Search results for ""Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art""

A single, monumental mappa mundi (world map), made around 1300 for Hereford Cathedral, survives intact from the Middle Ages. As Marcia Kupfer reveals in her arresting new study, this celebrated testament to medieval learning has long been profoundly misunderstood. Features of the colored and gilded map that baffle modern expectations are typically dismissed as the product of careless execution. Kupfer argues that they should rightly be seen as part of the map’s encoded commentary on the nature of vision itself. Optical conceits and perspectival games formed part of the map’s language of vision, were central to its commission, and shaped its display, formal design, and allegorical fabric. These discoveries compel a sweeping revision of the artwork’s intellectual and art-historical genealogy, as well as its function and aesthetic significance, shedding new light on the impact of scientific discourses in late medieval art. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

As the wife of King George II, Caroline of Ansbach became queen of England in 1727. Known for her intelligence and strong character, Queen Caroline wielded considerable political power until her death in 1737. She was enthusiastic and energetic in her cultural patronage, engaging in projects that touched on the arts, architecture, gardens, literature, science, and natural philosophy. This meticulously researched volume will survey Caroline’s significant contributions to the arts and culture and the ways in which she used her patronage to strengthen the royal family’s connections between the recently installed House of Hanover and English society. She established an extensive library at St. James’s Palace, and her renowned salons attracted many of the great thinkers of the day; Voltaire wrote of her, “I must say that despite all her titles and crowns, this princess was born to encourage the arts and the well-being of mankind.” Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

That Ireland is picturesque is a well-worn cliché, but little is understood of how this perception was created, painted, and manipulated during the long 18th century. This book positions Ireland at the core of the picturesque's development and argues for a far greater degree of Irish influence on the course of European landscape theory and design. Positioned off-axis from the greater force-field, and off-shore from mainland Europe and America, where better to cultivate the oblique perspective? This book charts the creation of picturesque Ireland, while exploring in detail the role and reach of landscape painting in the planning, publishing, landscaping and design of Ireland's historic landscapes, towns, and tourist routes. Thus it is also a history of the physical shaping of Ireland as a tourist destination, one of the earliest, most calculated, and most successful in the world.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

For much of early modern history, the opportunity to be immortalized in a portrait was explicitly tied to social class: only landed elite and royalty had the money and power to commission such an endeavor. But in the second half of the 16th century, access began to widen to the urban middle class, including merchants, lawyers, physicians, clergy, writers, and musicians. As portraiture proliferated in English cities and towns, the middle class gained social visibility—not just for themselves as individuals, but for their entire class or industry.In Citizen Portrait, Tarnya Cooper examines the patronage and production of portraits in Tudor and Jacobean England, focusing on the motivations of those who chose to be painted and the impact of the resulting images. Highlighting the opposing, yet common, themes of piety and self-promotion, Cooper has revealed a fresh area of interest for scholars of early modern British art.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

Paula Murphy, the leading expert on Irish sculpture, offers an extensive survey of the history of sculpture in Ireland in the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on the large public works produced during the Victorian period. The works of such major figures as Patrick MacDowell, John Henry Foley, Thomas Kirk, and Thomas Farrell are discussed —as well as works by a host of lesser-known sculptors, including John Edward Carew, Christopher Moore, James Cahill, and Joseph Robinson Kirk. Lavishly illustrated, the book covers the work of many Irish sculptors who practiced abroad, particularly in London, and the work of English sculptors, including John Flaxman, Francis Chantrey, E. H. Baily, and Richard Westmacott, who were located in Ireland. Murphy makes extensive use of contemporary documentation, much of it from newspapers, to present the sculptors and their work in the religious and political context of their time.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

Literature on domestic interior decoration first emerged as a popular genre in Britain during the 1870s and 1880s, as middle-class readers sought decorating advice from books, household manuals, women’s magazines, and professional journals. This intriguing book examines that literature and shows how it was influenced by the widespread liberalism of the middle class. Judith Neiswander explains that during these years liberal values—individuality, cosmopolitanism, scientific rationalism, the progressive role of the elite, and the emancipation of women—informed advice about the desirable appearance of the home. In the period preceding the First World War, these values changed dramatically: advice on decoration became more nationalistic in tone and a new goal was set for the interior—“to raise the British child by the British hearth.” Neiswander traces this evolving discourse within the context of current writing on interior decoration, writing that is much more detached from social and political issues of the day. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

Luxurious, beautiful, and portable, tapestry was the pre-eminent art form of the Tudor court. Henry VIII amassed an unrivaled collection over the course of his reign, and the author weaves the history of this magnificent collection into the life of its owner with an engaging narrative style. Now largely dispersed or destroyed, Henry’s extensive inventory is here reassembled and reveals how, through tapestry, Henry identified himself with historic, religious, and mythological figures, putting England in dialogue—and competition—with the leading courts of Early Modern Europe while promoting his own religious and political agendas at home. Campbell’s original account sheds new light on Tudor political and artistic culture and the court’s response to Renaissance aesthetic ideals. Sumptuously illustrated with newly commissioned photographs, this stunning re-creation of Europe’s greatest tapestry collection challenges the predominantly text-driven histories of the period and offers a fascinating new perspective on the life of Henry VIII.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

