It simply wants to tell a story, a story about the beginnings of Impressionism. King's The Judgement of Paris: Manet, Meissonier and an Artistic Revolution doesn't have that kind of historical imagination. Anything else makes revolution look easy. Only then are you able to gauge the magnitude of the change. But as with all novelties that have become normal, the real historical task is to envisage not liking them, not understanding them - to imagine yourself as one of those who visited Manet's 1863 exhibition and, as King says, 'menaced his canvases with their walking sticks'. We retrospectively cast ourselves amongst the enlightened few. When we look back on that great cultural revolution, the long birth of modern art, we tend to forget tactfully what our own tastes would likely have been.

If you'd been around then, chances are you'd have derided them.

You may like them now, but at the time few people did. Almost certainly, you would not have thrilled to his paintings. God forbid - but good questions, anyway, and of course you can't be sure, except on one point. But would you have seen this mixed up man as saintly - or squalid? Like the citizens of Arles would you have jeered at him? Or would you have been one of the few who offered him friendship? Why not discover the real Van Gogh by inviting him into your home?' An advert for an art-book club once asked: 'How would you have reacted to Van Gogh if you had met him? Yes, you would have thrilled to his paintings.

The Judgment of Paris by Ross King