"Shortly after the Civil War, a resurgent America strode brashly onto the hallowed ground of the Paris salon to present its most distinguished painters in the Exposition Universelle of 1867. Their offerings included majestic Western waterfalls, magnificent portraits, sprawling landscapes - the cream of a nation ready to assert itself culturally as it had begun to do economically. The Americans sat back to bask in anticipated applause." "But their confidence would be shattered abruptly when the luminaries of the French Academy condemned the spectacle as being unworthy of the great nation that had produced it. The rebuke provoked widespread soul-searching in America: Why was the land of Melville and Poe unable to produce paintings of comparable power? How was it to claim a place among nations producing art of real consequence?" "In this historical panorama, Annie Cohen-Solal shows how American...
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