Search results for ""paul holberton publishing ltd""

This beautifully illustrated and scholarly catalogue presents a selection of exceptional drawings from the Clement C. Moore Collection. It accompanies an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum. The drawings assembled by Clement C. (Chips) Moore constitute one of the preeminent private collections of Dutch drawing in America. The collection also includes works by Flemish, French, Italian and British artists, ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. These works have long been intended to join the collections at the Morgan Library & Museum, and this exhibition timed to coincide with the Morgan's centennial celebrations makes formal the promised gift. Accompanying the exhibition, this catalogue will demonstrate the breadth of the Moore Collection with a selection of around eighty works that highlight the principal themes of Dutch art, the various functions and techniques of Dutch drawings, and the connections between the Dutch and other European artistic traditions. Work

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This beautiful publication accompanies an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum of the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). It is the most important study of Piranesi’s drawings to appear in more than a generation. In a letter written near the end of his life, Giovanni Battista Piranesi explained to his sister that he had lived away from his native Venice because he could find no patronsthere willing to support “the sublimity of my ideas.” He resided instead in Rome, where he became internationally famous working as a printmaker, designer, architect, archaeologist, theorist, dealer, and polemicist. While Piranesi’s lasting fame is based above all on his etchings, he was also an intense, accomplished, and versatile draftsman, and much of his work was first developed in vigorous drawings.The Morgan Library& Museum holds what is arguably the largest and most important collection of these works, more than 100 drawings that include early architectural caprices, studies for prints, measured design drawings, sketches for a range of decorative objects, a variety of figural drawings, and views of Rome and Pompeii. These works form the core of the book, which will be published on the occasion of the Morgan’s Spring 2023 exhibition of Piranesi drawings. More than merely an exhibition catalogue or a study of the Morgan’s Piranesi holdings, however, this publication is a monograph that offers a complete survey of Piranesi’s work as a draftsman. It includes discussion of Piranesi’s drawings in public and private collections worldwide, with particular attention paid to the large surviving groups of drawings in New York, Berlin, Hamburg, and London; it also puts the large newly discovered cache of Piranesi material in Karlsruhe in context.The most comprehensive study of Piranesi’s drawings to appear in more than a generation, the book includes more than 200 illustrations, and while focused on the drawings it offers insights on Piranesi’s print publications, his church of Santa Maria del Priorato, and his work as a designer and dealer. In sum, the present work offers a new account of Piranesi’s life and work, based on the evidence of his drawings.

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The Hamburg banker’s son Aby Warburg (1866–1929) was one of the most influential art historians and cultural theorists of the 20th century. His life’s work was devoted to tracing antique formulas of representation in the depiction of human passions in Renaissance art. For this epoch-spanning relationship, he developed the term ‘pathos formula’ (Pathosformel). In a lecture given in 1905 in the Konzerthaus in Hamburg, focusing on the young Albrecht Dürer’s Death of Orpheus, Warburg outlined his thoughts in front of the original drawing, which he had borrowed from the rich holdings of the Kunsthalle in order to better illustrate his idea. This drawing, pivotal in the young artist’s development as an ambitious response to classical antiquity, was displayed during the lecture alongside a group of engravings and woodcuts which included not only some of Dürer’s own seminal later prints, such as Melencolia I, but also engravings by Andrea Mantegna which Dürer copied in 1494, the same year he drew the Death of Orpheus. Warburg’s ‘pop-up exhibition’ of eleven works has here been reconstructed and analyzed, using his fascinating lecture notes, sketches and slide lists. First developed by the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 2011, subsequently on view in Cologne in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum and now at The Courtauld Gallery, each institution has interpreted the material slightly differently, while retaining the core Warburg group. Aby Warburg aimed at unlocking the meaning of an art work by excavating its roots in its cultural context. By restaging his legendary display of 1905 with Dürer’s Death of Orpheus at its heart, the exhibition and accompanying book present some of the most skillful and ambitious works on paper ever produced and also seek to introduce into Warburg’s rich intellectual universe to a broader public, hoping thereby to offer both sheer enjoyment and food for thought.

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Anthony Speelman is the doyen of English art dealers specializing in Dutch Golden Age art. Vividly written and handsomely illustrated, his memoirs offer fascinating insight into the sometimes secretive world of Old Masters. This book will appeal not only to dealers, collectors and others in the fine art world, but also to would-be collectors eager for a glimpse behind the curtain.These memoirs cover a lifetime of dealing in Old Masters at the very highest level. Speelman’s career started under the guidance of his father Edward, whose own biography has much to tell. Over the years, Speelman has sold paintings to many of the world’s greatest collectors, including Norton Simon, Paul Mellon, Baron Thyssen, Harold Samuel, Charles Clore and the Wrightsmans in New York, along with world renowned museums such as the Getty, the Louvre and the National Gallery, London, among many others. He writes about his encounters with these eminent bodies in a light-hearted style, sometimes amusing, always extremely interesting – including an anecdote about a recent meeting with a Chinese billionaire with a penchant for fine wine.The two monkeys in the title refer to two paintings of a monkey holding a peach by George Stubbs, the outstanding English animal painter. Anthony describes how he discovered one of these masterpieces as a ‘sleeper’ in a Sotheby’s sale. Early in his career Anthony’s rooms in Piccadilly were broken into and a number of paintings stolen, including a George Stubbs painting of a spaniel. An intriguing tale follows, ending with the paintings recovered some eighteen months later after a failed blackmail attempt on the part of the thieves.Amongst his accomplishments, Speelman was for many years chairman of the vetting committee at the annual Maastricht art fair. He describes the working of the committees which ensure that all works exhibited are correctly described. Still active in the art world, he is currently chairman of the vetting committee of the prestigious annual Masterpiece art fair in London.Other chapters detail Speelman’s travels to California, New York and Paris, his interest in gastronomy and his thrilling adventures in the world of horseracing. The book is beautifully illustrated with examples of works that have passed through the author’s hands. The wide range of illustrations is not limited to Dutch art and includes works by Canaletto, Stubbs, Raphael, Tiepolo, Melendez and other Old Masters.

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This fascinating book tells the story of Thomas Hardy's Wessex. Accompanying a multi-venue exhibition, it explores Hardy's life and work.Internationally-acclaimed writer Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is best known for his evocative depictions of the West Country landscape and its people, a region that he called 'Wessex'. What is less well-known is that this landscape also inspired him in many other aspects of his life, from campaigning for animal welfare to questioning the way society viewed women. This publication accompanies a blockbuster, multi-venue exhibition of the largest collection of Thomas Hardy memorabilia ever to be displayed at once.  Hardy was born in the West Country, a few years after Queen Victoria came to the throne, and spent most of the rest of his life among its landscapes and people. When he turned writer, these landscapes and people re-emerged as his 'partly-real, partlydream country' of Wessex, in novels like Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure.Hardy's Wessex now conjures up a range of mental images: from raging seas on the coast to haunting ancient monuments, Victorian towns packed with life to peaceful hillsides grazed by sheep. However, through Hardy's 87-year life span, the West Country changed dramatically. Ideas of the role of women, humans' responsibility to animals, the realities of war, love and courtship, superstition, social structure, religion and how people related to the world around them altered fundamentally. Through his stories and campaigning, Hardy was keen to show not only the rural idyll, but also the tensions and difficulties that lay beneath these views.These dramatic landscapes were the lens through which Hardy presented his worldview to his readership. From the tragedy of a woman saying farewell to her sailorlover on the end of Portland Bill, to a shepherd losing his flock and facing ultimate ruin on the chalky hills. The landscapes shape his characters, whose stories in turn convey his messages of social change to his readers.This publication will explore the impact that Wessex had on Hardy's works, and how living there shaped his views on the often divisive social issues of the period. Uniting beautiful landscape imagery with a selection of personal items from Hardy's life, this book will show you the man behind the literature.

