The radical break with the past heralded by the French Revolution in 1789 has become one of the mythic narratives of our time. Yet in the drawn-out afterlife of the Revolution, and through subsequent periods of Empire, Restoration, and Republic, the question of what such a temporal transformation might involve found complex, often unresolved expression in visual and material culture.

This diverse collection of essays draws attention to the eclectic objects and forms of visuality that emerged in France from the beginning of the French Revolution through to the end of the July Monarchy in 1848. It offers a new account of the story of French art’s modernity by exploring the work of genre painters and miniaturists, sign-painters and animal artists, landscapists, architects, and printmakers, as they worked out what it meant to be “post-revolutionary.”