MERIMEE, J.F.L.

First edition. Faber Birren: Perhaps the most important book on painting of the early 19th century was [the present work]... In the book Merimee discussed varnishes, pigments, vehicles and the technique of painting. He defended the Van Eycks as the inventors of oil painting, eulogized the methods of the old Masters, referred to Lairesse and Mengs, and reviewed the craft of painting. But if the work was famous in its own time, it soon became an epitaph of a dead past - an obsolete and quaint record of an earlier age.? - History of color in painting, p. 55