The idea of a "Greater London" emerged in the 18th century with the expansion of the city's suburbs. In Landscapes of London, Elizabeth McKellar traces this growth back to the 17th century, when domestic retreats were established in outlying areas. This transitional zone was occupied and shaped by the urban middle class as much as by the elite who built villas there. McKellar provides the first major interdisciplinary cultural history of this area, analyzing it in relation to key architectural and planning debates and to concepts of national, social, and gender identities. She draws on a wide range of source materials, including prints, paintings, maps, poetry, songs, newspapers, guidebooks, and other popular literature, as well as buildings and landscapes. The author suggests that these suburban landscapes—the first in the world—were a new environment, but one in which the vernacular, the rustic, and the historic played a substantial part. This fascinating investigation shows London as the forerunner of the complex, multifaceted modern cities of today.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

During the nineteenth century, what had been British hostility toward French art shifted toward acceptance and even enthusiasm, a change that transformed British art. This book charts the impact of French culture on British art and, to a lesser extent, the influence of British art in France during the nineteenth century. Thoroughly original, it is the first full overview of artistic and cultural relations between the two most important European nations of the period.Extending its reach beyond Romanticism and Impressionism, the book offers an encyclopedic account of all aspects of the British reception of French art in the nineteenth century. It demonstrates in detail how the rapprochement between French and British art over the course of the century effected fundamental and lasting change throughout the British art world. This is an essential volume for anyone with an interest in the art of Britain and France and in the political, social, economic, and cultural contexts in which art is created.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

In Mother Stone Anne Middleton Wagner looks anew at the carvings of the first generation of British modernists, a group centered around Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Jacob Epstein. Wagner probes the work of these sculptors, discusses their shared avant-garde materialism, and identifies a common theme that runs through their work and that of other artists of the period: maternity.Why were artists for three turbulent decades after the First World War seemingly preoccupied with representations of pregnant women and the mother and child? Why was this the great new subject, especially for sculpture? Why was the imagery of bodily reproduction at the core of the effort to revitalize what in Britain had become a somnolent art? Wagner finds the answers to these questions at the intersection between the politics of maternity and sculptural innovation. She situates British sculpture fully within the new reality of “bio-power”—the realm of Marie Stopes, Brave New World, and Melanie Klein. And in a series of brilliant studies of key works, she offers a radical rereading of this sculpture’s main concerns and formal language.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

James Stirling (1924-1992) is acclaimed as the most influential and controversial modern British architect. His partnership with James Gowan (b. 1923) between 1956 and 1963 put postwar British architecture on the international map, and their Leicester University Engineering Building became an iconic monument for a new kind of modernism.Mark Crinson's book is the most thoroughly researched study of Stirling and Gowan's partnership to date. Based on extensive interviews and archival research, Crinson argues that their work was the product of two equally creative partners whose different concerns produced a dynamic aesthetic. He gives an in-depth account of their training and early careers, their relation to key architects and movements of the time, and the commissioning, design, and construction of their work. This critical reassessment dispels previous myths and inaccuracies regarding their partnership and analyzes how ideas about mannerism, modernism, nostalgia, community, consumerism, Victorian cities, and institutional typologies influenced their designs. Stirling and Gowan positions their avant-garde creations within a larger context as creative responses to Britain's postwar deindustrialization and the shift from austerity to affluence.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

Contributions by Christopher Baker, Cristina Borgioli, Louisa M. Connor Bulman, Antonella Capitanio, Marco Collareta, Peter Davidson, Francisco Freddolini, Cristiano Giometti, John Harris, Elisabeth Kieven, and Cinzia Maria Sicca This handsome book is the only full-length study of John Talman (1677–1726), first director of the Society of Antiquaries and one of the most influential collectors of drawings in early 18th-century Britain. Prominent scholars discuss the history of Talman’s acquisitions, shedding light on the competitive nature, social practices, and aesthetic ideas of connoisseurship both in England and abroad. Talman’s collection, amassed in England, Florence, and Rome between the 1690s and 1719, focused on Italian medieval art, architecture, and textiles as well as Renaissance and Baroque architecture and sculpture. It reflected the tastes and preoccupations of artistic and intellectual élites in pre-enlightenment Europe. A vehicle for disseminating aesthetic and historical ideas, the collection became not only an extraordinary document of the state of ancient and modern Italian monuments but also a history of architecture and culture at large that provided visual evidence of buildings and rituals lost through time. Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

In this wide-ranging, eloquent book, Paul Binski sheds new light on one of the greatest periods of English art and architecture, offering ground-breaking arguments about the role of invention and the powers of Gothic art. His richly documented study locates what became known as the Decorated Style within patterns of commissioning, designing, and imagining whose origins lay in pre-Gothic art. By examining notions of what was extraordinary, re-evaluating medieval ideas of authorship, and restoring economic considerations to the debate, Binski sets English visual art of the early 14th century in a broad European context and also within the aesthetic discourses of the medieval period. The author, stressing the continuum between art and architecture, challenges understandings about agency, modernity, hierarchy, and marginality. His book makes a powerful case for the restoration of the category of the aesthetic to the understanding of medieval art. Generously illustrated with hundreds of images, Gothic Wonder traces the impact of English art in Continental Europe, ending with the Black Death and the literary uses of the architectural in works by Geoffrey Chaucer and other writers.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

