eirinnphotography.com

Lunch at the NoMad is a sumptuous affair. Sink into the cushy chairs in the glass-enclosed atrium of the new NoMad Hotel, or one of the surrounding rooms, and prepare to feast.

The wait staff is plentiful with a Danny Meyer-esque attention to detail. No surprise since the restaurant is owned by Eleven Madison Park’s chef Daniel Humm and restaurateur Will Guidara, who bought Eleven Madison from Mr. Meyer and started their own company. This is their first new venture.

The lunch menu is an abbreviated version of the dinner menu with prices to match. To start there is an expertly poached egg with asparagus, quinoa and parmesan ($17) and a tagliatelle with king crab, Meyer lemon and black pepper ($19). Lighter entrees include oven-roasted carrots with cumin, wheatberries and crispy duck skin ($20) or seared scallops with sorrel, lemon and maitake mushrooms ($28). If you don’t plan on eating for the rest of the day, treat yourself to the very rich whole-roasted chicken for two, stuffed with black truffles, foie gras and brioche ($78). Ask for the dessert trolley and it shall arrive, along with a wide variety of tea and coffee options.

Parting words come with the check: “We should do this more often,” reads a business card. Indeed.

The NoMad, at 1170 Broadway and 28th Street; serving lunch noon to 2 p.m.; 347-472-5660.

—Sumathi Reddy

A version of this article appeared April 23, 2012, on page A19 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Attention to the Details.

Harper

A dark but droll story of strangers seeking refuge after a nearby train accident and refusing to leave.

“The Uninvited Guests” by Sadie Jones (Harper, May 1)

A dilapidated English country house, called Sterne, is the setting for this dark but droll story of strangers seeking refuge after a nearby train accident and refusing to leave. The eccentric family living at Sterne, who are celebrating a birthday, initially welcome and comfort the pale wanderers, but soon find themselves overwhelmed by their demands. No further description of the plot is possible without ruining much of the thrill of the story. I’ll only say that I read “The Uninvited Guests” a couple of months ago, and I’m still haunted by it. Ms. Jones’s earlier work, “The Outcast,” won the Costa Book Awards prize for First Novel.

Thames & Hudson

A paean to the physicality of the bound and printed word.

“Bookshelf” by Alex Johnson (Thames & Hudson, May 1)

My own bookshelves are conventionally functional, unlike many of the bookshelves pictured in Mr. Johnson’s paean to the physicality of the bound and printed word. Many of the featured bookshelves are more like sculpture than furniture, but they nonetheless store books. One shelf holds not only a pile of books but also a bicycle. Another set of shelves is built into the sides of a sculpted cow. If bookshelves eventually go the way of spinning wheels and washboards, Mr. Johnson’s book will remind our descendants of the whimsy and glory of making theater out of book storage.

Henry Holt & Co.

The eagerly anticipated sequel to Ms. Mantel’s riveting “Wolf Hall,” “Bring Up the Bodies” picks up Thomas Cromwell’s life in 1535, when he is chief minister to Henry VIII.

“Bring Up the Bodies” by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt & Co., May

The eagerly anticipated sequel to Ms. Mantel’s riveting “Wolf Hall,” “Bring Up the Bodies” picks up Thomas Cromwell’s life in 1535, when he is chief minister to Henry VIII. Henry has been waiting impatiently for his wife, Anne Boleyn, to bear a son, but now he is falling in love with Jane Seymour. Anne must go, and Cromwell must help make that happen. In an interview in the Guardian, Ms. Mantel said, “When I came to write about the destruction of Anne Boleyn (a destruction which took place, essentially, over a period of three weeks) the process of writing and the writing itself took on an alarming intensity, and by the time Anne was dead I felt I had passed through a moral ordeal. I can only guess that the effect on the reader will be the same.”

—Send your questions about books and reading to Cynthia Crossen at booklover@wsj.com.

By ERIC FELTEN

The United Nations hosted a “High Level Meeting on Happiness and Well-being” in New York this week. The confab’s point was that judging the success of societies solely by material measures such as Gross National Product fails to capture everything that goes into a life well-lived. True enough, but I do wonder how accurate a sense of happiness anyone can have who is willing to sit through a U.N. conference.

