Published to mark the reopening of the spectacular baroque interior of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich after a landmark conservation project, The Painted Hall is a wonderful celebration of what has been called `the Sistine Chapel of the UK'. The ceiling and wall decorations of the Painted Hall were conceived and executed by the artist Sir James Thornhill between 1707 and 1726 - years that witnessed the Act of Union during the reign of Queen Anne and Great Britain's rise to become a dominant Protestant power in a predominantly Catholic Europe. The accessions to the throne of William III and Mary II in 1688 and George I in 1714 form the central narrative of a scheme that also honours Britain's maritime successes and mercantile prosperity. The artist drew on a cast of around 200 figures - a mixture of historical, contemporary, allegorical and mythological characters - to tell a story of political change, scientific and cultural achievements, naval endeavours, and commercial enterprise against a series of magnificent backdrops. In the first part of the book, Dr Anya Lucas describes the history and architecture of the building and the background to Thornhill's commission. The grandeur of his composition, which covers 40,000 square feet, reflects the importance of the space that the paintings adorn: the hall of the new Royal Hospital for Seamen. The Hospital was established in 1694 at Queen Mary's instigation for men invalided out of the Navy, and was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor. The Painted Hall was originally intended as a grand dining room, but it soon became a ceremonial space open to paying visitors and reserved for special functions. The last naval pensioners left the site in 1869, when it became home to the Royal Naval College, an officers' training academy. The passage of nineteen years from the start of the commission to its completion, and the need to navigate contemporary political events, meant that Thornhill was required to rethink the design of his paintings several times. His preparatory sketches for the Painted Hall reveal how carefully he experimented with and planned the content. When he had finished his work, Thornhill wrote An Explanation of the paintings, which was published by the Hospital directors and sold to visitors. This guide is the subject of the second part of our book, by Dr Richard Johns. Johns also explores image and meaning in Thornhill's decorative scheme, which stretches across three distinct but connected spaces: the domed Vestibule, the long Lower Hall, and the Upper Hall, together presenting a vivid and compelling picture of Britain's place in the world according to those who governed it at the start of the 18th century. During the last 300 years, smoke and dirt built up on the fragile painted surfaces of the Hall, and varnish layers fractured under the effects of heat and humidity. In the final part of the book, the specialist conservators Sophie Stewart and Stephen Paine consider historic restorations of the Painted Hall from the 18th century to the Ministry of Works campaign of the late 1950s. The spring of 2019 sees the completion of a ground-breaking conservation programme that has reversed decades of decay and ensured the long-term preservation of the paintings. Now that every inch of decorated surface has been lovingly cleaned and conserved, new photography brings the colour, clarity and vibrancy of Thornhill's masterpiece to life.

William Hogarth (1697-1764) was among the first British-born artists to rise to international recognition and acclaim and to this day he is considered one of the country's most celebrated and innovative masters. His output encompassed engravings, paintings, prints, and editorial cartoons that presaged western sequential art. This comprehensive catalogue of his paintings brings together over twenty years of scholarly research and expertise on the artist, and serves to highlight the remarkable diversity of his accomplishments in this medium. Portraits, history paintings, theater pictures, and genre pieces are lavishly reproduced alongside detailed entries on each painting, including much previously unpublished material relating to his oeuvre. This deeply informed publication affirms Hogarth's legacy and testifies to the artist's enduring reputation. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Peter Paul Rubens was one of the most productive and exciting painters of his time, noted for his expressive, emotive and sensual paintings which are now instantly recognizable. Indeed, his voluptuous female figures have given rise to the word 'Rubenesque'. This book explores the life and times of Rubens, from his early studies in Italy through to his apprenticeship in Antwerp and his subsequent outstanding accomplishments as 'the prince of painters and the painter of princes'. It also contains a gallery of 300 of his paintings and drawings, revealing his unparalleled position as an artist, diplomat, scholar, linguist, teacher, art collector and devoted family man.

