MacNamidhe, Margaret. Delacroix and His Forgotten World: The Origins of Romantic Painting. New York: Tauris, 2015. ISBN 978-1-78076-937-0. Pp. 208. $49. In a well-researched study packed with rich illustrations and bolstered by confident prose, MacNamidhe succeeds in resurfacing what has been passed over within the long lineage of critics’ appropriation of Delacroix: painting itself. Her book hinges on Delacroix’s distinctive facture in Scene from the Massacres at Chios of 1824 and brings to life an ignored but charged French art scene of the 1820s that was reeling from the fallout of neoclassical sensibilities. An artist herself, MacNamidhe offers a revealing lens that invites us to focus on the idiosyncrasies and drama of Delacroix’s handling of paint. Confronting in her initial chapter the persistent legacy of art critics and historians whom she views as reading a piecemeal Delacroix through a“proleptic form of modernism”(15), the author instead highlights immediate responses to the artist’s creative interpretations of history painting (particularly that of David and Géricault). Though the names Léon Cogniet, Louis Vitet, Auguste Chauvin, and Étienne-Jean Delécluze have lost meaning to most readers and viewers, looking closely at Delacroix’s paintings through their art criticism offers a fresh take that shakes us out of our distanced and even jaded generalizations of the artist. MacNamidhe’s scrutiny in her subsequent chapter of Delécluze’s reaction to Delacroix’s Chios, for example, frees both critic and artist from the static categories of “classicist”and“romantic”and shows how they in fact reach common ground in their understanding of painting as a transformative agency that acknowledges and addresses the “decline of the Davidian tradition”(40). The remainder of the book continues with close readings of forgotten paintings and writings on art: if Xavier Sigalon’s painting Locusta was so sensational at the Salon of 1824 in its stark contraction of passion and temporality, the fourth chapter asks, why is it Delacroix’s legacy that remains intact when he approached Chios from a completely different angle? As she considers Stendhal’s preference for Sigalon over Delacroix, MacNamidhe elaborates on this question as a way to further underscore the ambiguous facture in Delacroix’s painting that Stendhal passes over for narrative clarity and dramatic intensity. In her ‘envoi’, MacNamidhe nicely reinforces how, within this “critical field of the 1824 Salon” (119), Delacroix worked “within and against ailing traditions”(120) and forged an evocative aesthetic whose treatment of paint and presentation of subject matter vie with and even supersede the dramatic moment depicted. A thorough bibliography and an arsenal of helpful footnotes enhance MacNamidhe’s authoritative voice as she revisits Delacroix and the art criticism of the 1820s, although her readings at times seem to overreach in their intense parsing of single phrases and minute painterly elements. This book is meant for specialists, given the references to now forgotten (if important) artists and art critics and the sophisticated handling of art history scholarship and methodology in general. It is, nonetheless, a commendable contribution that any serious researcher interested 222 FRENCH REVIEW 90.1 Reviews 223 in romantic painting or relationships between the arts in nineteenth-century France will want to consult. University of Delaware Karen F. Quandt Mazzeo,Tilar J. The Hotel on Place Vendôme: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris. New York: HarperCollins, 2014. ISBN 978-0-06-179108-6. Pp. xxii + 292. $27. This work recounts episodes from the lives of the Paris elite who lived or socialized at the Hôtel Ritz during the first half of the twentieth century. Although the hotel’s allure has long since faded, it was the epitome of luxury, status, and modernity from its opening in 1898 to the end of the Second World War. Through its doors passed the rich and powerful: film stars, writers, fashion designers, socialites, royalty in exile, entrepreneurs, and journalists. The institution was founded by César Ritz, the son of a Swiss peasant, who rose to the top of the hotel profession. This work’s eighteen vignettes stand independently, each featuring a prominent figure associated with the hotel. In 1898, Marcel Proust, seeking...