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The myth of Van Gogh today is linked as much to his extraordinary life as it is to his stunning paintings. His biography has often shaped the way that his self-portraits have been (mis)understood. Van Gogh. Self-Portraits reconsiders this aspect of his production and places the artist’s self-representation in context to reveal the role it plays in his oeuvre. It also explores the power and profound emotion of these highly personal paintings.Van Gogh. Self-Portraits is the first time this theme has been exclusively addressed. Self-portraits painted during Van Gogh’s time in Paris (February 1886 – February 1888) have been the subject of two exhibitions (in 1960 at Marlborough Fine Arts in London and in 1995 at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg) but never has the full chronological range been explored. The exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, which this volume accompanies, features paintings from both the Parisian and Provençal periods. It brings together half of Van Gogh’s thirty-five known self-portraits to examine the ways the artist approached this particular subject-matter. On a practical level, painting himself provided Van Gogh with the cheapest and most patient of models and represented an important conduit for stylistic experimentation. He also used self-portraiture as an homage to his illustrious Dutch predecessor Rembrandt, as well as a way of fashioning his own identity and presenting himself to the outside world. Of particular interest is the striking way the evolution of Van Gogh's self-representation over the short years of his artistic activity can be seen as a microcosm of his development as a painter.In addition to the world-famous Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear in The Courtauld’s collection, the exhibition showcases a group of major masterpieces brought together from international collections, including the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Muse d’Orsay in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others. This beautifully illustrated catalogue includes detailed entries on each work, an appendix illustrating all of Van Gogh’s self-portraits and three insightful essays on the theme.

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Isabella Stewart Gardner was a force to be reckoned with. She routinely went toe-to-toe with major museums and titans of industry to purchase masterpieces, created a museum unlike any other, and was famous for consistently flouting the social conventions that governed women of her time. However, this book shows another side of Isabella that readers may not expect: her love of dogs. Richly illustrated with images from the collection and museum archives, this volume allows readers to meet Isabella’s favorite dogs (Kitty Wink and Patty Boy), see the litters of puppies she bred, and discover how her dogs were a comfort toward the end of her life. Usually stern in photographs, Isabella - like many people - could not help grinning when posing for photos with puppies. This enthusiasm for dogs is also evident in her correspondence. As she wrote excitedly to her art advisor Bernard Berenson: “Part of my morning’s work has been to try to induce two 9 days old fox terrier pups to open their eyes again. They did once; and then clapped them to, with a vim that seemed to say that the box they found themselves in was not the ideal they had come to this world to see!” Even the dogs of celebrities - both celebrities she knew personally, and others she admired from afar - drew her attention. This book also features some of the many photographs she collected of notable people and their dogs, like the painter Anders Zorn and his adorable pup Mouche and Caesar, the regal and loyal terrier who belonged to King Edward VII and even marched in the monarch’s funeral parade. From gathering Renaissance masterpieces to raising Fox Terriers, this book shows that Isabella approached all her tasks with enthusiasm and dedication. By learning about her love of her canine companions, this book presents a more human side of Isabella than typically on display.

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Hogarth’s Britons explores how the English painter and graphic satirist William Hogarth (1697–1764) set out to define British nationhood and identity at a time of division at home and conflict abroad. With notions of community cohesion, good citizenship and patriotism, wrapped up in a unifying idea of British national character and spirit in all its variety, and set alongside the ongoing national debate on Britain’s past, present and future within European and World affairs, Hogarth and his art has never been more relevant.In the summer of 1745, Prince Charles Edward Stuart ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ landed with his supporters, the ‘Jacobites’, in a remote corner of Scotland. This signalled the start of his audacious military campaign, with the backing of Britain’s global adversary France andduring a Europe-wide war, to topple the Hanoverian, Protestant monarch George II and restore the Catholic Stuarts, exiled in France and then Rome since 1688, to the throne. The country descended into turmoil, with regional, local and family loyalty for these rival royal dynasties severely tested, and opposing visions for the new nation of Great Britain – since the Union of England and Scotland in 1707 – laid bare. By early December the prince and his 6,000 troops arrived in Derby, just 120 miles and five days’ march from London. For both sides everything was at stake.From the 1720s, through the crises of the early 1740s, to the civil war called the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion or Rising, Prince Charles’s defeat at Culloden in April 1746 and beyond, Hogarth created some of the most iconic images in British and European art, including Marriage A-La-Mode, O the Roast Beef of Old England (The Gate of Calais) and The March of the Guards to Finchley. Through such vibrant scenes, rich in topical commentary, he conveyed a sense of external threat (real and imagined) from foreign powers and internal political, social and cultural upheaval. At the same time he offered his fellow Britons a confident, reassuring idea of the rights and liberties they enjoyed under King George and his government: a flawed status quo, as Hogarth would readily admit, yet certainly better, he would argue, than the regime that would replace it under the ‘popish’ Stuarts as client monarchs of the self-serving French king, Louis XV.With British society and politics in flux, and the Union between Scotland and England arguably more vulnerable now than at any moment since 1746, the themes explored in Hogarth’s Britons have profound resonance with our own time.

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This catalogue sheds new light on the Paris Olympics of 1924, often considered the first international games. From their origins in ancient Greece to their modern transformation into a visually powerful event on the world stage, the Olympics have retained their unique place in sport and culture. Published to coincide with the Paris Olympics of 2024, the book accompanies a major exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum. The summer of 2024 will see the Olympics return to Paris after a century. The Olympics in 1924 were arguably the first truly international games, the first games to transmit live radio broadcasts and the first to have an Olympic village. They incorporated an art competition as well as sporting events, and yielded thirty-five medals for Britain, including for Cambridge sprinter Harold Abrahams of Chariots of Fire fame. This catalogue explores the Olympic games from a visual perspective, investigating the tensions between their classical beginnings and their representation in

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Presenting for the first time the Alexis Gregory Gift to The Frick Collection, this exquisite publication provides illuminating insights into Gregory’s magnificently eclectic collection, cataloging his fine and decorative works of art in detail.Twenty-eight works of art bequeathed to the Frick by Alexis Gregory range from Limoges enamels to Saint-Porchaire ware to pastels by the Venetian painter Rosalba Carriera. This remarkable gift has introduced new types of objects to the Frick: works in ivory and rhinoceros horn are the first of their kind to be held in the collection.Gregory’s gift includes fifteen Limoges enamels, one of them produced in the workshop of Suzanne de Court, the only woman known to have led an enamel workshop in Limoges. Also part of the gift are a gilt-bronze sculpture, an ivory hilt, a pomander, ewers, saltcellars, and two clocks. Many of Gregory’s objects came from such prestigious owners as the French royal collections and the Rothschilds. Included in the publication are commentaries on each gift.This lavishly illustrated publication accompanies an exhibition that will be on view at The Frick Collection February 16 through May 14, 2023.

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This lavish catalogue presents sketches made en plein air between the end of the eighteenth century and late nineteenth century. It accompanies a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (USA), the Fondation Custodia (France) and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (UK).In the eighteenth century the tradition of open-air painting was based in Italy, Rome in particular. Artists came from all over Europe to study classical sculpture and architecture, as well as masterpieces of Renaissance and Baroque art. During their studies, groups of young painters visited the Italian countryside, training their eyes and their hands to transcribe the effects of light on a range of natural features. The practice became an essential aspect of art education, and spread throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. This exhibition focuses on the artists’ wish to convey the immediacy of nature observed at first hand.Around a hundred works, most of them unfamiliar to the general public, will be displayed. The artists represented include Thomas Jones, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Achille-Etna Michallon, Camille Corot, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Johan Thomas Lundbye, Vilhelm Kyhn, Carl Blechen, Johann Martin von Rohden, Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, Johann Jakob Frey, among others. The sketches demonstrate the skill and ingenuity with which each artist quickly translated these first-hand observations of atmospheric and topographical effects while the impression was still fresh.The exhibition and the catalogue will be organized thematically, reviewing, as contemporary artists did, motifs such as trees, rocks, water, volcanoes, and sky effects, and favourite topgraphical locations, such as Rome and Capri. The catalogue will present numerous unpublished plein air sketches, and contains original scholarship on this relatively young field of art history.

