Laclotte Michel. The Book of Art: Volume 5: French Art from 1350 to 1850

Grolier, 1965. — 252 p.Many influences are evident in the development of French art from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. During the thirteenth century a school of miniaturists grew up in Paris, and easel painting did not appear until about one hundred years later, stimulated by a group of Flemish painters who had come to work in France. In the fifteenth century the School of Avignon was born, still showing Flemish influence. Portrait painting achieved great success in the sixteenth century, influenced at first by the Flemish and Lombard schools. By the middle of the seventeenth century, French painting had developed into a subtle blend of free artistic sensibility and the laws of reason. Landscape painting came to light in the eighteenth century, to be followed by the Romantic movement and realism in the nineteenth. Such artists as Corot, Millet, Daumier. Courbet, and others, who opposed classical and romantic views, were to pave the way for the next great phase in European art, the coming of Impressionism.