French Realist Painting and the Critique of American Society, 1865-1900 examines public reception of contemporary French painting in post-Civil War American society and demonstrates how a variety of audiences, from small capitalists to workers, used foreign images to politicize their claims to cultural lives.

Analyzed from class and regional perspectives, popular responses to Realist and Impressionist painting, recorded in the daily press and radical journals, are shown to have articulated conflicting attitudes toward equality as well as doubts about the fate of democracy in an industrialized society. At another level, French genre and landscape, which had been associated with the 1848 revolution and the rise of the Third Republic, also provoked American thinkers to critique their national culture and reconceptualize definitions of democratic art.

The methods of art history, reception theory, and social history merge in this study to explain how Americans came to see themselves in foreign art, and how the public gave these images meaning independent of official art criticism and their original French contexts.