The Gross National Happiness business is generally taken as a rebuke of U.S. culture. Look at the trap we’re in—for all our grasping and getting, we aren’t any happier! Why not be more like those happiness chart-toppers in Denmark? And I’m inclined to agree as long as we’re talking about pickled herring and aquavit. (Though let me state for the record that, having grown up in Arizona, I refuse to believe that anyone can be happy someplace that is cold and dark half the year.)

Why should we care if Danes claim to be marginally more content than we? It’s remarkable how eager we are to compare our happiness to that of others. And yet for all this comparative happiness anxiety, not to mention the many books about how to be happy, we don’t like the idea of being too happy. We worry that all joy and no strife makes Jack a dull boy. Take an episode this season of the television comedy “Modern Family,” in which daughter Haley finds herself flummoxed by her college application essay. She has to write on the theme, “What is the biggest obstacle you’ve ever had to overcome?” Which turns out to be a problem given her life of sylvan suburban affluence.

“I can’t do this!” Haley whines to her mother. “I’ve never had any obstacles to overcome.”

“Well,” says her mother, searching, searching for a worthy impediment, “you’re lactose intolerant.”

Despairing of the requisite despair, Haley blames her mother: “It’s all your fault. You’ve shielded me from everything interesting and dangerous.” Run-of-the-mill happiness, it turns out, can be a problem—it lacks the grand emotional drama our Young Werthers long to suffer. Or as Haley laments, “I’ve lived a boring, sheltered, pathetic life.”

It’s a complaint especially common to the creative class, who have long held that the biggest impediment to their arts is a lack of impediments in their lives. “One form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts,” Thornton Wilder once said in a bout of misery-envy. “Perhaps I should have been a better man if I had had an unequivocally unhappy childhood.” We’ve all been preached the benefits of Tiger Mothers and French Mothers; maybe it’s time for a book on the advantages of hateful, neglectful mothers.

Adele is hardly the first singer-songwriter to credit heartache with her best work. The biggest risk to her chart-topping, Grammy-winning ways may not be balky vocal cords but the newfound happiness of her situation.

It isn’t just art that demands unhappiness for success. “A miserable childhood in the worst part of Memphis was typically excellent emotional preparation for what was required on a football defense,” Michael Lewis wrote in “The Blind Side.” Who, among the happy, have the requisite anger and aggression? “The NFL was loaded with players who had mined a loveless, dysfunctional childhood for sensational acts of violence.”

These are all variations on a theme—that being happy, being satisfied, saps the will to strive, to create. It’s why we don’t usually expect trust-fund babies to be cracker-jack entrepreneurs. For all our happiness talk, we actually cultivate dissatisfaction. We don’t want to hog-wallow in the useless sort of contentment that H.L. Mencken derided as “the dull, idiotic happiness of the barnyard.”

Such questions are for philosophers and theologians (and yes, for each of us in our own lives)—what’s the right sort of happiness? what’s the right amount? But as the U.N. conference shows, economists are eager to horn in on the action. They may not be able to predict when housing bubbles will burst, but they’re prepared to unravel the mysteries of the human heart. Good luck with that.

—Write me at EricFelten@WSJPostmodern.com

By BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER

The playing of the British violinist Daniel Hope, who is performing at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall this Sunday, is not just distinguished by its tonal beauty, but by its compelling rhetorical quality—the 38-year-old’s phrasing seems often to express an unwritten text. Perhaps this is the result of growing up in a literary household. Mr. Hope’s father is the novelist and poet Christopher Hope, whose earlier poetry, critical of apartheid, had obliged the family to leave South Africa for Britain, and whose novels since then have garnered important British literary awards.

Zina Saunders

A student of the celebrated Russian teacher Zakhar Bron at London’s Royal Academy of Music, Daniel Hope was from early childhood a protégé of the violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin, who in 1999 made his last public appearance conducting Mr. Hope in Alfred Schnittke’s technically daunting Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Chamber Orchestra. During the last six seasons of the venerable Beaux Arts Trio, Mr. Hope was its violinist, the youngest member in its history.

Mr. Hope’s interests range beyond the classical repertoire, however. In a recent series of conversations and emails, he noted: “My goal is always to keep my ears as wide open as possible. I have been privileged to work with many great classical musicians, from Menuhin to [the Beaux Arts' founder and pianist] Menahem Pressler, who imparted so much wisdom. Intense study with Indian musicians such as Gaurav Majumdar and Zakir Hussain has inspired me to rethink my view of instrumental sound. And some of the most spontaneous and inspiring recording sessions I ever experienced were with Sting, a consummate and fiercely intelligent musician from an entirely different genre.”

