Riveting...Such material could have been tedious in less nimble literary hands. But so thorough is King's grasp of the Second Empire's cultural politics, so ironic his wit and choice of detail, that his text remains a page-turner throughout."—Francine du Plessix Gray, Los Angeles Times

"[A] spirited account of the decade-long battle between France's officially sanctioned history painters and the wild tribe of upstarts contemptuously dismissed as "impressionists"…[told] with tremendous energy and skill. It is hard to imagine a more inviting account of the artistic civil war that raged around the Paris Salons of the 1860's and 70's, or of the outsize personalities who transformed the way the world looked at painting."—William Grimes, The New York Times

"This is the most engrossing, finely written, richly detailed book of popular history I've encountered in a long, long time."—David Walton, Philadelphia Inquirer

"A marvelously well-structured history and a deeply pleasurable read."—Donna Seaman, Chicago Tribune

"King has made a career of elucidating crucial episodes in the history of art and architecture.  This time he's at play in the fields of French art and society from 1863 to 1874…At the same time, the vainglorious Emperor Louis-Napoleon was stumbling into the calamities of war and revolution. Eventually art would imitate life; all the old orders would come crashing down; and Manet, Monet and Cézanne would emerge from the wreckage. King's account of that all-important crack-up is full of smart pleasures."—Richard Lacayo, Time Magazine

"The Judgment of Paris has the stylistic grace, the abundance of entertaining anecdotes and the shrewd marshaling of facts that made King's Brunelleschi's Dome a best-seller and his Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling a National Book Critics Circle award finalist."—Charles Matthews, San Francisco Chronicle

"King writes art history as tapestry."—Matthew Price, Newsday