Julian Barnes began writing about art with a chapter on Gericault"s "The Raft of the Medusa" in his 1989 novel "A History of the World in 10.5 Chapters". Since then he has written a series of remarkable essays, chiefly about French artists, which trace the story of how art made its way from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism. Fully illustrated in colour throughout, "Keeping an Eye Open" contains Barnes’ essays on Gericault, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Cezanne, Degas, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Howard Hodgkin and Lucian Freud.