Mr. Hope’s activities also include administering music festivals on two continents. He is artistic director of Germany’s Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival, with which he has been associated for two decades. And since 2002 he has also served as associate artistic director of the Savannah Music Festival, in Georgia, where artistic director Rob Gibson has given free rein to Mr. Hope’s remarkably catholic taste in programming. Talking about this year’s Savannah season (March 22-April 7), Mr. Hope noted that “Savannah’s hallmark is its cultural diversity, and on any given day our programs range from, say, the Baroque to Brahms to Edgar Meyer, from Fauré to Portuguese Fado, from Béla Fleck to Chris Thile. It’s a celebration of music in all its many forms.”

During his current visit to New York, Mr. Hope is leading another celebration. On Sunday he joins pianist Wu Han, violist Paul Neubauer, cellist David Finckel and violinist Erin Keefe of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in “Inspired by Joachim.” The concert program reflects Mr. Hope’s investigation into the work and influence of the great 19th-century Austro-Hungarian violinist and composer Joseph Joachim, who also inspired his critically acclaimed Deutsche Grammophon recording “The Romantic Violinist: A Celebration of Joseph Joachim.” Mr. Hope said that, “In a sense, we are reintroducing one of the 19th century’s most transcendent violinists and musical minds to today’s New York audience.”

Joachim (1831-1907) is best known to posterity for his close friendship with Johannes Brahms, whom he introduced to Robert and Clara Schumann. But there is a great deal more to his story. “As dedicatee of Brahms’s Violin Concerto, Joachim is the name that every violinist first encounters when he opens that score,” Mr. Hope observed. “But it was not until I read his collected letters that I realized the true extent of his influence on the major composers of the day.

“Most fascinating is his correspondence with Brahms and with Max Bruch, going into tremendous detail about interpretive suggestions for both composers’ violin concertos. Bruch wrote his G-Minor Concerto for another violinist, but Joachim took it and revised it completely into ‘his’ piece. In fact, Bruch worried that if people read his correspondence with Joachim, they would think Joachim had written the concerto himself. Also of great interest were the letters voicing Joachim’s very public break with Liszt and the school of music he represented—after having studied with Liszt at Weimar. It was a move that shook the music world.”

A protégé of Felix Mendelssohn, Joachim had triumphantly played Beethoven’s Violin Concerto under Mendelssohn’s baton in London in 1844, helping establish that work in the core repertoire. As part of the Brahms-Schumann circle, Joachim performed, composed, formed the celebrated Joachim Quartet, founded the Berlin Music Academy and enjoyed an unassailable reputation for the dignity and purity of his playing. His influence as the teacher of more than 400 violinists was equivalent to that of Liszt in the keyboard realm, despite their aesthetic differences.

“Joachim’s concert programming was ‘cutting edge’ for his time,” Mr. Hope said. “He reintroduced Bach solo sonatas, he initiated entire programs of string quartets when mixed programs of chamber music, operatic selections and other genres were customary.”

Joachim not only conducted the English premiere of Brahms’s First Symphony, but also played the premieres of his Violin Concerto and his Double Concerto for Violin and Cello, both having been composed for him (and Robert Hausmann, cellist of the Joachim Quartet, in the latter instance). In addition, the Schumann-Brahms circle included Bruch, Albert Dietrich, Antonin Dvořák and several other important composers, all of whom wrote works for him.

The Tully Hall program will thus reflect Joachim as inspiration to one of Central Europe’s most important musical coteries. On the bill are Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Opus 25 and several of his Hungarian Dances arranged by Joachim for violin and piano; Dvořák’s “Echo of Songs” for String Quartet, B. 152; and the Schumann and Brahms movements from their collaborative “F-A-E” Sonata. In addition, audiences will be treated to Joachim’s own Romanze, Opus 2 and his Sostenuto and Andante Cantabile from “Hebrew Melodies,” Opus 9, after Lord Byron.

“Joachim’s writing for the violin is technically extremely challenging, yet always wonderfully intelligent,” Mr. Hope said. “You never find virtuosity for its own sake. His concern was with expression and with expressing fundamental musical values.” All in all, Sunday’s program will place Joachim in his historical context while placing familiar and unfamiliar works against the backdrop of his influential life.

Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.

Corrections & Amplifications: An earlier version of this article identified Menahem Pressler as a veteran cellist.

A version of this article appeared February 9, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Inspired by Joseph Joachim.

By CORINNA DA FONSECA-WOLLHEIM

New York

In the summer of 2009, cellist David Finckel and his wife, pianist Wu Han, were in Prague, visiting the Lobkowicz palace that is nestled inside the castle. As concert musicians and presenters—they are the artistic directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center—the name was familiar to them. Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowicz, at the turn of the 19th century, commissioned some of the finest string quartets from Haydn and Beethoven; the “Eroica” Symphony is dedicated to him. While they were admiring the paintings by Velázquez, Tintoretto and Brueghel on display, a man entered the room, whom Mr. Finckel recognized from his visitor’s guide as William Lobkowicz, the current owner of the palace. Without pausing to think, says Mr. Finckel, “I chased him down, jumped in front, stuck out my hand and said, ‘I just have to thank you for helping Beethoven!’”

This month, Mr. Finckel is repaying his debt in the form of “Immortal Investments,” a festival at Alice Tully Hall presented by the Chamber Music Society that is dedicated to the men and women who financed and inspired great music. The opening concert on Feb. 10, featuring the vivacious Jupiter Quartet, celebrated the Lobkowicz legacy; concerts on Feb. 24, 26 and 28 will honor two visionary women whose patronage enabled some of the most groundbreaking works of the early 20th century.

“As a musician,” says Mr. Finckel, “I just have to stop and think: If Beethoven’s Opus 18 quartets didn’t exist, what would the world be like? We take a work like the ‘Eroica Symphony’ for granted. It’s like the Rock of Gibraltar—it’s always been there. But it might not have been there had the composers not been inspired by or pleaded with a patron, or had they not had some composure in their lives because someone gave them a little money.”

The relationship between patron and composer became more personal—and prone to negotiation—when the era of liveried composer-servants came to an end in the late 1700s. While a court composer like Bach turned out works in the service of a longtime employer who, as Mr. Finckel puts it, “needed music the way we need milk,” the Romantic era brought with it the ideal of the autonomous artist who needed a sponsor—not a boss.

When Beethoven, always a prickly self-promoter, became impatient with the hustle for patronage—the kind that earned him a gold snuffbox from King Friedrich Wilhelm II in return for two cello sonatas—it was Lobkowicz who organized a consortium of donors to pay the composer an annual stipend that granted him creative freedom.

As the 19th century progressed, composers became more autonomous. “Brahms never accepted a commission in his life,” says Mr. Finckel. “He always wrote what he wanted to write.” That his music was nevertheless shaped by its dedicatees was the premise of the Chamber Music Society concert on Feb. 12 of works written for the virtuoso violinist Joseph Joachim. Without him, it is unlikely that Brahms would have written as testosterone-charged a piano quartet as the G-minor Opus 25, which was given an incandescent performance by Mr. Finckel and Ms. Han, joined by violinist Daniel Hope and violist Paul Neubauer.

The culture of salons put women at the center of artistic production. The final concerts of the festival focus on two American contemporaries, Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac (1865-1943) and Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (1864-1953).

“The two women could not have been more different,” says Mr. Finckel. “Polignac was, by all accounts, a wild and crazy woman. She was flamboyant, she was generous—she supported hospitals and charities—but her real world was her salon. She created her own universe around her, and she was like a center of gravity that pulled people toward her. Coolidge was much more businesslike, more of a public servant.”

The roster of talent they cultivated speaks for itself. In her Paris salon, Singer hosted writers, artists and composers—including Erik Satie and Manuel de Falla, Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau, Sergei Diaghilev and Igor Stravinsky. The works she commissioned from them were often substantial and included operas such as Falla’s “El Retablo del Maese Pedro,” Darius Milhaud’s “Les Malheurs d’Orphée” and Stravinsky’s “Renard.”

Just as impressive, says Mr. Finckel, was her adventurous approach to programming. Concerts in her home might feature early music by John Dowland and Heinrich Schütz alongside recent compositions by Gabriel Fauré and Polignac’s husband, the amateur composer Edmond de Polignac.

