First published in 1880, same year as Edgar Degas’ The Dancing Lesson and Edouard Manet’s solo show, these Parisian Sketches share the Impressionist fascination with the contemporary life of Paris, the exuberant Paris of the Opera Garnier and the Folies-Bergers. Like the striking images of the early Impressionists, Parisian Sketches is an assault on the visual senses. Composed of a series of intense, meticulously observed literary impressions–of cafe concerts and circus performers, of streetwalkers and hot-chestnut sellers, of forgotten quarters in the grimy, shiny ‘City of Light’– Parisian Sketches recreates Paris with an intimacy and immediacy that confirms Huysmans as one of the masters of 19th century French prose.