From fine art paintings by such artists as Stubbs and Landseer to zoological illustrations and popular prints, a vast array of animal images was created in Britain during the century from 1750 to 1850. This highly original book investigates the rich meanings of these visual representations as well as the ways in which animals were actually used and abused. What Diana Donald discovers in this fascinating study is a deep and unresolved ambivalence that lies at the heart of human attitudes toward animals. The author brings to light dichotomies in human thinking about animals throughout this key period: awestruck with the beauty and spirit of wild animals, people nevertheless desired to capture and tame them; the belief that other species are inferior was firmly held, yet at the same time animals in stories and fables were given human attributes; though laws against animal cruelty were introduced, the overworking of horses and the allure of sport hunting persisted. Animals are central in cultural history, Donald concludes, and compelling questions about them—then and now—remain unanswered. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

Published in association with the Royal Academy of Arts, London Animated by an unprecedented study of its collections, this book tells the story of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and illuminates the history of art in Britain over the past two and a half centuries. Thousands of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and engravings, as well as silver, furniture, medals, and historic photographs, make up this monumental collection, featured here in stunning illustrations, and including an array of little-studied works of art and other objects of the highest quality. The works of art complement an archive of 600,000 documents and the first library in Britain dedicated to the fine arts. This fresh history reveals the central role of the Royal Academy in British national life, especially during the 19th century. It also explores periods of turmoil in the 20th century, when the Academy sought either to defy or to come to terms with modernism, challenging linear histories and frequently held notions of progress and innovation.Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Royal Academy of Arts, London

Read more less

An in-depth look at the changing status of American artists in the 18th and early 19th century This fascinating book is the first comprehensive art-historical study of what it meant to be an American artist in the 18th- and early 19th-century transatlantic world. Susan Rather examines the status of artists from different geographical, professional, and material perspectives, and delves into topics such as portrait painting in Boston and London; the trade of art in Philadelphia and New York; the negotiability and usefulness of colonial American identity in Italy and London; and the shifting representation of artists in and from the former British colonies after the Revolutionary War, when London remained the most important cultural touchstone. The book interweaves nuanced analysis of well-known artists—John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, and Gilbert Stuart, among others—with accounts of non-elite painters and ephemeral texts and images such as painted signs and advertisements. Throughout, Rather questions the validity of the term “American,” which she sees as provisional—the product of an evolving, multifaceted cultural construction. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) was one of the leading British landscape painters of the 19th century. Inspired by his mentor, the artist and poet William Blake, Palmer brought a new spiritual intensity to his interpretation of nature, producing works of unprecedented boldness and fervency. Pre-eminent scholar William Vaughan—who organized the Palmer retrospective at the British Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005—draws on unpublished diaries and letters, offering a fresh interpretation of one of the most attractive and sympathetic, yet idiosyncratic, figures of the 19th century. Far from being a recluse, as he is often presented, Palmer was actively engaged in Victorian cultural life and sought to exert a moral power through his artwork. Beautifully illustrated with Palmer's visionary and enchanted landscapes, the book contains rich studies of his work, influences, and resources. Vaughan also shows how later, enthralled by the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Palmer manipulated his own artistic image to harmonize with it. Little appreciated in his lifetime, Palmer is now hailed as a precursor of modernism in the 20th century.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

Empire to Nation offers a new consideration of the image of the sea in British visual culture during a critical period for both the rise of the visual arts in Britain and the expansion of the nation's imperial power. It argues that maritime imagery was central to cultivating a sense of nationhood in relation to rapidly expanding geographical knowledge and burgeoning imperial ambition. At the same time, the growth of the maritime empire presented new opportunities for artistic enterprise. Taking as its starting point the year 1768, which marks the foundation of the Royal Academy and the launch of Captain Cook's first circumnavigation, it asserts that this was not just an interesting coincidence but symptomatic of the relationship between art and empire. This relationship was officially sanctioned in the establishment of the Naval Gallery at Greenwich Hospital and the installation there of J. M. W. Turner's great Battle of Trafalgar in 1829, the year that closes this study. Between these two poles, the book traces a changing historical discourse that informed visual representation of maritime subjectsPublished for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

With the rise of museums in the 19th century, including the formation in 1824 of the National Gallery in London, as well as the proliferation of widely available published reproductions, the art of the past became visible and accessible in Victorian England as never before. Inspired by the work of Sandro Botticelli, Jan van Eyck, Diego Velázquez, and others, British artists elevated contemporary art to new heights through a creative process that emphasized imitation and emulation. Elizabeth Prettejohn analyzes the ways in which the Old Masters were interpreted by critics, curators, and scholars, and argues that Victorian artists were, paradoxically, at their most original when they imitated the Old Masters most faithfully. Covering the arc of Victorian art from the Pre-Raphaelites through to the early modernists, this volume traces the ways in which artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Orpen engaged with the art of the past and produced some of the greatest art of the later 19th century. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