Coolidge, a gifted pianist based in Washington, D.C., combined a wide-ranging curiosity about new music with a clear focus on chamber music, a genre that she felt needed more passionate advocacy in America. In that vein she commissioned string quartets from Béla Bartók, Sergei Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten and Arnold Schoenberg, and chamber works from Samuel Barber and Stravinsky. Her foundation commissioned “Appalachian Spring” from Aaron Copeland, a work that will be at the center of the Feb. 26 and 28 concerts.

While Mr. Finckel’s aim is, above all, to celebrate the work of past patrons, he also hopes some audience members will be inspired to emulate them. For pointers, they might look to the concerts on April 5 and 26 showcasing chamber works commissioned by new-music power couple Linda and Stuart Nelson and by Klaus Lauer, a fiercely modernist concert presenter and hotelier from Germany. “He really knew what he liked,” says Mr. Finckel. “And people were like, if he’s that passionate about it, I’ll go along for the ride.”

Ms. Fonseca-Wollheim writes about classical music for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared February 21, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: In Praise of the Patron.

By MICHAEL HSU

“YOU CAN’T TELL if any chair is comfortable until you’ve occupied it for at least an hour,” Charles Eames once said, “and then you should return to it again and again in different moods.” Today we might need to add to that, “And with different gadgets.”

Our gear, of course, affects the way we sit. There’s a difference between kicking back with a book and kicking back with a Nook. Still, it makes sense to smudge the line between ordinary furniture and the tech-centric kind. After all, gadgets have gotten so small that they’re practically appendages. Your ottoman may be intended for your legs, but it also makes a sensible spot for your laptop. When your smartphone keyboard fits in your hand, the armrests on your seat become a de facto keyboard tray. Furniture can’t keep up with technology, but these days, it really doesn’t need to.

The tools that keep us productive are also sources of entertainment—the same applies to Lounge Chair 2.0. Whether you’re working on a presentation or checking Facebook, it’s nice to have a space within a space—your living room, bedroom or even deck—that’s semi-private, quiet and, above all, inviting. We’ve pulled together a handful of luxurious sofas and lounge chairs that masquerade as intimate micro cubicles, theaters and reading nooks depending on the task—or distraction—at hand.

1. Cappellini’s Capo Chair

Serge Bloch

Cappellini’s Capo Chair

With its slightly pitched seat, Capo is a chair that you lean back in. Designer Doshi Levien gave the chair flat armrests that splay outward. Because the armrests start out narrow and get wider as they move away from you, they’re not ideal for typing on, but they do give you a convenient spot to rest your laptop or tablet. Like your tablet, the Capo appears impossibly light—it’s little more than legs and upholstery. The designers compare the chair’s high walls to an upturned collar. Understandably, the sides are not so tall that you can’t see over them when seated, and they’re rigid but offer a bit of give. Even without walling you off, though, Capo lets you opt for privacy. Turn Capo’s back to the room (it’s light enough to do this easily), and there’s no mistaking that you’d prefer not to be disturbed. $5,000, cappellini.it

2. Blå Station’s Innovation C

Serge Bloch

Blå Station’s Innovation C

The Innovation C may look like it was designed for intergalactic space travel, but the chair can complement grand, traditional spaces as well. (I first came across these chairs in the centuries-old, medieval Salaborsa Library in Bologna, Italy, where they dot the periphery of the ground floor.) Its novel shape—essentially two parallel planes—also happens to be practical. What’s most innovative about Innovation C is its open-endedness. Instead of a vertical seat back, Innovation C’s goes horizontal, offering a comfortable place to rest your elbows when you’re leaning back (no bulky armrests required). Swivel the chair around so the seat back is in front of you and you’ve got a surface on which to rest your laptop or book (it’s set at the perfect height for working) or lean on while making a phone call. $4,525, blastation.com

3. Jayson Home’s Canopy Chair

Serge Bloch

Jayson Home’s Canopy Chair

Lest you assume all visually and acoustically isolating seating to be a product of the iPod age, behold the Canopy Chair. It’s a reproduction of a “porter’s chair,” which hails from the 16th century. Back in the day, the hall porter would hunker down in one of these; the high seat back and sides protected him from front-door drafts, while the hooded headrest helped him stay attuned to distant sounds. Its signature headrest is just as practical today. The “hoodie” is kind of like holding your hands up to your ears: In noisy environments, it makes conversations more intelligible; in quieter places, chatting with someone feels more intimate. If the burlap and exposed brass nailheads of this reproduction aren’t your style, there are other equivalents. Jaime Hayon’s Showtime Poltrona for BD Barcelona is a sleeker, but no less spectacular version, and it comes in glossy indoor and matte outdoor versions. $1,895, jaysonhome.com