Poussin's scenes of bacchanalian revelry, tripping maenads and skipping nymphs are often described as 'dancelike' and 'choreographed'. The artist's dancing pictures helped him develop a new approach to painting that would become the model for the French classical tradition. Shedding the sensuous, painterly manner of his early career, Poussin carved out the crisp, relief-like approach that characterized his mature work and set the precedent for three centuries of French art, from Le Brun and David to Cezanne and Picasso. He carried lessons learned from dance into every corner of his production. This book brings together a key group of paintings and drawings by Poussin, exploring the theme of dance and dancers in his production for the first time. Focusing on the dancing pictures created in Rome in the 1620s and 1630s, essays connect Poussin's interest in dance, his study of antiquities, and his formulation of a new classical style. Richly illustrated and engagingly written, this publication uses the prism of dance to cast Poussin in a new, fresh light.

A new account of painting in early modern England centered on the art and legacy of Anthony van Dyck As a courtier, figure of fashion, and object of erotic fascination, Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) transformed the professional identities available to English artists. By making his portrait sittings into a form of courtly spectacle, Van Dyck inspired poets and playwrights at the same time that he offended guardians of traditional hierarchies. A self-consciously Van Dyckian lineage of artists, many of them women, extends from his lifetime to the end of the eighteenth century and beyond. Recovering the often surprising responses of both writers and painters to Van Dyck's portraits, this book provides an alternative perspective on English art's historical self-consciousness. Built around a series of close readings of artworks and texts ranging from poems and plays to early biographies and studio gossip, it traces the reception of Van Dyck's art on the part of artists like Mary Beale, William Hogarth, and Richard and Maria Cosway to bestow a historical specificity on the frequent claim that Van Dyck founded an English school of portraiture. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Chinoiserie, a decorative style inspired by the art of the Far East, gripped Britain from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Despite taking its name from the French word for 'Chinese', the style also incorporated influences from other Asian countries, helping to shape the period's popular fantasy of the 'exotic Orient'. Wealthy consumers jostled to obtain imported wallpaper, lacquered cabinets and hand-painted porcelain, while domestic manufacturers such as Royal Worcester and Chippendale met demand with mass-produced items of their own. Though interest in the style waned as the Gothic Revival took hold, many examples of Chinoiserie have been preserved. In this beautifully illustrated book, Richard Hayman tells the story of this fascinating phenomenon, and explores the profound impact of Chinoiserie on the material culture of the West.

Art in Theory (1648-1815) provides a wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of documents on the theory of art from the founding of the French Academy until the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Like its highly successful companion volumes, Art in Theory (1815-1900) and Art in Theory (1900-1990), its' primary aim is to provide students and teachers with the documentary material for informed and up-to-date study. Its' 240 texts, clear principles of organization and considerable editorial content offer a vivid and indispensable introduction to the art of the early modern period.
Harrison, Wood and Gaiger have collected writing by artists, critics, philosophers, literary figures and administrators of the arts, some reprinted in their entirety, others excerpted from longer works. A wealth of material from French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Latin sources is also provided, including many new translations.
Among the major themes treated are early arguments over the relative merits of ancient and modern art, debates between the advocates of form and color, the beginnings of modern art criticism in reviews of the Salon, art and politics during the French Revolution, the rise of landscape painting, and the artistic theories of Romanticism and Neo-classicism.
Each section is prefaced by an essay that situates the ideas of the period in their historical context, while relating theoretical concerns and debates to developments in the practice of art. Each individual text is also accompanied by a short introduction. An extensive bibliography and full index are provided.
For more details of our book and journal list in Art, visit http: //www.blackwellpublishing.com/arttheory

The DeMell Jacobsen Collection of paintings and sculpture—an assemblage rich in American cultural heritage—parallels the development of art in the United States. American Made features some of the country’s most recognized artists: Thomas Cole, John Kensett, Asher B. Durand and William Trost Richards, while works by Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam, Willard Leroy Metcalf and William Merritt Chase represent the Grand Tour and concepts gained abroad. Wonderful still lifes appear throughout the collection, including paintings by Severin Roesen, William Harnett and a late work by William Bailey. Portraiture is represented in stellar examples by members of the Peale family, Thomas Sully, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent and Edmund Charles Tarbell. Classically-inspired marble works from Hiram Powers and Randolph Rogers, bronze pieces from Paul Manship and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and a modern copper and bronze example from Harry Bertoia are highlights of the sculpture collection. Early modernist and interwar works by Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Emil Bisttram, Paul Cadmus and Joseph Stella explore colour, form and abstraction. Highlights of contemporary art include works by Frank Stella, Louise Nevelson and a recently acquired painting by Alexis Rockman. Fully illustrated—with several paintings including profiles of their appropriate period frames—each work of art features an extended entry with full specifications, information on style and stylistic influences, significance and social context.

