"I received both volumes at eleven o'clock this morning and I've just finished them. In other words, my dear fellows, has enraptured me for an entire day. It's stunning, dazzling, intoxicating. I have tears in my eyes. So I must unleash these feelings on you, without pausing to sort them out first." So wrote Flaubert, in a letter to the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt on November 13th, 1867. And his enthusiasm was certainly not unfounded, for , here superbly translated for the first time into English by Tina Kover, is undoubtedly one of the greatest novels about art ever written, sitting easily between Balzac's and Zola's --the latter novel Edmond de Goncourt even going so far as to say was nothing but a rewriting of . This is one of the masterpieces of European literature--a panorama of the world of the painters of France during the mid-nineteenth century--the schools, the studios, the salons--the successes and failures, the magnificent inspirations and the crushing disillusions of the artists.