While the Civil War raged in America, another very different revolution was beginning to take shape across the Atlantic: one fought in the studios of Paris against the art world's ancient regime. Ross King delivers a page-turning account of real-life rivalry in the act of artistic creation, personified by Edouard Manet as he challenged the conservative French academy and the supremacy of its most celebrated painter, Ernest Meissonier. Illuminated by their legendary supporters and critics - Zola, Delacroix, Courbet, Baudelaire, Whistler, Monet, Hugo, Degas - Ross King shows that their contest was not just about Art, it was about how to see the world. The author of Brunelleschi's Dome, Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, and two novels (Ex-Libris and Domino), Ross King lives in England.