The first major English-language biography of Francisco Goya y Lucientes, who ushered in the modern era The life of Francisco Goya (1746-1828) coincided with an age of transformation in Spanish history that brought upheavals in the country's politics and at the court which Goya served, changes in society, the devastation of the Iberian Peninsula in the war against Napoleon, and an ensuing period of political instability. In this revelatory biography, Janis Tomlinson draws on a wide range of documents-including letters, court papers, and a sketchbook used by Goya in the early years of his career-to provide a nuanced portrait of a complex and multifaceted painter and printmaker, whose art is synonymous with compelling images of the people, events, and social revolution that defined his life and era. Tomlinson challenges the popular image of the artist as an isolated figure obsessed with darkness and death, showing how Goya's likeability and ambition contributed to his success at court, and offering new perspectives on his youth, rich family life, extensive travels, and lifelong friendships. She explores the full breadth of his imagery-from scenes inspired by life in Madrid to visions of worlds without reason, from royal portraits to the atrocities of war. She sheds light on the artist's personal trials, including the deaths of six children and the onset of deafness in middle age, but also reconsiders the conventional interpretation of Goya's late years as a period of disillusion, viewing them instead as years of liberated artistic invention, most famously in the murals on the walls of his country house, popularly known as the "black" paintings. A monumental achievement, Goya: A Portrait of the Artist is the definitive biography of an artist whose faith in his art and his genius inspired paintings, drawings, prints, and frescoes that continue to captivate, challenge, and surprise us two centuries later.

This book theorizes the baroque as neither a time period nor an artistic style but as a collection of bodily practices developed from clashes between governmental discipline and artistic excess, moving between the dramaturgy of Jesuit spiritual exercises, the political theatre-making of Angelo Beolco (aka Ruzzante), and the civic governance of the Venetian Republic at a time of great tumult. The manuscript assembles plays seldom read or viewed by English-speaking audiences, archival materials from three Venetian archives, and several secondary sources on baroque, Renaissance, and early modern epistemology in order to forward and argument for understanding the baroque as a gathering of social practices. Such a rethinking of the baroque aims to complement the already lively studies of neo-baroque aesthetics and ethics emerging in contemporary scholarship on (for example) Latin American political art.

The first exploration of Piranesi's work as a draughtsman, published to coincide with an exhibition at the British Museum. The Venetian-born artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) is best known for his dramatic prints of the architecture and antiquities of his adopted city of Rome, and for the extraordinary flights of spatial fancy in his series Le Carceri (Prisons). But he was also an astonishingly talented draughtsman, as revealed in this outstanding collection of drawings at the British Museum. This book explores the relationship between Piranesi's drawings and prints, and reveals the way in which his style and interests as a draughtsman evolved over time. Some are spontaneous 'primi pensieri', first thoughts that anticipate a bigger work; others explore more complex exercises in perspective and spatial representation. Piranesi drawings reveals the quality and lasting impact of the work of this remarkably influential artist.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder is one of the world's most original artists who founded a dynasty of painters. His most popular works include Children's Games, Hunters in the Snow and Peasant Wedding Feast. He collaborated with Rubens on several important works. The first part of the book tells the story of the Bruegel family, including his sons Pieter the Younger and Jan theElder. The second part is a glorious wide-ranging gallery of their work. Unlike other Old Masters, the Bruegels focused on ordinary people: farmers, workers, children, dancing, celebrating, working. Their work, often surprisingly modern in tone, still speaks to us today.

Artemisia Gentileschi, widely regarded as the most important woman artist before the modern period, was a major Italian Baroque painter of the seventeenth century and the only female follower of Caravaggio. This first full-length study of her life and work shows that her powerfully original treatments of mythic-heroic female subjects depart radically from traditional interpretations of the same themes.