4. Moroso’s Take a Line for a Walk

Moroso’s Take a Line for a Walk

If walling yourself off from the rest of the room is too extreme, designer Alfredo Häberli’s Take a Line for a Walk strikes a good balance between intro- and extroversion. As with Arne Jacobsen’s iconic Egg Chair (the midcentury classic that this chair evokes with more angular lines), the generously proportioned seat encourages you to curl up, while the enveloping headrest gives you a sense of separation without coming off as anti-social. It does an exceptional job of blocking out the periphery so you can pay attention to what’s in front of you. There’s a matching ottoman to complete the look, as well as a version of the chair with a low integrated footrest made of tubular metal that lets you take a load off without wondering whether you should remove your shoes. $4,126, moroso.com

5. Vitra’s Alcove Sofa

Marc Eggimann © Vitra

Vitra’s Alcove Sofa

The Alcove Sofa’s soft, high walls allow it to play impromptu meeting area, workspace or nap spot—it serves all three purposes exceptionally well. Plop down in one and you’re surrounded by the equivalent of sound-absorbing tile, which makes it ideal for contemplation, intimate conversation or recording the next episode of your YouTube series. Designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec supply the sofa with firm, fitted pillows, rather than overstuffed ones, to give rigor to what will easily be the coziest and most coveted spot in a home or office. (The Love Seat model is shown here.) The Alcove aspires to be a serious workplace as well. A single-seater “Workstation” model has a contoured desk on one side that flips up to reveal a storage compartment with slots to run cables through. It’s the type of cubicle you’d want to trade your office for. $9,225, vitra.com

6. Offecct’s Small Room

Serge Bloch

Offecct’s Small Room

As its name suggests, Ineke Hans’s series of short to long sofas provides the building blocks for creating a room within a room. The sofas have high backs and sides (roughly five-and-a-half-feet tall) and come in three complementary sizes—1, 1½ and 2 meters (about 3¼- to 6-feet long)—so they can be mixed and matched to fit various expanses. (The 1½-meter version is shown here.) Because each sofa has one enclosed side, they can be arranged in any combination (in a line, back to back, flipped front to back). The wide armrest can be outfitted with a writing surface or even a built-in flowerpot.$4,076, offecct.se

By JIM FUSILLI

Hendersonville, Tenn.

Marty Stuart keeps a warehouse here that’s filled with guitars, paintings, photographs and miscellany said to constitute the world’s largest private collection of country-music memorabilia. It includes several of Johnny Cash’s guitars, a coat worn by Hank Williams, Porter Wagoner’s rhinestone boots and a briefcase of songs that rode in Jimmie Rodgers’s casket on his funeral train.

Christopher Serra

The warehouse is a cheerful, reverent space that Mr. Stuart enriches with his presence. Though his rooster-comb hair is now silver-gray, at 53 he looks much as he did when he came to Nashville some four decades ago. Mr. Stuart’s new album is “Nashville, Vol. 1: Tear the Woodpile Down” (Sugar Hill), a rollicking collection with a spirit that comes from what Mr. Stuart calls “the Old Testament days” of country music. It avoids current Nashville trends that, in a grab for a mainstream audience, repudiate most of what’s great about traditional country. Mr. Stuart rejects the overly processed, market-driven music that uses arena rock as a template rather than his country idols of Cash, Rodgers, Wagoner and Williams.

He says he’s well aware of what’s going on, having for years issued muscled-up pseudo-country music in a bid for wider acclaim. To his mind, the glossy music coming out of Nashville today is bad country and bad rock.

“When I was playing the chart game, I was embarrassed to play my albums for my rock friends,” he said, mentioning Tom Petty and Jack White. “When people think of country music, they want a feeling of authenticity. Now you have to homogenize.” He recalled an insight Cash once shared with him: “In trying to become all things to all people, we have virtually become nothing.”

