The Judgement of Paris

This is an exhilarating book... The success Ross King achieved with Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling is repeated here, for he fashions history anew

Frances Spalding, Independent

A crowded canvas - like, say, Manet's Music in the Tuileries Gardens - full of diverse characters

Martin Gayford, Sunday Telegraph

A brilliant book, a micro-history that feels like a macro-history... A good read and a good history; an unusual a pairing as its twin subjects

Charles Darwent, Independent on Sunday

Wonderfully rich... With great deftness [King] tracks the careers of both men in the decade leading up to the most important exhibition in the history of art, the Impressionist group show of 1874

Michael Prodger, Literary Review

It is, in its broad outlines, a familiar story, but King, the author of Brunelleschi's Dome, tells it with tremendous energy and skill. It is hard to imagine a more inviting account of the artistic civil war that raged around the Paris salons of the 1860s and 1870s, or of the outsize personalities who transformed the way the world looked at painting

William Grimes, Scotsman

King's book is an absorbing investigation into [Meissonier's] rise and fall, and while this alone would have been subject enough, the author opens up the canvas by interweaving the parallel fortunes of another artist, Edouard Manet... In King's careful hands this tale of two artists rises beyond a mere historical account to become a revealing investigation into the vagaries of taste and success

Iain Gale, Scotland on Sunday

King's history of artistic rivalry and the stormy gestation of the Impressionist movement is a rich and textured read, full of the sounds and smells of Paris in a wild and exciting time

Books Quarterly, Waterstones