This book examines the links between the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain and eighteenth-century theories of the sublime. Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), in particular, is shown to have directly or indirectly challenged visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and visual media such as panoramas and book illustrations, by arguing that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork. -- .

The volume examines the mutually constitutive relationship between the materiality of objects and their aesthetic meanings. Its approach connects material culture with art history, curation, technologies and practices of making. A central dimension of the case studies collected here is the mobility of objects between Europe and China and the transformations that unfold as a result of their transcultural lives. Many of the objects studied here are relatively unknown or understudied. The stories they recount suggest new ways of thinking about space, cultural geographies and the complex and often contradictory association of power and culture. These studies of transcultural objects can suggest pathways for museum experts by uncovering the multi-layered identities and temporalities of objects that can no longer be labelled as located in single regions. It is also addressed to students of art history, of European and Chinese studies and scholars of consumer culture. " This eagerly awaited volume offers deep and extensive insights into the fast-growing field of material culture studies. Its fresh approach to Eurasian objects and materialities will serve as useful reading for all scholars interested in transcultural and global studies. A very helpful introductory essay. " Sabine du Crest, University of Bordeaux Montaigne, Former Fellow, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

Michael Jacobs was haunted by Velazquez's enigmatic masterpiece Las Meninas from first encountering it in the Prado as a teenager. In Everything is Happening Jacobs searches for the ultimate significance of the painting by following the trails of associations from each individual character in the picture, as well as his own memories of and relationship to this extraordinary work. From Jacobs' first trip to Spain to the complex politics of Golden Age Madrid, to his meeting with the man who saved Las Meninas during the Spanish Civil war, via Jacobs' experiences of the sunless world of the art history academy, Jacobs' dissolves the barriers between the past and the present, the real and the illusory. Cut short by Jacobs' death in 2014, and completed with an introduction and coda of great sensitivity and insight by his friend and fellow lover of art, the journalist Ed Vulliamy, this visionary, meditative and often very funny book is a passionate, personal manifesto for the liberation of how we look at painting.

The Biographic series presents an entirely new way of looking at the lives of the world's greatest thinkers and creatives. It takes the 50 defining facts, dates, thoughts, habits and achievements of each subject, and uses infographics to convey all of them in vivid snapshots. Many people know that Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) was a Dutch painter and etcher, a master of light and shadow who is regarded as one of the greatest of all portrait artists. What, perhaps, they don't know is that he taught over 50 apprentices; that he produced over 2,000 artworks, of which 120 were self-portraits; and that, after buying one of the finest houses in Amsterdam, he ran up so many debts that he was forced to sell his wife's grave. Biographic: Rembrandt presents an instant portrait of his life and work, with an array of irresistible facts and figures converted into infographics to reveal the artist behind the pictures.

Fancy in the eighteenth century was part of a rich semantic network, connecting wit, whimsicality, erotic desire, spontaneity, deviation from norms and triviality. It was also a contentious term, signifying excess, oddness and irrationality, liable to offend taste, reason and morals. This collection of essays foregrounds fancy - and its close synonym, caprice - as a distinct strand of the imagination in the period. As a prevalent, coherent and enduring concept in aesthetics and visual culture, it deserves a more prominent place in scholarly understanding than it has hitherto occupied. Fancy is here understood as a type of creative output that deviated from rules and relished artistic freedom. It was also a mode of audience response, entailing a high degree of imaginative engagement with playful, quirky artworks, generating pleasure, desire or anxiety. Emphasizing commonalities between visual productions in different media from diverse locations, the authors interrogate and celebrate the expressive freedom of fancy in European visual culture. Topics include: the seductive fictions of the fancy picture, Fragonard and galanterie, fancy in drawing manuals, pattern books and popular prints, fans and fancy goods, chinoiserie, excess and virtuality in garden design, Canaletto's British 'capricci', urban design in Madrid, and Goya's 'Caprichos'.

