In an interview on The Cult of Celebrity

Your next book is set in 19th-century Paris, T J Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life.

The second stage of my history of celebrity focuses on Paris at this time. A new kind of phenomenon is beginning to declare itself, which is the process whereby the fashion industry becomes industrialised and the whole novel notion of glamour attaches itself to people who are known and recognised. T J Clark wrote his wonderful book to study how the great painters of the day, people like Manet, Renoir and Redon, depicted the new, very appearance-conscious life of the city. The Impressionists took off at that time because people of the day aspired to public self-display and therefore, as we understand it, celebrity.

Some of Manet’s best paintings mark out the coincidence of the new fashion and the new self-displaying class. In his painting of the garden at Tuileries the people portrayed were almost all his friends and acquaintances. Manet himself is also in the picture and you can see that people are in the latest fashions. Clark’s wonderful book traces those processes through the paintings. And at the same time he follows up what Brewer was talking about in Pleasures of the Imagination, which is a new type of leisured life, especially in rather shady bars which hovered on the edge of ordinary drinking bars, dance halls and bordellos.

Manet’s famous picture of the girl at the bar of the Folies Bergère shows in the mirror behind the bar the whole scene in the theatre. And this is one of the pictures of the day which most marvellously shows this new kind of social life.