In the late 18th century, as a wave of English nationalism swept the country, the printseller John Boydell set out to create an ambitious exhibition space, one devoted to promoting and fostering a distinctly English style of history painting. With its very name, the Shakespeare Gallery signaled to Londoners that the artworks on display shared an undisputed quality and a national spirit. Exhibiting Englishness explores the responses of key artists of the period to Boydell’s venture and sheds new light on the gallery’s role in the larger context of British art. Tracking the shift away from academic and Continental European styles of history painting, the book analyzes the works of such artists as Joshua Reynolds, Henry Fuseli, James Northcote, Robert Smirke, Thomas Banks, and William Hamilton, laying out their diverse ways of expressing notions of individualism, humor, eccentricity, and naturalism. Exhibiting Englishness also argues that Boydell’s gallery radically redefined the dynamics of display and cultural aesthetics at that time, shaping both an English school of painting and modern exhibition practices. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

From Still Life to the Screen explores the print culture of 18th-century London, focusing on the correspondences between images and consumer objects. In his lively and insightful text, Joseph Monteyne considers such themes as the display of objects in still lifes and markets, the connoisseur’s fetishistic gaze, and the fusion of body and ornament in satires of fashion. The desire for goods emerged in tandem with modern notions of identity, in which things were seen to mirror and symbolize the self. Prints, particularly graphic satires by such artists as Matthew and Mary Darly, James Gillray, William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, and Paul Sandby, were actively involved in this shift. Many of these images play with the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, self and thing. They also reveal the recurring motif of image display, whether on screens, by magic lanterns, or in “raree-shows” and print-shop windows. The author links this motif to new conceptions of the self, specifically through the penetration of spectacle into everyday experience.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

The City of London is a jurisdiction whose relationship with the English monarchy has sometimes been turbulent. This fascinating book explores how architecture was used to renew and redefine a relationship essential to both parties in the wake of two momentous events: the restoration of the monarchy, in 1660, and the Great Fire six years later. Spotlighting little-known projects alongside such landmarks as Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, it explores how they were made to bear meaning. It draws on a range of evidence wide enough to match architecture’s resonances for its protagonists: paintings, prints, and poetry, sermons and civic ceremony mediated and politicized buildings and built space, as did direct and sometimes violent action. The City and the King offers a nuanced understanding of architecture’s place in early modern English culture. It casts new light not only on the reign of Charles II, but on the universal mechanisms of construction, decoration, and destruction through which we give our monuments significance.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

ART AND ARCHITECTURE OF IRELAND is an authoritative and fully illustrated survey that encompasses the period from the early Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century. The five volumes explore all aspects of Irish art – from high crosses to installation art, from illuminated manuscripts to Georgian houses and Modernist churches, from tapestries and sculptures to oil paintings, photographs and video art. This monumental project provides new insights into every facet of the strength, depth and variety of Ireland’s artistic and architectural heritage. MEDIEVAL c. 400-c. 1600 An unrivalled account of all aspects of the rich and varied visual culture of Ireland in the Middle Ages. Based on decades of original research, the book contains over 300 lively and informative essays and is magnificently illustrated. Readers will enjoy expanding their knowledge of medieval Ireland through explorations of the objects and buildings produced there and the people who created them.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in association with the Royal Irish Academy

Read more less

This fascinating book recounts the extensive building program that took place at Canterbury Cathedral Priory, England, from 1153 to 1167, during the time when Thomas Becket served as Royal Chancellor and then as archbishop of Canterbury. Masterminded by Prior Wibert, the renewal included the physical expansion of the cathedral's precinct, the construction of new buildings, and the installation of a pioneering pressurized water system. This ambitious undertaking utilized a Late Romanesque style, lavish materials, and sculpture, and drew on the optimism and creative energy of the young Angevin rulers of England, Henry II and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Canterbury Cathedral Priory in the Age of Becket reassesses the surviving remains and relates them to important changes in Benedictine monasticism concerned with hospitality, hygiene, the administration of law, liturgy, and the care of the sick. It also restores to history a neglected major patron of unusual breadth and accomplishments. Peter Fergusson sheds fresh light on the social and cultural history of the mid-12th century.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

George Stubbs (1724-1806), now recognized as one of the greatest and most original artists of the eighteenth century, stands out from other practitioners in the field of animal painting. His most frequent commissions were for paintings of horses, dogs, and wild animals, and his images invariably arrest attention and frequently strike a deeply poetic note. Stubbs did not emerge as a painter until he was in his mid-thirties, but then his genius flowered astonishingly. He steadily celebrates English sporting and country life and reveals himself—in his “incidental” portraits of jockeys and grooms, for example—as a perceptive observer of different levels of social behavior. Among his many experiments with technique were his chemical experiments with painting in enamels, first on copper and later on earthenware “tablets,” manufactured for him in Wedgwood's potteries.This is the first full catalogue of Stubbs's paintings and drawings. Along with the full catalogue entries, the book offers a lengthy study of Stubbs's art and career. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

