Those cultural dinosaurs among us who persist in believing that paintings and sculptures have something to offer other than politics, sociology, anthropology, or even sex, tend to be skeptical about revisionist enterprises. Nothing is more exciting than having one’s old habits of thought jolted loose by new observations and new information, but, all too often, self-proclaimed new approaches turn out to be predictable attempts to redeem the reputations of second- or third-rate figures, “marginalized,” we are told, because of race, sex, country of origin, class, and all the rest of it. (How come plain old lack of ability is never an issue in these discussions?) Whole periods, entire movements in the history of art have been re-examined in light of these currently fashionable pieties, but, alas, they don’t usually offer anything more illuminating than the entrenched ideas they aim to replace.

So imagine my surprise and pleasure when two patently revisionist undertakings, the recent exhibition “The Rise of Landscape Painting in France: Corot to Monet,” organized by Kermit S. Champa¹ and the new book Corot in Italy, by Peter Galassi,² both proved astonishingly fresh, perceptive, and downright enlightening. Given the visual evidence of Champa’s exhibition and the painstakingly accumulated, persuasively argued evidence of Galassi’s book, our view of nineteenth-century French painting may never be the same. What is perhaps most refreshing is that this genuine “re-vision” results from a thoughtful, intelligent consideration of the paintings themselves in their historical context, not from stretching the