BOOKS – A REVOLUTION ON CANVAS

Art history is never quite as settled as it seems. Paris’s first book, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2022), traces the activity of more than 1,300 women who exhibited more than 7,000 works of art across genres in London’s and Paris’s premier exhibition venues over the course of the Revolutionary era—upending longstanding tropes about women artists and demonstrating that they professionalized in significant numbers a century earlier than was previously thought. It was named one of the top art books of 2022 by The Art Newspaper and The Conversation and won several academic prizes.

Book cover for “A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830” by Paris A. Spies-Gans, featuring a classical painting of a woman reaching through clouds.

“This beautiful volume demolishes the historical fallacy of women’s absence with scholarly rigor and visual splendor.”

— Stansky Book Prize

    • Named one of the top art books of 2022 by The Art Newspaper

    • Named one of the top art books of 2022 by The Conversation

    • Winner of the NACBS 2023 Stansky Book Prize for the best book on British studies after 1800

    • Winner of the Historians of British Art Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period between 1600-1800

    • Received the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies’ Louis A. Gottschalk Prize, Honorable Mention, for an outstanding historical or critical study on the eighteenth century

    • Shortlisted for the William MB Berger Prize for excellence in the field of British art history

  • “New Books – Paris Spies-Gans,” History: the Journal of the Historical Association

    David Marcus, “Paris A. Spies-Gans Is Pulling Women Artists Into Mainstream Art History,” Princeton Alumni Weekly  (January 30, 2023)

  • “This publication…might be one of the most anticipated art history books of the year” — Sotheby’s Old Master Minute


    “Revelatory” — Sebastian Smee, The Washington Post


    “Exhaustive, groundbreaking research. . . . [A] beautifully produced book.” — Jacqueline Riding, The Art Newspaper’s “Top Art Books of 2022”


    “The book is not only engrossing and stuffed with ravishing images, but also offers a truly pioneering rebuttal to ‘revisionist’ art history by claiming that, in this case, no revision is needed: women artists were already great.” — Eliza Goodpasture, The Conversation 


    “It blows apart the clichéd but hard-to-shift notions of women artists as few in number, pursuing careers that blurred the lines between professional and amateur […] An important contribution to the field.” — Tabitha Barber, The Art Newspaper


    “This beautiful volume demolishes the historical fallacy of women’s absence with scholarly rigor and visual splendor.” — Stansky Book Prize


    “A Revolution on Canvas is a book that fills a true lacuna in extant scholarship … a welcome, beautifully constructed, and much-needed addition to our field… [a] major correction to the notion that women inevitably accepted exclusion from the world of art in the eighteenth century.” — Louis A. Gottschalk Prize


    “By bringing together the surviving documentary evidence … and making a data-driven analysis of broader trends, the book makes a highly ambitious and original contribution.” — Brigid von Preussen, Art History


    “A significant contribution to the fields of art, gender, and cultural history. . . . Beautifully produced . . . timely and foundational.” — Julia Dabbs, Early Modern Women

  • Brigid von Preussen, “A Woman’s Work,” Art History 48, no. 1 (February 2025)

    Julia Dabbs, Review in Early Modern Women 19, no. 1 (September 2024)

    Clare Bucknell, “Don’t wait to be asked,” London Review of Books 45, no. 5 (March 2, 2023)

    Eliza Goodpasture, “The best art books of 2022,” The Conversation (December 22, 2022)

    Jacqueline Riding, “Some of the top art books of 2022,” The Art Newspaper (December 2022)

    Peter Saenger, “Women at Work,” The Wall Street Journal (October 8-9, 2022)

    Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable (August 15, 2022)

    Critic’s pick, “The Critic’s Notebook,” The New Criterion (July 19, 2022)

    Norma Clarke, “Pioneering Paintresses,” Literary Review (July 2022)

    Tabitha Barber, “New book reveals how women artists in the ‘Age of Revolutions’ confound stereotypes,” The Art Newspaper (July 4, 2022)

    “Off the Shelf: Apollo’s selection of recently published books on art, architecture, and the history of collecting,” Apollo (May 2022)

Header image: Adrienne Marie Louise Grandpierre-Deverzy, “The Studio of Abel de Pujol”, 1822, Musée Marmottan Monet