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Michelangelo's masterpiece The Dream ( Il Sogno) has been described as one of the finest of all Italian Renaissance drawings and is amongst The Courtauld Gallery's greatest treasures. Executed in c. 1533, The Dream exemplifies Michelangelo’s unrivalled skill as draftsman. Accompanying an exhibition at the Courtauld in 2010, this catalogue examines this celebrated work in the context of a group of closely related drawings by Michelangelo, as well as some of his original letters and poems and works by his contemporaries. The Dream is one of Michelangelo's 'presentation drawings', a magnificent and famous group of highly refined compositions which the artist gave to his closest friends. These beautiful and complex works transformed drawings into an independent art form and are amongst Michelangelo's very finest creations in any medium. The Dream was probably one of a superb group made for a young Roman nobleman with whom Michelangelo was in love, Tommaso de' Cavalieri, who was celebrated for his outstanding beauty, gracious manners and intellect. This group is studied in the book and includes The Punishment of Tityus, The Fall of Phaeton, A Bacchanal of Children and The Rape of Ganymede. In his Life of Michelangelo (1568) the biographer and artist Giorgio Vasari praised these exceptional works as "drawings the like of which have never been seen" - and they are still regarded as amongst the greatest single series of drawings ever made.

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Ken Thomson was no mere trophy gatherer. A man of passionate commitment and of wide-ranging cultural curiosity, the late Lord Thomson of Fleet (1923–2006) began a half-century of collecting in 1953 and continued to the very end of his life. The most important private art collection in Canada, it has drawn the respect of museum curators worldwide.

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Makoure Scott is a young New Zealand artist who is rapidly establishing an international reputation. This, his first book, presents a selection of his work today, featuring in particular his Synapse series, in which primary geometric forms 'synapse' in various crossroads, intersections and parallels mirroring the tension and fusion of nature and spirit. Via strong geometric forms Arohanui attempts to capture the principles of the Maori spiritual term arohanui, its intersection with colonial beliefs and the resulting tension. Dream Waka presents a series of textural winter northland landscapes, attempting to capture the various cultura parallels of Maori and Pekeha influences. 80 colour illustrations

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While there have been monographs on British artist-travellers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there has been no equivalent survey of what the writer, Henry Blackburn, described as ‘artistic travel' a hundred years later. By 1900, the ‘Grand Tourist' became a ‘globe-trotter' equipped with a camera, and despite the development of ‘knapsack photography', visual recording by the oldmedia of oil and watercolour on-the-spot sketching remained ever-popular.Kenneth McConkey's exciting new book explores the complex reasons for this in a series of chapters that take the reader from southern Europe to north Africa, the Middle East, India and Japan revealing many artist-travellers whose lives and works are scarcely remembered today. He alerts us to a generation of painters, trained in academies and artists' colonies in Europe that acted as crèches for those would go on to explore life and landscape further afi eld. The seeds of wanderlust were sown in student years in places where tuition was conducted in French or German, and models were often Spanish, Italian, or North African. At fi rst the countries of western Europe were explored afresh and cities like Tangier became artists' haunts. Training that prioritized plein air naturalism led to the common belief that a well-schooled young painter should be capable of working anywhere, and in any circumstances.At the height of British Imperial power, and facilitated by engineering and technological advance, the burgeoning tourism and travel industry rippled into the production of specialist goods and services that included a dedicated publishing sector. Essential to this phenomenon, the artist-traveller was often commissioned by London dealers to supply themed exhibitions that coincided with contracts for colour-illustrated books recording those exotic parts of the world that were newly available to the tourist, traveller, explorer, emigrant, or colonial civil servant.These works were not, however, value-neutral, and in some instances, they directly address Orientalism, Imperialism, and the Post-Colonial, in pictures that hybridize, or mimic indigenous ways of life. Behind each there is a range of interesting questions. Does experience live up to expectation? Is the street more desirable than the ancient ruin or sacred site? How were older ideas of the ‘picturesque' reborn in an age when ‘Grand Tours' once confi ned to Italy, now encompassed the globe? McConkey's widerangingsurvey hopes to address some of these issues.This richly illustrated book explores key sites visited by artist-travellers and investigates artists including Frank Brangwyn, Mary Cameron, Alfred East, John Lavery, Arthur Melville, Mortimer Menpes, as well as other under-researched British artists. Drawing the strands together, it redefi nes the picturesque, by considering issues of visualization and verisimilitude, dissemination and aesthetic value.

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Touch is our first sense. Through touch we make art, stake a claim to what we own and those we love, express our faith, our belief, our anger. Touch is how we leave our mark and find our place in the world; touch is how we connect. Drawing on works of art spanning four thousand years and from across the globe, this book explores the fundamental role of touch in human experience, and offers new ways of looking. In a series of lavishly illustrated essays, the authors explore anatomy and skin; the relationship between the brain, hand, and creativity; touch, desire and possession; ideological touch; reverence and iconoclasm. A final section collects a range of reflections, historic and contemporary, on touch. Objects range from anonymous ancient Egyptian limestone sculpture, to medieval manuscripts and panel paintings, to devotional and spiritual objects from across the world, to love tokens and fede rings. Drawings, paintings, prints and sculpture by Raphael, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Carracci, Hogarth, Turner, Rodin, Degas, and Kollwitz are explored, along with work by contemporary artists Judy Chicago, Frank Auerbach, Richard Long, the Chapman Brothers, and Richard Rawlins. The events of 2020 have made us newly alive to the preciousness and the dangers of touch, making this exploration of our most fundamental sense particularly timely and resonant.

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Elijah Pierce (1892–1984) was born the youngest son of a former slave on a Mississippi farm. He began carving at an early age when his father gave him his first pocketknife. Pierce became known for his wood carvings nationally and then internationally for the first time in the 1970s. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, this publication seeks to revisit the art of Elijah Pierce and see it in its own right, not simply as ‘naive’. Elijah Pierce made his living as a barber; he was also a qualified preacher. Just as his barber shop was a place for gossip and meeting, so his art reflects his own and his community's concerns, but also universal themes. Through his carvings Pierce told his own life story and chronicled the African-American experience. His subjects ranged from politics to religious stories but he seldom distinguished the race of his figures – he thought of them as everyman. His secular carvings show his love of baseball, boxing, comics and the movies, and also reflect his appreciation for American heroes who fought for justice and liberty. In 1932, Pierce completed ‘the Book of Wood’, which he considered his best work. Originally carved as individual scenes, the completed ‘Book’ tells the story of Jesus carved in bas-relief. He and his wife Cornelia held “sacred art demonstrations” to explain the meaning of the Book of Wood. Pierce’s work was first appreciated in the art world thanks to a fellow sculptor, Boris Gruenwald, who saw the expressive power of his work. As a later critic wrote, “There are 500 woodcarvers working today in the United States who are technically as proficient as Pierce, but none can equal the power of Pierce’s personal vision”. Pierce became known primarily in circles promoting ‘naive’ art, winning first prize at the International Meeting of Naive Art in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in 1973. The vast majority of his work is now held in Columbus, Ohio, which had become his home town. This book revisits Pierce’s art seeking to see it in its own right, and not simply as ‘naive’. Another critic wrote: “He reduces what he wants to say to the simplest forms and compositions. They are decorative, direct, bold and amusing. He uses glitter and all kinds of devices to make his message clear. It gives his work an immediacy that’s very appealing” – an appeal arising from a sophisticated art with its own particular voice.