While the connected, international character of today's art economy is well known, the 18th century too had global systems of artistic production and consumption. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds is the first book to create a global map of the art world of the 18th century. Fourteen case studies from distinguished experts explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a series of interconnected and asymmetrical art worlds that were well developed in the 18th century. Capturing the full material diversity of 18th-century art, this book considers painting and sculpture alongside numerous prints and decorative objects. Analyzing the role of place in the history of 18th-century art, it bridges the disciplines of art history and cultural geography, and draws attention away from any one place as a privileged art-historical site, while highlighting places such as Manila, Beijing, Mexico City, and London as significant points on a global art map. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds combines a broad global perspective on the history of art with careful attention to how global artistic concerns intersect with local ones, offering a framework for studies in global art history.

Hogarth has long been viewed as an insular and chauvinistic individual, with a particular aversion to all things French. On the contrary, while Hogarth himself liked to project this image, his effective invention of British art was founded upon a profound knowledge of contemporary French art and theory. This lavishly illustrated book conjures up in great detail the French and wider European context within which Hogarth's art was formed. Robin Simon examines the ways in which Hogarth interacted with and influenced his contemporaries not only in painting and printmaking, but also in sculpture, poetry, the novel, the theater, public life, art education, copyright law, music and opera. In this wide-ranging but richly detailed book, full of analyses of individual works, the author draws upon a mass of new material, with fresh analyses of Hogarth's most famous and less well-known works alike, opening a window on to one of the most creative and formative periods in British life. Robin Simon, FSA, is Editor of The British Art Journal, having been Editor of Apollo magazine and a tenured university academic for many years before that. He is the author of many scholarly articles on British art, and his books include The Portrait in Britain and America (1987).

Even during the artist's lifetime, contemporary art lovers considered Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) to be an exceptional artist. In this revelatory sequel to the acclaimed Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, renowned Rembrandt authority Ernst van de Wetering investigates the painter's considerations that determined the striking changes in his development from an early age onwards. This gorgeously illustrated book explores how Rembrandt achieved mastery by systematic exploration of the 'foundations of the art of painting'. According to written sources from the seventeenth century, which were largely misinterpreted until now, these 'foundations' were considered essential at that time. From his first endeavours in painting, Rembrandt embarked on a journey past these foundations, thus becoming the 'pittore famoso', whom Count Cosimo the Medici visited at the end of his life. Rembrandt never stopped searching for solutions to the pictorial problems that confronted him; this led over time to radical changes that cannot simply be attributed to stylistic evolution or natural development. In a quest as rigorous and novel as the artist's, Van de Wetering reveals how Rembrandt became the revolutionary painter that would continue to fascinate the art world. This ground breaking exploration reconstructs Rembrandt's theories and methods, shedding new light both on the artist's exceptional accomplishments and on the theory and practice of painting in the Dutch Golden Age.

The first major English-language biography of Francisco Goya y Lucientes, who ushered in the modern era The life of Francisco Goya (1746-1828) coincided with an age of transformation in Spanish history that brought upheavals in the country's politics and at the court which Goya served, changes in society, the devastation of the Iberian Peninsula in the war against Napoleon, and an ensuing period of political instability. In this revelatory biography, Janis Tomlinson draws on a wide range of documents-including letters, court papers, and a sketchbook used by Goya in the early years of his career-to provide a nuanced portrait of a complex and multifaceted painter and printmaker, whose art is synonymous with compelling images of the people, events, and social revolution that defined his life and era. Tomlinson challenges the popular image of the artist as an isolated figure obsessed with darkness and death, showing how Goya's likeability and ambition contributed to his success at court, and offering new perspectives on his youth, rich family life, extensive travels, and lifelong friendships. She explores the full breadth of his imagery-from scenes inspired by life in Madrid to visions of worlds without reason, from royal portraits to the atrocities of war. She sheds light on the artist's personal trials, including the deaths of six children and the onset of deafness in middle age, but also reconsiders the conventional interpretation of Goya's late years as a period of disillusion, viewing them instead as years of liberated artistic invention, most famously in the murals on the walls of his country house, popularly known as the "black" paintings. A monumental achievement, Goya: A Portrait of the Artist is the definitive biography of an artist whose faith in his art and his genius inspired paintings, drawings, prints, and frescoes that continue to captivate, challenge, and surprise us two centuries later.