Book overview While the Civil War raged in America, another very different revolution was beginning to take shape across the Atlantic, in the studios of Paris. The artists who would make Impressionism the most popular art form in history were showing their first paintings amidst scorn and derision from the French artistic establishment. Indeed, no artistic movement has ever been, at its inception, quite so controversial. The drama of its birth, played out on canvas, would at times resemble a battlefield; and as Ross King reveals, it would reorder both history and culture, and resonate around the world. King recalls a seminal period when artistic expression had the power to electrify and divide a nation.