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This groundbreaking new book presents 60 projects - past and present, real and imagined - of 'anarchist' architecture. From junk playgrounds to Extinction Rebellion in the UK, from Christiania to the Calais Jungle in Europe, and from Dignity Village to Slab City in the USA - all are motivated by the core values of autonomy, voluntary association, mutual aid and self-organisation. Taken as a whole, they are meant as an inspiration to build less uniformly, more inclusively and more freely.Architecture and Anarchism documents and illustrates 60 projects, past and present, that key into a libertarian ethos and desire for diverse self-organised ways of building. They are what this book calls an 'anarchist' architecture, that is, forms of design and building that embrace the core values of traditional anarchist political theory since its divergence from the mainstream of socialist politics in the 19th century. These are autonomy, voluntary association, mutual aid, and self-organisation through direct democracy. As the book shows, there are a vast range of architectural projects that can been seen to refl ect some or all of these values, whether they are acknowledged as specifically anarchist or otherwise.Anarchist values are evident in projects that grow out of romantic notions of escape - from isolated cabins to intentional communities. Yet, in contrast, they also manifest in direct action - occupations or protests that produce micro-countercommunities. Artists also produce anarchist architecture - intimations of much freer forms of building cut loose from the demands of moneyed clients; so do architects and planners who want to involve users in a process normally restricted to an elite few. Others also imagine new social realities through speculative proposals. Finally, building without authority is, for some, a necessity - the thousands of migrants denied their right to become citizens, even as they have to live somewhere; or the unhoused of otherwise affl uent cities forced to build improvised homes for themselves.The result is to significantly broaden existing ideas about what might constitute anarchism in architecture and also to argue strongly for its nurturing in the built environment. Understood in this way, anarchism off ers a powerful way of reconceptualising architecture as an emancipatory, inclusive, ecological and egalitarian practice.

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This scholarly publication presents the work of the designer, painter and illustrator Claude Gillot (1673–1722). The first volume on the artist in English, it accompanies a major exhibition at the Morgan Library& Museum that explores Gillot’s inventive and highly original draftsmanship and places his work in the context of artistic and intellectual activity in Paris ca. 1700.The history of eighteenth-century French art under the ancien régime is dominated by great names. But the artistic scene in Paris at the dawn of the century was diverse and included artists who forged careers largely outside of the Royal Academy. Among them was Claude Gillot. Known primarily as a draftsman, Gillot specialized in witty scenes taken from the Italian commedia dell’arte plays performed at fairground theaters and vignettes of satyrs enacting rituals that expose human folly. The book will address Gillot’s work as a designer, painter, and book illustrator, and advance a chronology for his career. Crafting a timeline for Gillot’s life and work will clarify his relationship with his younger collaborators Antoine Watteau and Nicolas Lancret.Through an artistic biography and six chapters, each devoted to an aspect of his oeuvre, Gillot’s role in developing quintessential rococo subjects is established. We follow Gillot from his start as the son of a decorative painter in the bishopric of Langres to his arrival in Paris in the 1690s, as the city and its secular entertainments flourished apart from the royal court at Versailles. Myriad opportunities awaited artists outside official channels, and Gillot built his career working in the theater and as a painter and designer long before seeking official academic status. His involvement with writers, playwrights, and printmakers helped define his sphere. Gillot’s preference for theatrical subjects brought him critical attention, and also attracted talented assistants such as Watteau and Lancret. Gillot came to prominence around 1712 working at the Paris Opéra and as a printmaker and illustrator of books, lending his droll humor to satires. By 1720, Gillot was enlisted to design costumes for the last royal ballet, one of the final projects of his career. He died nine months after his most celebrated pupil, Watteau. The sale of his estate, which including his designs and many etched copper plates, provided material for printmakers and publishers and ensured Gillot’s lasting fame among print connoisseurs. His oeuvre as a draftsman and painter, however, was largely forgotten until drawings and canvases began to emerge in the first half of the twentieth century.

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Throughout his long career, David Hockney has insistently explored diverse ways of depicting the visible world. He has scrutinised the methods of the old masters, and explored radical departures from their cherished assumptions. The exhibitions accompanied by this volume are the first to focus on this central theme in his art. 'Western art' from the Renaissance until at least the late 19th century has been dominated by the depiction of nature. Was this to be accomplished by direct looking (called “eyeballing” by Hockney) or with the assistance of optical theory and devices, such as cameras? Hockney has experimented with the full range of existing strategies, overtly using perspective in some of his classic pictures and rigorously investigating optical aids for the imitation of nature, including the camera obscura and camera lucida.Yet he has come to reject the photograph as the definitive image of what we see. Along the way, he has identified a 'camera culture' in European painting from 1400, arguing very controversially that the supreme naturalism of painters like Jan van Eyck are the product of optical devices. His book, Secret Knowledge (2001), with its majestic panorama of paintings over the course of five centuries, claims that art historians have missed the central aspect of painters’ practice. The 'Hockney thesis' has been received more favourably outside the professional world of art history than in it.His own artistic practice has been in vigorous dialogue with his radical thesis, and he has progressively demonstrated new and dynamic ways of characterising the visual world without perspective and other conventional techniques. This quest results a series of joyous challenges to our ways of seeing in the major exhibition in Cambridge at the Fitzwilliam Museum and in the Heong Gallery (Downing College). It will look at the whole span of Hockney’s varied career and at the nature of the optical devices he has tested. His vision will be explored in the setting of traditional masterpieces of naturalistic observation, and in the context of modern sciences and technologies of seeing.The first section of the book looks at his thrilling experiments in seeing and representing in broad historical and contemporary contexts. This is followed by discussions of pre-photographic devices for capturing the appearances of things by optical means. The third section includes essays on Hockney’s experiments from the perspectives of neuroscience and computer vision. In short, it reveals in a new way the working of Hockney’s unique eye.

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The Crocker Art Museum has one of the finest and earliest German drawings collections in the United States. Featuring artists such as Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner, Anton Raphael Mengs and Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, The Splendor of Germany examines the major developments in German draughtsmanship over the course of the eighteenth century. Published to coincide with the collection’s 150th anniversary. In the 21st century, the collecting and study of 18th-century German drawings has become a major focus for American museums. One of the finest collections of them, however, has been in California for 150 years. The superb drawings at the Crocker Art Museum, from a Baroque altarpiece design by Johann Georg Bergmüller to a Neoclassical mythology by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, provide a panorama of German draughtsmen and draughtsmanship throughout the century. Many of the drawings are remarkable for their modernity. A self-portrait by Johann Gottlieb Prestel bypasses convention to achieve a direct, unmediated likeness. Well-placed slashes with brush and black ink define the features below his peruke outlined in black chalk. Other drawings encapsulate specific developments and styles, such as Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner’s Lazarus and the Rich Man, which shows the florid dynamism of the Augsburg Rococo. A full range of eighteenth-century German artists are represented here, from the satirizing moralists Johann Elias Ridinger and Daniel Chodowiecki to the Classicist and friend of the art theorist Johann Joachim Winkelmann, Anton Raphael Mengs. Landscape artists are especially well represented, such as the key figure Johann Georg Wille, printmaker to the French king Louis XV, and generations of artists he taught and influenced all the way to the early Romantic landscapists. The exhibition and catalogue gather together a variety of dynamic and sensitive portraits, charming scenes of daily life, and often humorous moralizing subjects, as well as narratives, both religious and mythological, from the late Baroque to Neoclassicism. In the realm of landscape, the depth of the collection allows the exhibition to trace schools and influences—in addition to Wille’s mentioned above—even in families such as that of Prestel, whose wife and daughter were both landscapists. It also allows it to demonstrate the great variety of works by single artists such as Christoph Nathe, represented by four landscapes in four different genres including a splendid scene near Görlitz. Some artists, in fact, work in several genres as in the case of Johann Christian Klengel, whose works include the scene of a family by candlelight, a farmstead landscape, and a sketchbook that he carried through the countryside to record picturesque views. This is a rare opportunity for the public and for drawings enthusiasts. Two-thirds of the drawings in the exhibition have not been shown before; most of the exceptions have not been seen since 1989. Because of the drawings’ 150-year history of limited exposure, the state of preservation of the collection is exceptional, as is the condition of the new acquisitions included in the exhibition.

