Books by Christopher Riopelle

Gauguin: Portraits

by Cornelia Homburg, Christopher Riopelle

The first in-depth investigation of Gauguin’s portraits, revealing how the artist expanded the possibilities of the genre in new and exciting ways

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) broke with accepted conventions and challenged audiences to expand their understanding of visual expression. Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in his portraits, a genre he remained engaged with throughout all phases of his career. Bringing together more than 60 of Gauguin’s portraits in a wide variety of media that includes painting, works on paper, and sculpture, this handsomely illustrated volume is the first focused investigation of the multifaceted ways the artist approached the subject.

Essays by a group of international experts consider how the artist’s conception of portraiture evolved as he moved between Brittany and Polynesia. They also examine how Gauguin infused his work with symbolic meaning by taking on different roles like the Christ figure and the savage in his self-portraits and by placing his models in suggestive settings with alluring attributes. This welcome addition to the scholarship on one of the 19th century’s most innovative and controversial artists reveals fascinating insights into the crucial role that portraiture played in Gauguin’s overall artistic practice.

Distributed for the National Gallery of Canada

Exhibition Schedule:
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
(05/24/19–09/08/19)
National Gallery, London
(10/07/19–01/26/20)

Paintings by Peder Balke

by Christopher Riopelle, Knut Ljøgodt, Marit Ingeborg Lange

In 1832, the Norwegian painter Peder Balke (1804–1887) traveled to the far north of Norway to the dramatic coastline of the North Cape. The experience was so profound that he built his career painting isolated Arctic Circle seascapes. His pictures were originally rooted in the 19th-century romanticism of artists such as Caspar David Friedrich and his compatriot, Johan Christian Dahl. Later in his career Balke created improvised seascapes with roughly applied brushwork—sometimes using his hands, a technique that was prescient of early modern expressionism. His profile as an artist had fallen into obscurity outside of Norway, but now this book brings together a group of Balke’s pictures from collections in Europe and the United States, and introduces readers to a unique artist and personality whose works bridged 19th-century romanticism and early modern expressionism.

Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press

Exhibition Schedule:
Northern Norway Art Museum, Tromsø
(06/14/14–10/12/14)
National Gallery, London
(11/12/14–04/12/15)

Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art

by Christopher Riopelle, Patrick J. Noon, National Gallery (Great Britain)

A handsome volume exploring Delacroix's works, his artistic contemporaries, and the generations of great artists he inspired

Eugène Delacroix (1789-1863), a dominant figure in 19th-century French art, was a complex and contradictory painter whose legacy is deep and enduring. This important, beautifully illustrated book considers Delacroix in his own time, alongside contemporaries such as Courbet, Fromentin, and the poet Charles Baudelaire, as well as his significant influence on successive generations of artists.

Delacroix's paintings and his posthumously published Journals laid crucial groundwork for immediate successors including Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, and Renoir. Later admirers including Seurat, Gauguin, Moreau, Redon, Van Gogh, and Matisse renewed the obsession with his work. Through essays and catalogue entries, the authors demonstrate how Delacroix became mentor and archetype to younger generations who sought direction for their own creative experiments, and found inspiration in Delacroix's brilliant use of color, audacious technique, and rebellious nature.

Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press

Exhibition Schedule:

Minneapolis Institute of Arts
(10/18/15-01/10/16)

National Gallery, London
(02/17/16-05/22/16)

Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents

by Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, Christopher Riopelle, Daniel Immerwahr, Stephanie L. Herdrich, Sylvia Yount

This timely study of Winslow Homer highlights his imagery of the Atlantic world and reveals themes of racial, political, and natural conflict across his career.

Long celebrated as the quintessential New England regionalist, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) in fact brushed a much wider canvas, traveling throughout the Atlantic world and frequently engaging in his art with issues of race, imperialism, and the environment. This groundbreaking publication focuses, for the first time, on the watercolors and oil paintings Homer made during visits to Bermuda, Cuba, coastal Florida, and the Bahamas—in particular, The Gulf Stream (1899), an iconic painting long considered the most consequential of his career—revealing a lifelong fascination with struggle and conflict. The book also includes Homer’s depictions of rural life and the sea, in which he grapples with the violence of nature, as well as his Civil War and Reconstruction paintings of the 1860s and 1870s, which explore the unresolved effects of the war on the landscape, soldiers, and the formerly enslaved. Recognizing the artist’s keen ability to distill complex issues in his work, Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents upends popular conceptions and convincingly argues that Homer’s work resonates with the challenges of the present day.

Picasso Ingres Face to Face

by Christopher Riopelle, Emily Talbot, Susan L. Siegfried

An exploration of the fascinating parallels and differences between Picasso's Woman with a Book and Ingres's Madame Moitessier



This publication examines, in detail, two extraordinary interrelated works: Picasso's Woman with a Book (1932) and Ingres's Madame Moitessier (1844-56). Each painting is explored in depth, illuminating the parallels and differences between the artists' techniques and creative ambitions. The first essay tells the story of the twelve-year gestation of Ingres's Madame Moitessier, focusing on the role of drawings in the elaboration of the composition, and of the sitter herself in determining how she was to be presented. The second essay traces the development of Picasso's Woman with a Book, among the most celebrated likenesses of the artist's young lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter. In contrast to Ingres's work, it was painted in just a day or two. The final essay explores, through these two works, the artists' shared interest in the relationship between nude and clothed bodies, revealing the depth of Picasso's engagement with Madame Moitessier, which motivates and animates Woman with a Book.