This meticulously researched catalogue presents an authoritative assessment of the works of Pompeo Batoni (1708–1787), one of the 18th century’s most celebrated painters. Born in Lucca, Batoni established himself in Rome and received commissions from popes, princes, and British aristocrats on the Grand Tour. Batoni was highly sought after for his theatrical yet incisive—and often flattering—portraits. Connoisseurs and cognoscenti also prized his learned and technically brilliant allegorical, religious, and mythological compositions. With entries on more than 480 paintings and 250 drawings, this magnificent two-volume set provides the most complete examination to date of Batoni’s entire oeuvre. Featuring beautiful, high-quality reproductions, the book provides thorough details on provenance and exhibition history as well as biographies of the portrait sitters. New analysis of the works, resulting from decades of research, reinterprets some of Batoni’s iconography, identifies new textual and visual sources of his imagery, and reveals insights gleaned from unpublished archival materials.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Read more less

Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641) is among the greatest portrait painters of all time. The 1990s opened and closed with major exhibitions devoted to his work, and now the long-awaited catalogue raisonné of his painted oeuvre is complete.A native of Antwerp, Van Dyck also lived and worked for long periods in Italy and England, where his brief, productive life ended. He is best known for his work at the court of Charles I. His full-length portraits of aristocrats in the Caroline court and in Genoa, Antwerp, Brussels, and The Hague influenced the history of Western portraiture into the twentieth century in the work of John Singer Sargent. Handsomely designed and illustrated, the volume includes a reproduction of every known authentic painting by the artist as well as the provenance and the significant facts and literature on each. This catalogue raisonné is, fittingly, the collaborative work of an international team devoted to the study of this major international artist. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

Art in Britain 1660–1815 presents the first social history of British art from the period known as the long 18th century, and offers a fresh and challenging look at the major developments in painting, drawing, and printmaking that took place during this period. It describes how an embryonic London art world metamorphosed into a flourishing community of native and immigrant practitioners, whose efforts ultimately led to the rise of a British School deemed worthy of comparison with its European counterparts. Within this larger narrative are authoritative accounts of the achievements of celebrated artists such as Peter Lely, William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, and J.M.W. Turner. David H. Solkin has interwoven their stories and many others into a critical analysis of how visual culture reinforced, and on occasion challenged, established social hierarchies and prevailing notions of gender, class, and race as Britain entered the modern age. More than 300 artworks, accompanied by detailed analysis, beautifully illustrate how Britain’s transformation into the world’s foremost commercial and imperial power found expression in the visual arts, and how the arts shaped the nation in return.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

In the early modern period, rulers demonstrated their power and influence through carefully curated “display”—their presence in court ceremonies, their palaces and their contents, and their portraits. Henrietta Maria of France (1609–1669), queen consort of King Charles I of England, embraced these opportunities for display with particular flair. This richly illustrated book follows Henrietta Maria through and beyond the Bourbon and Stuart courts to chart her patronage and engagement with the visual arts, building works, and the luxury trade. It develops a powerful picture not just of the images, fashions, interiors, and buildings shaped by the queen’s directorial influence but also of the political and religious factors that governed her choices and policies of court display. Her cultural patronage in particular emphasized her family honor, dynastic clout, Catholic piety, feminine virtue, and discerning taste. Erin Griffey analyzes the full spectacle of the queen’s represented image, not only through the well-known portraits by Sir Anthony van Dyck but also through her rich bed ensembles, tapestries, jewelry, clothing, and devotional goods—the objects that embodied and conveyed her royal power.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

This beautiful publication narrates the romantic biography of an architecturally significant country residence and its rescue from decline. Dating from the mid-15th century, Apethorpe in Northamptonshire was home to a succession of leading courtiers and politicians. At the command of King James I, the house was refurbished with a richly decorated state apartment. The suite, with its series of rare plaster ceilings and carved chimneypieces, unquestionably ranks as one of the finest—and least known—in Britain. In 2004, English Heritage rescued the house from ruin and has since restored it to much of its glory. This book places Apethorpe in its wider historical and architectural context, comparing it with other Tudor and Jacobean houses. It sheds new light on the furnishing, decoration, and circulation patterns of state suites in country homes. Written by architectural and archeological experts from Historic England, this monograph, the first on Apethorpe, is illustrated with new and historical photographs, paintings, maps, engravings, and specially commissioned interpretive drawings that reveal how the house looked at key moments in its history.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

By the nineteenth century, connoisseurs from the British Isles had assembled the richest collections of classical antiquities outside Rome. The galleries they created to house the spectacular Greek and Roman statues, ornaments, vases, bronzes, and gems were in many instances designed to be as magnificent as the artworks themselves. This delightful book examines how the great British antiquities collections were put together and displayed, from Lord Arundel’s collection of marbles in the seventeenth century to the Grand Tour acquisitions of the eighteenth century and the greatest art acquisition of all time, that of the Elgin Marbles from the Acropolis. In this book, the first comprehensive history of the collecting of antiquities in Great Britain, Jonathan Scott gives portraits of the principal collectors, describes the mechanics of the art trade and collecting, and takes us to beautiful sculpture galleries that were created by such distinguished architects as Robert Adam and Jeffry Wyatville. With a generous selection of illustrations of the interiors of collectors’ houses, the book presents in unprecedented detail the story of private British antiquities collectors and their truly remarkable collections.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