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When English naturalist Joseph Banks (1743–1820) accompanied Captain James Cook (1728–1779) on his historic mission into the Pacific, the Endeavour voyage of 1768–71, he took with him a team of collectors and illustrators. Banks and his team returned from the voyage with unprecedented collections of artefacts and specimens of stunning birds, fish and other animals as well as thousands of plants, most seen for the first time in Europe. They produced, too, remarkable landscape and figure drawings of the peoples encountered on the voyage along with detailed journals and descriptions of the places visited, which, with the first detailed maps of these lands (Tahiti, New Zealand and the East Coast of Australia), were afterwards used to create lavishly illustrated accounts of the mission. These caused a storm of interest in Europe where plays, poems and satirical caricatures were also produced to celebrate and examine the voyage, its personnel and many ‘new’ discoveries. Along with contemporary portraits of key personalities aboard the ship, scale models and plans of the ship itself, scientific instruments taken on the voyage, commemorative medals and sketches, the objects (over 140) featured in this new book will tell the story of the Endeavour voyage and its impact ahead of the 250th anniversary in 2018 of the launch of this seminal mission. Artwork made both during and after the voyage will be seen alongside actual specimens. And by comparing the voyage originals with the often stylized engravings later produced in London for the official account, the book will investigate how knowledge gained on the mission was gathered, revised and later received in Europe. Items separated in some cases for more than two centuries will be brought together to reveal their fascinating history not only during but since that mission. Original voyage specimens will feature together with illustrations and descriptions of them, showing a rich diversity of newly discovered species and how Banks organized this material, planning but ultimately failing to publish it. In fact, many of the objects in the book have never been published before. The book will focus on the contribution of Banks’s often neglected artists Sydney Parkinson, Herman Diedrich Spöring, Alexander Buchan as well as the priest and Pacific voyager Tupaia, who joined Endeavour in the Society Islands, none of whom survived the mission. These men illustrated island scenes of bays, dwellings, canoes as well as the dress, faces and possessions of Pacific peoples. Burial ceremonies, important religious sites and historic encounters were all depicted. Of particular interest, and only recently recognised as by him, are the original artworks of Tupaia, who produced as part of this mission the first charts and illustrations on paper by any Polynesian. The surviving Endeavour voyage illustrations are the most important body of images produced since Europeans entered this region, matching the truly historic value of the plant specimens and artefacts that will be seen alongside them.

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This elegant publication presents for the first time the Eveillard Gift of drawings to the Morgan Library& Museum. It accompanies an exhibition at the Morgan and includes a catalogue of the works with entries by drawings experts. The Morgan celebrates the 100th year of its founding with a series of exhibitions devoted to promised gifts to the museum, including 28 drawings from the holdings of New Yorkbased collectors Jean-Marie and Elizabeth Eveillard, which will be on view during the summer of 2024. The selection comprises drawings from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and includes a rare compositional study for Rembrandt's first painting, Greuze's virtuoso depiction of a young cook made for his friend Georges Wille, Delacroix's intimate portrait of his confidante and caretaker Jenny Le Guillou, and a spectacular nude by Bonnard. Also in the gift are significant sheetsmany rarely seenby major artists including Rubens, Guercino, Watteau, Constable, Seurat, Cezanne, and Vuill

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This is a revised second edition of the best-selling book which incorporates new and additional material on the majority of the objects as well as an expanded glossary which will be of interest to both collector and scholar. The first edition was long-listed for the R.L. Shep Award by the Textile Society of America and chosen as one of the twelve best books of the year by the Crafts Council of the UK, both in 2020.

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Artists and travel have for centuries been intertwined where the desire to explore beyond the confines of one’s home has provoked a truly astonishing outpouring of creativity, much of which was captured through drawings and prints. Comprising over 100 such works, Connecting Worlds: Artists& Travel will be the first exhibition to approach the subject through the lens of artists’ experiences of travel from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, before the establishment of the railroad and use of photography as a means of recording changed these experiences deeply. A collaboration between the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Katrin Bellinger Collection, London, the exhibition will include works by major artists, lesser known professionals as well as amateurs, mostly from Northern Europe, amongst them Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein the Younger, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Wenceslaus Hollar, Zacharias Wagner, Valentin Klotz, Maria Sibylla Merian, Angelika Kauffmann, Franz Pforr, Augusta von Buttlar, Julie von Egloffstein,Ludwig Richter, and Friedrich Preller the Elder.Divided into three sections, “On the road”, “Destination Rome”, and “Dresden”, the exhibition begins by exploring artists on the road and what they regarded as important to record in sketchbooks and individual sheets. The second section looks at Rome as one of the most important destinations for Northern travellers, with its incomparable remains of antiquity and as the seat of the Catholic Church that celebrated its religious and administrative life through processions and public spectacle.The journey ends in Dresden, as a centre for collecting, cultural exchange and glamorous festivities, ambitiously competing with other international courts since the time of Augustus the Strong. A different kind of travel, made possible by collecting images and stories of landscapes, flora, fauna, and cultures previously unknown in Europe, is explored. This section closes with the story of the IndonesianRomantic artist Raden Saleh, who first visited Dresden in 1839, and was warmly welcomed by the Saxon court.The richly illustrated catalogue will feature essays by an international panel of experts addressing such topics as the uses of artist sketchbooks across time, written and visual accounts of travel in books and prints, encounters with the Ottoman world, travel and collecting at the Saxon court.

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In London in 1770 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) remarked, ‘What a work could be written on Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick! There is something similar in the genius of all three.’ Two-and-a-half centuries on, Robin Simon’s highly original and illuminating book takes up the challenge.William Hogarth (1697–1764) and David Garrick (1717–1779) closely associated themselves with Shakespeare, embodying a relationship between plays, painting and performance that had been understood since Antiquity and which shaped the rules for history painting drawn up by the Académie royale in Paris in the seventeenth century.History painting was considered the highest form of art: a picture illustrating a moment drawn from just a few lines in a revered text. Hogarth’s David Garrick as Richard III (1745) transformed those ideas because, although it looked like a history painting, it was also a portrait of an actor in performance. With it, Hogarth established the genre of theatrical portraiture, a new and distinctively British kind ofhistory painting.This book offers a fresh examination of theatrical portraits through close analysis of the pictures and of the texts used in performance. It also examines the central role of the theatre in British culture, while highlighting the significance of Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick in the European Enlightenment and the rise of Romanticism. In this context another trio of genius features prominently: Lichtenberg, GottholdEphraim Lessing and Denis Diderot.Familiar paintings and performances are seen in an entirely new light, while unfamiliar pictures are also introduced, including major paintings and drawings that have never been published.The final chapter shows that the inter-relationship between plays, painting and performance survived into the age of cinema, revealing the pictorial sources of Laurence Olivier’s legendary film Richard III.