“That knowledge comes from his own hard-won wisdom,” Mr. Stuart said. “If it’s chart or heart, choose the heart. It’ll take you to the right place.”

The line from Mr. Stuart’s career to the origins of country isn’t hard to follow. At 13, he joined Lester Flatt’s group. In the 1940s, Flatt was a member of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, the seminal band in country-music history. Two Blue Grass members, Flatt and Earl Scruggs, later found an audience in the ’60s and ’70s in a Woodstock Generation searching for authentic American roots music. “When rock ‘n’ roll hit, Flatt and Scruggs never wavered,” he said. “Their sonic empire was founded on something beyond the commercial.”

One day, Mr. Stuart was tempted to leave Flatt’s band. “I went to Lester and told him I’d been offered a job with Glen Campbell in California. Seven hundred and fifty dollars a week. At the time, I was making $165 with Lester. He hugged me around my neck and said, ‘You’re not ready.’ And he was right.

“When he saw something that helped me, he pushed me toward doing it. That’s the kind of mentoring that’s divinely ordered,” he said. “I had a lot of wisdom around me.”

Flatt died in 1979, and a year later Mr. Stuart was in a hotel in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, when Cash called from Des Moines. “He asked, ‘You got anything black to wear?’” Mr. Stuart jumped in the car; the assignment lasted five years. On stage one evening, Mr. Stuart extended a mandolin solo well beyond the point of reason. Cash leaned over and told him, “Saying too much of something is the same as saying nothing.”

Mr. Stuart went out on his own in 1985. Since then, he’s released 16 solo studio albums, the past six—including “Tear the Woodpile Down”—with the Fabulous Superlatives.

On the new album, Mr. Stuart and his band touch on many streams of what constitutes traditional country, the kind welcomed more by Americana music fans than those who consume what comes these days from Nashville’s Music Row. “A Matter of Time” is a twangy country waltz with bite and “Truck Drivers’ Blues” chugs along on the thwacks across a mandolin’s strings. Mr. Stuart’s haunting composition “The Lonely Kind” is delivered with Roy Orbison-like poignancy. Hank Williams III joins in on his grandfather’s tune “Pictures From Life’s Other Side,” while Lorrie Carter Bennett, heir to the Carter Family mantle, is Mr. Stuart’s vocal duet partner in his composition “A Song of Sadness.”

Mr. Stuart and his band have showcased the songs on “The Marty Stuart Show,” which appears weekly on cable’s RFD-TV. It’s reminiscent of “The Porter Wagoner Show,” which ran for more than 20 years beginning in 1960. As a boy, Mr. Stuart watched it with his dad back in Philadephia.

A few years ago, Mr. Stuart visited Wagoner, a man he says provided comfort and stability with his music and presence on television. “Porter was just sitting around, staring at walls,” he recalled. “I said, ‘You got any songs? I want to produce you.’ He’d been keeping them secret, and it was the sound I hadn’t heard in years except in slivers and splinters. He thought he’d have to make a contemporary country record to be heard.”

Music Row rejected the album by Wagoner, once known as Mr. Grand Ole Opry. The independent label Anti released it, and shortly before his death in 2007, Wagoner played Madison Square Garden, opening for the White Stripes. Mr. Stuart sat in on guitar. “The Wagonmaster went out on top,” Mr. Stuart said with pride.

Mr. Stuart’s new disc reaffirms his commitment to the predecessors he calls “legacy artists” and “cultural missionaries.” With Flatt and Cash, he said, “I was what I needed to be—part of a great fraternity.

“The music that I love the very most is traditional country,” he said. “It’s an empowering force of our own country. I felt it was fading away. So I went back to what made me fall in love with it. I thought, ‘Let’s make it again and see who shows up.’”

Mr. Fusilli is the Journal’s rock and pop music critic. Email him at jfusilli@wsj.com or follow him on Twitter: @wsjrock.

A version of this article appeared May 1, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Crossing Music Row.

By ERIC GIBSON

New York

Prospective visitors to the Frick Collection can be excused for looking askance at the title of its latest exhibition, “Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting.” Given that Impressionism is a style associated primarily with landscapes and vistas of Paris, it may seem like another attempt to squeeze one more drop from that old reliable cash cow, like the book published a few years ago titled “Impressionist Cats and Dogs.”