Go behind the scenes of generations of the British royal family, exploring both the glamour and domestic life inside the spectacular 300‐year-old Kensington Palace Kensington Palace is renowned for its architecture, splendid interiors, internationally important collections, and, of course, its royal residents. This lavish book thoroughly explores Kensington’s physical beauty and its history, presenting new material drawn from archives, newspapers, personal letters, images, and careful analysis of the building itself. Originally a fashionable Jacobean villa, Kensington was dramatically rebuilt in 1689 by Christopher Wren for the newly crowned monarchs, William III and Mary II. The palace became the favored London home of five sovereigns, yet also survived fires, partial collapse, bombings, and periods of neglect. Queen Victoria recognized the national significance of her birthplace and childhood home, turning the palace into her own memorial as well as a home for members of her extended family and their descendants. With over 450 illustrations, including specially commissioned reconstructions and historic plans, this volume explores the personal tastes and fashions of the British monarchy over the course of 300 years and provides insight into the 20th- and 21st-century royal family’s domestic life.Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

The south London parish of Battersea has roots as a working village, growing produce for London markets, and as a high-class suburb, with merchants’ villas on the elevated ground around Clapham and Wadsworth Commons. Battersea enjoyed spectacular growth during Queen Victoria’s reign, and railroads brought industry and a robust building boom, transforming the parish into another of London’s dense, smoky neighborhoods, though not without its unique and distinguishing features. Among these are Battersea Park, which was created by the Crown in the 1850s; the monumental Battersea Power Station, completed in 1939; and Clapham Junction railway station, which is, by measure of passenger interchanges, the busiest station in the United Kingdom. The two latest volumes of the Survey of London, 49 and 50, trace Battersea’s development from medieval times to the present day. Offering detailed analysis of its streets and buildings both thematically and topographically, and including copious original in-depth research and investigation, the books are a trove of architectural history and British history. Profusely illustrated with new and archival images, architectural drawings and maps, these volumes are welcome additions to the acclaimed Survey of London series.Published for English Heritage by Yale University Press on behalf of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

This revelatory book traces how the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their close associates put scientific principles into practice across their painting, poetry, sculpture, and architecture. In their manifesto, The Germ, the Pre-Raphaelites committed themselves to creating a new kind of art modeled on science, in which precise observation could lead to discoveries about nature and humanity. In Oxford and London, Victorian scientists and Pre-Raphaelite artists worked together to design and decorate natural history museums as temples to God’s creation. At the same time, journals like Nature and the Fortnightly Review combined natural science with Pre-Raphaelite art theory and poetry to find meaning and coherence within a worldview turned upside down by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Offering reinterpretations of well-known works by John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, and William Morris, this major revaluation of the popular Victorian movement also considers less-familiar artists who were no less central to the Pre-Raphaelite project. These include William Michael Rossetti, Walter Deverell, James Collinson, John and Rosa Brett, John Lucas Tupper, and the O’Shea brothers, along with the architects Benjamin Woodward and Alfred Waterhouse. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

ART AND ARCHITECTURE OF IRELAND is an authoritative and fully illustrated survey that encompasses the period from the early Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century. The five volumes explore all aspects of Irish art – from high crosses to installation art, from illuminated manuscripts to Georgian houses and Modernist churches, from tapestries and sculptures to oil paintings, photographs and video art. This monumental project provides new insights into every facet of the strength, depth and variety of Ireland’s artistic and architectural heritage. TWENTIETH CENTURY An examination of the works of art created in twentieth-century Ireland and the critical contexts from which they came. Focusing on painting, photography and new media, rather than on sculpture, this volume considers the work of conceptual and digital artists as well as those who have used more traditional approaches. Definitive biographies of many of the key artist of the era are included, and the volume also addresses the main political and social issues that lay behind twentieth century Irish art. Through its many fine illustrations, it recreates the vibrancy of the art world of the period.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in association with the Royal Irish Academy

Read more less

The 18th-century rediscovery of the three archaic Greek-Doric temples in Paestum in southern Italy turned existing ideas on classical architecture upside down. The porous limestone temples with rough, heavy columns were entirely unlike the classical architecture travelers to the site were familiar with. Paestum, exceptional in the completeness of its ruins, came to fascinate architects, artists, writers, and tourists alike, who documented the site in drawings and texts. In Rediscovering Architecture, Sigrid de Jong analyzes extensive original source material, including letters, diaries, drawings, paintings, engravings, and published texts, which are attractively reproduced here. The book offers new insights on the explorations of the site, the diverse reactions to it, and their dramatic and enduring effect on architectural thought, as they influenced intellectual debates in England, France, and Italy during the long 18th century. This unique study of the experience of architecture reconstructs Paestum’s key role in the discourse on classical architecture and its historiography, primitivism, the sublime and the picturesque, and the growing importance of science and history in architectural thought. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

Inigo Jones (1573-1652) is widely acknowledged to have been England's most important architect. As court designer to the Stuart kings James I and Charles I, he is credited with introducing the classical language of architecture to the country. He famously traveled to Italy and studied firsthand the buildings of the Italian masters, particularly admiring those by Andrea Palladio. Much less well known is the profound influence of native British arts and crafts on Jones's architecture. Likewise, his hostility to the more opulent forms of Italian architecture he saw on his travels has largely gone unnoted. This book examines both of these overlooked issues. Vaughan Hart identifies well-established links between the classical column and the crown prior to Jones, in early Stuart masques, processions, heraldry, paintings, and poems. He goes on to discuss Jones's preference for a "masculine and unaffected" architecture, demonstrating that this plain style was consistent with the Puritan artistic sensitivities of Stuart England. For the first time, the work of Inigo Jones is understood in its national religious and political context.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