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Accompanying a major exhibition at Philip Mould & Company, Fruit of Friendship: Portraits by Mary Beale presents the work of the remarkable sevenenteenth-century woman artist.

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This welcome catalogue accompanies The Courtauld's display of the work of Helen Saunders (1885–1963), the first monographic exhibition devoted to the artist in over 25 years. After years of obscurity, Helen Saunders: Modernist Rebel reconsiders her work as an important part of the story of British modernism.One of the first British artists to pursue abstraction, Saunders was one of only two women to join the Vorticists, the radical but short-lived art movement that emerged in London on the eve of the First World War. Her extraordinary drawings capture both the dynamism of modern urban life and the horrors of mechanised warfare. Following the war, she turned her back on Vorticism and pursued her own path, working in a more figurative style. Due in part to the loss of a significant portion of her oeuvre, including all of her Vorticist oil paintings, this remarkable artist fell into obscurity. Only in recent years has her work begun to be rediscovered and celebrated as an important piece of the story of British modernism. A group of 20 drawings gifted in 2016 by her relative, the artist and writer, Brigid Peppin, has transformed The Courtauld into the largest public collection of Saunders's work in the world. These drawings trace Saunders's artistic development in the orbit of Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury Group, keenly attuned to contemporary art in France, to the ground-breaking abstraction of Vorticism. Following the disruption of the First World War and the disbanding of the Vorticists, Saunders turned again to figuration, developing her own approach to landscape, portraiture and still life which she would pursue alone for the rest of her career, exhibiting sporadically and never again joining a group of artists. This interest is revealed here in a group of landscapes created in L'Estaque in the south of France in the 1920s, which show the artist responding both to her surroundings as well as to predecessors such as Paul Cézanne and Georges Braque who had previously worked in the area. Featuring essays by Brigid Peppin and Jo Cottrell on Saunders's artistic education and career and on her relationship to the places of Vorticism in London, and catalogue entries by Rachel Sloan, this volume sheds light on an artist who steadily pursued her own path and whose contribution to the story of modern art is being newly appreciated.

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Disillusioned with London life and struggling to make a living, Blake and his wife Catherine went in 1800 to live at the coastal village of Felpham, which the artist soon described as “the sweetest spot on earth”. Providing his principal encounters with both English rural life and the coast, the artist’s three years “on the banks of the ocean” informed his two greatest illustrated epic poems, Milton and Jerusalem, and continued to be refl ected in his work for the rest of his career: “In Felpham”, claimed Blake, “I saw and heard Visions of Albion”. In addition to the work associated with Felpham, this publication considers the collections of nearby Petworth House, which include three major paintings by Blake – otherwise unrepresented in other grand houses of Britain – along with related prints, books and archival material. The authors will examine the relationships formed by Blake in Sussex, particularly with the poet William Hayley, the sculptor John Flaxman, the 3rd Earl of Egremont (one of the great collectors of contemporary art in the early 19th century) and his estranged wife Elizabeth Ilive, who commissioned two of the three paintings now in Petworth. Blake’s work for Hayley, often dismissed as illustrative and decorative, will be reappraised, and other projects he worked on in Sussex – including remarkable biblical watercolours produced for his great London patron, Thomas Butts – will be celebrated. Blake’s infamous arrest and trial for sedition – chief among the events profoundly aff ecting him in Sussex – will be discussed. It is not widely known that Blake was tried fi rst in Petworth, where he was vouched for by the 3rd Earl.

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This volume brings together over 25 scholarly essays, reviews and shorter contributions by Peter Hecht, preceded by an introduction on what he thinks his life in art history has taught him. The title indicates what his collected papers have in common: together they represent an attitude of listening to what you see. Hecht is very suspicious of applying a method and believes that looking at an image until it speaks is essential to understanding it. Also, he has done much to prove that it not only pays to study the subject of a picture as part of an iconographical tradition, but that one should study it within the oeuvre of the artist who made it as well.

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This innovative and compelling study reconsiders Whistler’s work from the context of his military service and his relationship with ‘nature at the margins’. Whistler came from a family of soldiers and engineers; his father, Major George Washington Whistler, was originally a US military engineer. Drawing and mapmaking were important components of the military training that Whistler acquired as an offi cer cadet at West Point Academy in 1851-4 and subsequently in the Drawing Department at the US Coast and Geodetic Survey,where he attempted to realise his father’s hopes that he would make engineering or architecture his profession. These infl uences in turn shaped Whistler’s attitude towards nature, as expressed in works ranging from his celebrated London ‘Nocturnes’ to his French coastal scenes – all of which were created after Whistler moved permanently to Europe in 1855.Whistler’s close observation of nature and its moods underpinned his powerful and haunting visions of nineteenth-century life. His images explore the contrasts between the natural and man-made worlds: rivers and wharves, gardens and courtyards, the ideal and the naturalistic. And his singular vison was always defi ned by his enduring affi nity with the makers of railways, bridges and ships, the cornerstones of Victorian wealth and trade. Infl uenced by Rembrandt, Whistler’s early etchings of London are notable for their focus on line and topographical accuracy. From the 1860s, his enthusiasm for Japanese art, too, infl uenced his attitude to perspective and spatial relations between objects. This led him, in his London Nocturnes, to reduce the external world before him to its bare bones. Whistler’s smoky images of warehouses, bridges, harbours and tall ships were designed to showcase a new kind of productive, wealth-generating landscape. It is a view of nature constrained by man-made structures: the shadowy outline of the warehouses and chimneys on the far shore; the mast and rigging of a Thames barge in the middle distance.This absorbing book reassesses a familiar and notoriously colourful artistic fi gure in a fascinating and pertinent new light, and is an important new contribution to our understanding of the Victorian art world and its physical context.

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Detailed biographies describe the lives of twelve collectors of tribal art in Britain, active between 1770 and 1990. These men were rarely field collectors and only occasional travellers, but they were vigorous hunters, for whom the pursuit, handling and possession of such objects was what mattered.The climax of the period of collecting from around 1880 to 1960 coincided with the maximum extent of Empire, when legions of explorers, missionaries, administrators, traders and military personnel brought back to Britain an inexhaustible quantity of exotic material. The sources for the collections included most of Africa, the Americas and the Pacific, as well as tribal societies in Asia.The collectors described here – a interesting mix of highly individualistic, eccentric and sometimes avaricious men – could, and did, quite reasonably claim that they were saving ethnographic material for the future. This was partly based on the widely held notion that tribal cultures were disappearing and the idea that some museums were negligent and uninterested in ethnography. Several of the collectors eventually created museums themselves, most notably Pitt Rivers.Contemporary illustrations and recent photography of the objects are accompanied by evocative photographs of the collectors amongst their collections.

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This fascinating book presents the first biography of Helen Coombe, a woman admired not only for her artistic skill, but also for her intellect, personality and wit. It reveals her family background and education, her place in the Arts and Crafts Movement and her outstanding artistic output.