As it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth. This is a solid, groundbreaking exhibition that takes us into a byway of Impressionism we knew little about—and makes us want to linger. It’s also a show that, despite its modest size, goes a long way to rehabilitate Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s reputation. If your view of him is a shallow, facile artist partial to abundantly fleshy nudes painted in vivid pinks and purples—Rubens in the ice-cream parlor—you’re in for a surprise. This Renoir is an artist of depth and a probing artistic temperament.

Organized by Colin B. Bailey, the Frick’s deputy director and chief curator, the show consists of just nine pictures, most depicting one or two full-length, canvas-filling figures. The Frick’s own “La Promenade” (1875-76), of a mother out in the park with her two young daughters, anchors the selection, which includes “The Umbrellas (Les Parapluies)” (c. 1881-85) from London’s National Gallery; “La Parisienne” (1874) from the National Museum of Wales, of a woman decked out, head to toe, in a magnificent blue dress and hat; and three paintings of dancing couples, two from the Museé d’Orsay in Paris and one, “Dance at Bougival” (1883), from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (Once the Frick’s show closes, these last three will be exhibited together in Boston from May 26 through Sept. 3.) It is an intriguing group of pictures, one with enough similarities and differences that rather than fixating on a single one, you will find it almost impossible to keep still, your eyes and, when necessary, your whole body shifting from one to another, back again, and then on to still another as you compare details large and small.

Renoir’s paintings here illustrate the paradoxical notion that it’s possible to be a great painter without necessarily being a good one. Take “The Dancer,” his 1874 portrait of a young ballerina turning to look out at us while adopting a dance pose. Renoir has composed his figure as if he believed a corkscrew, rather than the spinal column, is the main structural element around which the human body is organized. Everything rotates around the center—the head, the torso, the legs—yet none of it makes anatomical sense. Indeed it’s almost painful to imagine how the dancer’s legs might attach to her invisible pelvis underneath her tutu. We’re a long way from Edgar Degas’s images of ballerinas, so accurate that they can instill in us the same sensations of physical strain his dancers are shown experiencing.

Yet such technical limitations don’t diminish the picture; they simply make you see that Renoir’s mastery lies elsewhere. The girl’s tutu is rendered in a lush shimmer of blues and whites, with Renoir capturing through that narrow tonal range the garment’s form, texture and, in particular, tulle’s characteristic mix of stiffness and fluffiness.

Clothing, in fact, is one of the main themes of this show. In “La Parisienne,” Renoir captures the complex architecture of his subject’s blue dress by varying color, light and his brushstrokes. So engaged is he by his task—and so accomplished is he at it—that the outfit becomes as much of a “subject” as the sitter herself. Renoir revels in fabrics and materials of all kinds—fur, silk, swansdown, lace, cotton. In every case, he rises to the challenge of finding a pictorial language to convey their physical reality. It is a language that forswears meticulous description for the Impressionist aesthetic of painterly suggestion, where pure color and free paint-handling are allowed to play an independent role in the overall descriptive effect.

The other theme here is psychology. We aren’t used to thinking of Renoir as an artist much interested in the inner life of his fellow man. But these subjects aren’t just foils for his eye and his brush; they’re real people. This becomes evident in the three dance pictures that are juxtaposed on one wall, where Renoir deftly and touchingly captures varying degrees of amorous engagement—or diffidence.

Renoir’s larger achievement here, however, is to have linked Impressionism with the European tradition of monumental figure painting. Paul Cėzanne once famously said he wanted to “make of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art of the museums.” Renoir here does just that. There’s no mistaking these as anything other than Impressionist pictures. Yet they have something more, a presence and a gravitas we associate with Old Master paintings that is in many ways antithetical to Impressionism’s in-the-moment aesthetic of color and light. They feel completely at home in the most unforgiving context you could ask for: the Frick Collection itself, with portraits by El Greco, Ingres, Velázquez, to name just a few, and its Rembrandt self-portrait.

The comparison would have quickly destroyed a lesser artist. Not Renoir. At one point when you turn in the exhibition, you look past two of his paintings down the length of the Frick’s Long Gallery and see, on the very farthest wall in the distance, Piero della Francesca’s somber, inward portrait of St. John the Evangelist. The early Renaissance at one end, the early modern period at the other. The effect is one of a natural continuity, not a rupture.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal’s Leisure & Arts features editor.