Les Petits Maîtres De La Peinture, 1820-1920

This book makes an inventory of the Little Masters of the 19th century painting. The great success of the Impressionists, subjects during their first exhibitions to polemics, as artists rarely were before, occulted numerous painters, often appreciated during their lives, then sunk into oblivion. Little Masters' movement of rehabilitation, whose works were forgotten into the reserves of small-town museums or attics, was begun in 1958 with an exhibition in Dijon Museum of Art, followed by others all around Europe, and knew a spectacular issue when the Musée d'Orsay opened in Paris, where the Great and Little Masters are exposed side by side.

During more than twenty years, with a patient work of documentation and research, Gérald Schurr showed advantage of these "pariahs of the glory". After Schurr's death, Pierre Cabannes went on with the latter's work, fleshing out the notes and adding numerous French and foreign artists.