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This beautiful publication presents a collection of exquisite ancient bronzes from the Wadsworth Atheneum that were collected by John Pierpont Morgan. It accompanies a special exhibition of the bronzes at Bowdoin College.This fully illustrated catalogue presents highlights of the ancient bronzes that were collected by J. Pierpont Morgan and are currently in the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum. Purchased between 1904 and 1916, the bronzes were given to the museum by Morgan’s son in 1917. Morgan was a passionate collector and spent years of his life acquiring exquisite works of art. He had a discerning eye and discriminating taste, and his driving motivation was to find works of quality and beauty. His Greek and Roman bronzes include a range of figure and vessel types: males and females, gods and mortals, humans and animals and hybrid mythological creatures, free-standing statuettes, and furniture embellishments. This is the first exhibition and publication to consider the bronzes as a group.Morgan chose each work of art for its exquisite craftsmanship, its quality of composition and execution, and its preservation. These objects represent the very best of ancient Mediterranean bronze sculpture, with carefully rendered clothing, hair, and fur, and adorned with inlays of silver and other luxury materials. Showcasing different types of objects and figures that were made in bronze in the ancient world, this exhibition and book demonstrate the high level of quality that these works of art could achieve. The bronzes are important not only for their provenance and place in America’s ‘Gilded Age’, but also as highly significant individual works of art that represent the best of ancient bronzeworking. New high-resolution photography of each work of art will allow readers to appreciate their intricate details of craftsmanship, including copper and silver inlay. This focused publication will also present current research on these exceptional objects to help readers better understand how they were made and what they represented in an ancient context.

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This important publication accompanies a major exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, London, of paintings by Edvard Munch, one of the world’s greatest modern artists. The exhibition and catalogue showcase 18 major works from the collection of KODE Art Museums in Bergen. The works span the most significant part of Munch’s artistic development and have never before been shown as a group outside of Scandinavia. KODE houses one of the most important collections of paintings by Edvard Munch (1863–1944) in the world. The collection was assembled at the beginning of the 20th century by the Norwegian industrialist, mill owner and philanthropist Rasmus Meyer (1858–1916), who was one of the first significant early collectors of Munch’s work. Meyer knew Munch personally and was astute in acquiring major canvases by the artist that chart his artistic development.Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen explores this group of remarkable works in detail and considers the important role of Rasmus Meyer as a collector. The exhibition and publication include seminal paintings from Munch’s early ‘realist’ phase of the 1880s, such as Morning (1884), which was made when the artist was just twenty years old, and Summer Night (1889), a pivotal work that shows the artist’s move towards the expressive and psychologically charged work for which he became famous. These paintings launched Munch’s career and set the stage for his renowned, highly expressive paintings of the 1890s when his compositions became powerful projections of his emotions and imaginative states. Such works are a major feature of the exhibition that includes remarkable canvases from Munch’s famous ‘Frieze of Life’ series, such as Evening on Karl Johan (1892), Melancholy (1894-96) and At the Death Bed (1895). Through his ‘Frieze of Life’ works, Munch intended to address profound themes of human existence, from love to death. The artist used his own experiences as source material to make visceral depictions of the human psyche, which he hoped would help others understand their own life. Munch’s powerful use of colour and form to convey his subjects marked him out as one of the most radical painters at the turn of the 20th century.This fully illustrated publication includes a catalogue of the works, with contributions by leading experts in their fi eld from KODE and The Courtauld.

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Ambrose McEvoy was one of the most modern and daring English society portrait painters of the early 20th century. His quick, confident style of painting drew the attention of many leading society figures, from Winston Churchill to Lady Diana Cooper, and in particular subjects who craved something beyond a simple ‘likeness’ in paint. Despite his success, when McEvoy died unexpectedly at the peak of his career in 1927, his name was soon forgotten. Divine People is the first major written study of McEvoy’s life and work and aims to firmly place this long-neglected artist back into the canon of 20th-century British art. Ambrose McEvoy (1877–1927) was a household name by 1915, with prominent socialites and debutantes vying for sittings in his Grosvenor Road studio. His patrons – typically young, well-known beauties – were dazzled not only by his remarkable ability to capture their character, but also his working methods, which one spectator described as an ‘awe-inspiring sight’. McEvoy would illuminate his subject using electric lights, switching between different coloured bulbs until he reached the level and colour of light he desired. This ‘Hollywood’ look, with his glamourous subjects lit from below as if caught mid-speech on stage, is what he soon became best known for. McEvoy had studied at the Slade School of Fine Art on the recommendation of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and soon after established himself as a talented painter of portraits and interior scenes. He exhibited his first work at the New English Art Club in 1901 and subsequently attracted the attention of wealthy patrons and collectors. His first major commission came in 1906, for two large religious pictures for the Long Tower Church in Londonderry, where they remain to this day. After a period spent in Dieppe with Walter Sickert in 1909 McEvoy’s style began to change and his handling became looser and more confident with bolder use of colour. In 1915 he firmly established his position as a portrait painter following the exhibition of his work Madame at the National Portrait Society. ‘[Madame] holds you spellbound from the moment you enter the gallery,’ wrote one critic. Two of his earliest admirers were Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough and Lady Diana Cooper, who sat for their portraits in 1917 and 1918 respectively. In the early 1920s McEvoy also made several trips to New York, where the famous art dealer and tastemaker Joseph Duveen was busy promoting his work. It was during these years he painted some of his best-known works including remarkable watercolours of ‘wild-child’ Lois Sturt and a portrait of James Ramsay MacDonald. In 1927, at the very peak of his career, McEvoy was tragically struck down with pneumonia and died on 4 January. Many of McEvoy’s friends and contemporaries including Augustus and Gwen John, William Rothenstein and William Orpen have become familiar names to British art enthusiasts, but McEvoy has remained on the side-lines. This is partly due to the fact that many of his most accomplished works have remained tucked away in private collections or left languishing in museum stores, however, it is also due to the absence of any reliable literature on his life and work. This publication hopes to restore him to his rightful place. Written in the early 1970s by Erik Akers-Douglas, 3rd Viscount Chilston (1910–1986), the original manuscript – of which only one copy was produced – was lost soon after it was submitted to a publisher in 1975. After several years of legal wrangling, Chilston decided to type a second copy and it was resubmitted to his agent. Chilston died the following month and the manuscript was never published. It was recently rediscovered by Philip Mould& Company and edited by Lawrence Hendra.

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The depth of history at Queen Anne’s Gate – a handsome Baroque street overlooking St James’s Park – is unusual even in London, and few houses resonate with more memories than the extraordinary number 14. The story of the house over the centuries features political revolutionaries, occult initiations, clandestine war meetings, and a decapitated head. It begins, however, as a museum of Roman sculpture, unrivalled outside Italy, designed for connoisseur and virtuoso Charles Townley (1737–1805). Townley embodied Enlightenment values perhaps more completely than any other figure in the art world of 18th-century Britain – his portrait by Johann Zoff any (seen above) is one of the iconic paintings of the period – yet remarkably he has never been the subject of a major publication. Written with a sparkle matching Townley’s own enthusiasm, this beautiful and engaging publication tells the story of 14 Queen Anne’s Gate and examines the extraordinary life of Charles Townley and his remarkable collection of over 150 Roman marble statues (mostly now in the British Museum but captured in spectacular engravings of the period). It will be a revelation. The house was designed as a temple to the past, reviving in the modern city the occult practices of the ancient world. Here visitors in eighteenth century would have found an assembly of Roman sculpture unrivalled outside Italy, as well as a library and collection devoted to understanding a universal ‘generative sprit’ worshipped by early civilizations. That spirit may be found in the succession of major roles the house has continued to take through generations of dramatic change up to the present day. Charles Townley, for whom the house was built, was a fi gure both marginal and emblematic. Catholic and bisexual, he forged a life literally on the borders of the Protestant British establishment. He remains little understood or appreciated in his homeland and, remarkably, has never been the subject of a major exhibition or publication. The ‘emblematic’ side of Townley’s life was dedicated to virtù, the term used for an appreciation of fi ne art pursued for its own sake. The ‘marginal’ side of Townley, by contrast, manifested itself in a fascination with the ancient occult, particularly the Bacchic mysteries. The house he made for himself was at once a temple to virtù and to Bacchus and contained an unprecedented programme of Bacchic iconography.