Artist Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) was a unique cultural figure. His varied yet instantly recognisable work chronicles the significant changes in British art from the austere 1950s to the post-post-modern late 1990s. This highly illustrated and visually exciting book provides the first comprehensive overview of the career of a major, prolific and complex artist, exploring Paolozzi's work from all periods and across all media: collage, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, tapestry and film.An Italian Scot, Paolozzi studied first at Edinburgh College of Art, before moving on to the Ruskin Drawing School and the Slade. He was a founding member of the Independent Group in the early 1950s but steadfastly resisted the 'Pop' label, preferring instead to see his pioneering interdisciplinarity as an extension and an expansion of radical Surrealism.Dedicating a chapter to each facet of Paolozzi's wide-ranging practice - including, in turn, his bronze, aluminium and public sculptures, as well as his early collages and his innovative screenprints - this book offers the definitive, illustrated, art-historical appraisal of an artist whose work continues to fascinate and inspire. Published with support from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Read more less

This handsome volume is the first authoritative survey of one of the most intriguing periods of British art—the radically innovative decade of the 1860s. The book explores new developments in English painting of this period, focusing on the early work of Edward Burne-Jones, Frederic Leighton, Albert Moore, Edward Poynter, Simeon Solomon, and James McNeill Whistler, as well as on paintings by Frederick Sandys and the older G. F. Watts, and by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his Pre-Raphaelite colleagues Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Allen Staley argues that engagement in the decorative arts, particularly by Burne-Jones, Moore, and Poynter at the outset of their careers, led to a transcending of traditional expectations of painting, making abstract formal qualities, or beauty for beauty's sake, the main goal. Rather than being about what it depicts, the painting itself becomes its own subject. The New Painting of the 1860s examines the interplay among the artists and the shared ambitions underlying their works, giving impetus to what would soon come to be known as the Aesthetic Movement.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

The south London parish of Battersea has roots as a working village, growing produce for London markets, and as a high-class suburb, with merchants’ villas on the elevated ground around Clapham and Wadsworth Commons. Battersea enjoyed spectacular growth during Queen Victoria’s reign, and railroads brought industry and a robust building boom, transforming the parish into another of London’s dense, smoky neighborhoods, though not without its unique and distinguishing features. Among these are Battersea Park, which was created by the Crown in the 1850s; the monumental Battersea Power Station, completed in 1939; and Clapham Junction railway station, which is, by measure of passenger interchanges, the busiest station in the United Kingdom. The two latest volumes of the Survey of London, 49 and 50, trace Battersea’s development from medieval times to the present day. Offering detailed analysis of its streets and buildings both thematically and topographically, and including copious original in-depth research and investigation, the books are a trove of architectural history and British history. Profusely illustrated with new and archival images, architectural drawings and maps, these volumes are welcome additions to the acclaimed Survey of London series.Published for English Heritage by Yale University Press on behalf of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

Laden with works of art acquired by young British travelers on the Grand Tour in Italy, the British merchant ship Westmorland sailed from the Italian port of Livorno before being captured by French naval vessels and escorted to Malaga in southern Spain. The artistic treasures on board were purchased by King Carlos III of Spain, and the majority were deposited in the collections of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. There they resided, unknown, until recent research, using original inventories that survive in the Academia's archives, identified the Westmorland's rich cargo.The English Prize reveals the gripping story of the ship's capture and the disposition of its artistic contents, which included Raphael Mengs's Perseus and Andromeda, Pompeo Batoni's portraits of Frances Bassett and Lord Lewisham, and watercolors by John Robert Cozens. This volume illuminates the cultural phenomenon of the Grand Tour and the young travelers who acquired the trove of books and art works on board the Westmorland but were never able to enjoy their purchases.Published in association with the Yale Center for British Art, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Real Academia de Belles Artes de San Fernando, MadridExhibition Schedule:Ashmolean Museum, Oxford(05/09/12-08/29/12)Yale Center for British Art(10/03/12-01/20/13)

Read more less

Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture— the uniquely strange and exciting buildings built by the great and powerful, ranging from huge houses to gem-like pavilions and lodges designed for feasting and hunting—is a phenomenon as remarkable as the literature that accompanied it, the literature of Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Marlow, and others. In this beautiful and fascinating book, Mark Girouard discusses social structure and the way of life behind it, the evolution of the house plan, the excitement of English patrons and craftsmen as they learned not only about the classic Five Orders and the buildings of Ancient Rome, the surprising wealth of architectural drawings that survive from the period, the inroads of foreign craftsmen who brought new fashions in ornament, but also the strength of the native tradition that was creatively integrated with the “antique” style. Behind the book is a vivid consciousness of the European scene: Italy, France, central Europe and above all the Low Countries and their influence on England. But the principal argument of the book is the unique individuality of the English achievement. The result of new research and fieldwork, as well as a lifetime’s observation and scholarship, this remarkable book displays Girouard’s unique sense of style and his enduring excitement for the architecture of the period.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less

