In American author Booth Tarkington's best-known novels and stories, he describes the changing of the cultural guard in the United States as the moneyed aristocracy gave way to the up-and-coming robber barons and titans of industry. In The Guest of Quesnay, Tarkington casts his social scrutiny on a different continent, using the figure of an American painter in Paris as a lens through which to explore relationships between European and American attitudes and ideals.