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Venetian Disegno: New Frontiers circa 1420 to 1620 offers a fresh perspective on the art of Venice and the Veneto. The volume brings together the contributions of scholars and curators specialist on a wide variety of artists and art forms including drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture and architecture. Venetian Disegno: New Frontiers circa 1420 to 1620 takes disegno as its central theme, that in its plurality of meaning allows for a consideration of the conceptual role of design and the act of drawing. The relationship between disegno and Renaissance Venetian art has historically been a problematic one, with emphasis instead being placed on the Venetian predilection for colore. This volume is reflective of an ongoing challenge to this perspective and draws attention to the importance of Venetian disegno and the study of drawings for understanding various art forms. The book commences with a critical study of what constitutes disegno in Venetian art. It does so through questioning the historiography of Venetian artistic scholarship and the restrictive framework and preconceptions that have emerged before setting out the merits of a broader, more inclusive approach. Disegno is applied in its multifaceted nature to address the physical act of drawing, the tangible drawn object and the role of design in artistic practice. The term 'Venetian' is taken to encompass both Venice and its mainland territories not least because of the mobility of artists across and beyond the region. Contributions are divided into five thematic sections. The first, entitled 'Peripheries', frames the art of Venice within a wider discourse on the movement of ideas across and beyond the Veneto in locations including Padua, Verona and Rome. A section on Media considers the origins and innovations that took place in the use of materials such as blue paper, oil and coloured chalks. In another, the theories that have developed on Venetian notions of disegno are brought under scrutiny, addressing topics such as the long upheld perspective that Venetian artists did not draw, the role of sculpture in Tintoretto's drawing practice and the interrelation between the written and drawn line in Palma Giovane's draftsmanship. The section on Invention reflects on the technical innovations that were facilitated through the uptake of printmaking and the intellectual freedom granted by humanist patrons. Finally, Function gets to the heart of the practical purpose of disegno. Contributions focus on the workshops of the Bellini family and Titian to consider the diverse ways they used drawing within their artistic practices with an emphasis on technical analysis. These sections are all preceded by introductions that provide an overview on each theme while the volume is bookended by two reflections on the state of research into Venetian disegno and the potential for further progress. Sumptuously illustrated with over 100 images with a comprehensive bibliography, Venetian Disegno: New Frontiers circa 1420 to 1620 represents a significant contribution to scholarship on the art of Venice, Renaissance workshops and drawing studies.

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This is the first catalogue of the collection of early modern ceramics in the Courtauld. The pieces in the collection showcase brilliantly the skill of potters and pottery painters working at the time of Raphael and Titian.Maiolica is one of the most revealing expressions of Renaissance art. Its extraordinary range of colours retain the vividness that they had when they left the potter's kiln. Italian potters absorbed techniques and shapes from the Islamic world and incorporated ornament and subject matter from the arts of ancient Rome. This new approach to pottery making, combined with the invention of printing, woodcut and engraving, resulted in an extraordinary type of painted pottery, praised by Vasari in his Lives of the Artists for 'surpassing the ancient with its brilliance of glaze and variety of painting'.The collection boasts a magnificent group of vessels made during the high Renaissance, the golden age of Italian maiolica. It includes precious and delicate Deruta lustreware with imagery deriving from Perugino and Raphael, as well as vessels painted in a narrative style of pottery painting known as istoriato. Highlights include vessels depicting episodes taken from the first printed Bibles of the Renaissance. Istoriato maiolica flourished particularly in the lands of the Dukes of Urbino, who promoted this craft by sending painted pottery to prestigious patrons across Europe.Emblems and devices painted on the pottery help us understand that they were meant to be used and enjoyed by the elites in Renaissance society, such as the Medici and other great Tuscan families. The catalogue will include two recent gifts to the Courtauld, a rare tile of the famous patroness of the arts Marchioness Isabella D'Este, and a refined dish painted with the story of Diana and Actaeon.All major Renaissance pottery centres are represented in the collection, including Siena, Faenza and Venice, as well as splendid examples of the mysterious pharmacy jars made at the foot of the mountain of Gran Sasso in the town of Castelli d'Abruzzo. These achievements of the art of pottery in the early modern period are completed by fine examples of Ottoman pottery, as well as examples of Valencian lustreware.Sani's introductory essay on the Victorian collector Thomas Gambier Parry will shed new light on the development of this fascinating collection, making links between Gambier Parry's artistic practice and his collecting and revealing new insights into his taste as a collector. Each detailed entry uncovers a wealth of new information on the provenance of the pieces.

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This beautifully illustrated catalogue presents a selection of exceptional seventeenth-century Dutch drawings from the Peck Collection in the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Featuring many previously unpublished and rarely exhibited works, the catalogue brings together examples by some of the best-known artists of the era such as Rembrandt, Jacques de Gheyn II, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and Frans van Mieris.The collection was donated to the museum in 2017 by the late Drs. Sheldon and Leena Peck. The transformative gift is comprised of over 130 largely seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch and Flemish drawings, establishing the Ackland as one of a handful of university art museums in the United States where northern European drawings can be studied in depth.Drawn to Life presents around 70 works from this exceptional and diverse group of drawings amassed by the Pecks over four decades. Featuring new research and fresh insights into seventeenth-century drawing practice, the catalogue and accompanying exhibition celebrates the creativity and technical skills of Dutch artists who explored the beauty of the natural world and the multifaceted aspects of humanity.The catalogue features a broad selection of scenes of everyday life, landscapes, biblical and historical scenes, portraits, and preparatory studies, forming a dynamic and representative group of Dutch drawings made by some of the most outstanding artists of the period, including Abraham Bloemaert, Jacob van Ruisdael, Esaias van de Velde, Bartholomeus Breenbergh, Pieter Molijn, Aelbert Cuyp, Adriaen van Ostade, Ferdinand Bol, Nicolaes Maes, Jan Lievens, Gerard ter Borch, Adriaen van de Velde, Nicolaes Berchem, and Cornelis Dusart. Key sheets of remarkable quality by lesserknown artists such as Guillam Dubois, Herman Naiwincx, Willem Romeyn, and Jacobvan der Ulft, also comprise a core strength of the collection, and serve as a testament to the visual acuity of the Pecks as collectors.At the heart of the Peck Collection are several sheets by Rembrandt, including the sublime Noli me Tangere; a beautifully rendered late landscape, Canal and Boats with a Distant View of Amsterdam; and the superbly charming Studies of Women and Children, which was the last of Rembrandt’s seventeen known drawings with an inscription in his own hand to reach a public collection.Meticulously researched and written by Robert Fucci, Ph.D., Drawn to Life introduces both scholars and drawings enthusiasts to the depth and beauty of the Peck Collection at the Ackland Art Museum.

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Spanning some 350 years, the Thomson Collection of historic ship models contains examples of exquisite workmanship and some of the masterpieces of the genre. Pride of the collection are the rare British dockyard models made to scale for affluent 18th-century clients closely associated with the Navy. A large number of models– made from wood and bone, with rigging of human hair– were made by some of the 120,000 French and other prisoners of the Napoleonic Wars. The diverse collection also includes tugs, dredgers, trawlers, cargo vessels, passenger steamers, private yachts, corvettes, battleships, cruisers, torpedo boat destroyers and two aircraft carriers. The author (curator at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) considers the rich history and the artistry of model shipbuilding. New photography captures the incredible workmanship – the carving, casting, gilding and stitching – that such model-making demands.

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John Carr of York (1723 – 1807) was one of the most prolific and significant architects of the eighteenth century, with an output of over 400 designs, most of which were executed. His designs vary from simple gateways through to the grandest schemes, such as that for the palatial hospital at Oporto in Portugal, Harewood House and village in Yorkshire, and Basildon Park in Berkshire.

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