The ninth and tenth volumes of the diary cover the years from January 1808 up to December 1810. Among the public events that preoccupy Joseph Farington are the wars in Europe and South America and the spectacular scandal that erupted in 1809 over Duke of York’s association with Mary Anne Clark.This period finds Farington embarking on extended tours—one to the north of England and two to the West Country—making sketches to illustrate the survey of Britain, Britannica Depicta, compiled by his friends Samuel and Daniel Lysons. Farington’s association with this and other projects for the publishers Cadell and Davies involves him in negotiations with many engravers, among them Joseph Landseer, James Heath, and Samuel Middiman.Within the Royal Academy (to which Landseer is pressing that a number of engravers be admitted) feelings run high over the lecture by John Soane criticizing the architecture of Covent Garden Theatre, which was the work of Robert Smirke, the son of Farington’s oldest friends. At the end of 1810 Farington is occupied with assessing Robert Smirke’s prospects at the coming election of academicians. In common with many others in the diarist’s wide circle of acquaintances, Thomas Lawrence and John Constable continue to seek Farington’s advice on professional and practical affairs. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Read more less

An examination of written and other responses to conflict in a variety of forms and genres, from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. War and violence took many forms in medieval and early modern Europe, from political and territorial conflict to judicial and social spectacle; from religious persecution and crusade to self-mortification and martyrdom; from comedic brutality to civil and domestic aggression. Various cultural frameworks conditioned both the acceptance of these forms of violence, and the protest that they met with: the elusive concept of chivalry, Christianity and just wartheory, political ambition and the machinery of propaganda, literary genres and the expectations they generated and challenged. The essays here, from the disciplines of history, art history and literature, explore how violence and conflict were documented, depicted, narrated and debated during this period. They consider manuals created for and addressed directly to kings and aristocratic patrons; romances whose affective treatments of violence invitedprofoundly empathetic, even troublingly pleasurable, responses; diaries and "autobiographies" compiled on the field and redacted for publication and self-promotion. The ethics and aesthetics of representation, as much as the violence being represented, emerge as a profound and constant theme for writers and artists grappling with this most fundamental and difficult topic of human experience. JOANNA BELLIS is the Fitzjames Research Fellow in Oldand Middle English at Merton College, Oxford; LAURA SLATER holds a Postdoctoral Fellowship from The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. Contributors: Anne Baden-Daintree, Anne Curry, David Grummitt, Richard W. Kaeuper, Andrew Lynch, Christina Normore, Laura Slater, Sara V. Torres, Matthew Woodcock,

Read more less

How was the remote past of Britain imagined in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? What part did the visual arts play in that process? In this book Sam Smiles argues that the ancient Britain of the romantic imagination was a contested world, variously seen as a noble epoch of wisdom and patriotism and as a period of unredeemed savagery and barbarism. The arts, says Smiles, not only reflected these historical debates but actively contributed to them by attempting to bring the archaic past to life.Smiles examines the interplay of antiquarian research, historiography, and the visual arts in constructing an image of Britain from prehistoric times to the arrival of the Saxons. He discusses such topics as the lengthening of prehistoric time in the contemporary view, the status of antiquarian learning, and the celebration of ancestral peoples as an offshoot of the growing sense of national identity. He describes the Celtic revival during the late eighteenth century, with its iconography that fashioned a pictorial repertoire for megaliths, bards, Druids, and the patriotic leaders Boadicea and Caractacus, who fought off the Romans. He also explains why the Victorians downgraded the Celts and replaced them with the Saxons, preferred by Victorians because they were Christians, because they were English (rather than British), and because they had established organized kingdoms. Illustrated with images from a wide range of sources, this is the first major interdisciplinary examination of the British image of antiquity that has a particular significance for art historians and historians alike. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British ArtPublished for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art

Read more less

A comprehensive presentation of the provocative, modernist graphic works of Britain’s creator of Art Nouveau This is the first book to bring together the recorded works of the English artist Aubrey Beardsley. Despite his early death from tuberculosis in 1898, at the age of 25, these amount to nearly 1100 completed works of art (plus many related sketches) as well as more than 100 sketches in his letters and the books he owned, and this book includes over 50 that have never previously been published. In his brief career Beardsley made a defining contribution to Art Nouveau in Britain and abroad. He also influenced the early history of modern art, attracting the attention of the young Picasso, for example. His distinctive and innovatory graphic style, combined with highly provocative, often sexual subject matter, outraged critics and led to a period of intense notoriety. Beardsley's drawings span the grotesque, the delicately beautiful, the subtly erotic, and the frankly bawdy, and challenged the moral norms of Victorian society. They enthralled artists and art lovers the world over and continue to enthral today. Linda Gertner Zatlin's text presents Beardsley's drawings with a full record of their making, provenance, exhibition history and references in the art historical literature. This material record is accompanied by often extensive discussions of their themes, motifs and symbolism, as well as their critical reception. Unprecedented in its scope and thoroughness, this study presents Beardsley's work and explores its meanings more comprehensively than any previous work on him; it is likely to remain definitive. This superbly illustrated two volume catalogue, beautifully presented as a boxed set, is both an essential reference for specialists and an accessible and enchanting delight for Beardsley enthusiasts.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Read more less