Despite this famous protestation in a letter to his friend William Jackson, Gainsborough was clearly prepared to make an exception when it came to making portraits of his own family and himself. This book, and the major exhibition it accompanies, features a dozen portraits of his daughters Mary and Margaret, the same number of himself and his wife Margaret (though, perhaps tellingly, only one of the couple together), as well as works depicting four of his five siblings, his handsome nephew Gainsborough Dupont (who became his studio assistant) , an aunt and uncle, several in - laws and - last, but not least - his beloved dogs, Tristram and Fox. Spanning more than four decades, Gainsborough's family portraits chart the period from the mid - 1740s, when he plied his trade in his native Suffolk , through his time in Bath ( 1758 - 74 ), when he established hi mself with a rich and fashionable clientele , to his most successful latter years at his luxuriously appointed studio in London's We st End. Alongside this story of a provincial 18th - century artist's rise to fame and fortune runs a more private narrative, ab out the role of portraiture in the promotion of family values, at a time when these were assuming a recogni s ably modern form. In the first of three introductory essays, David H. Solkin writes on Gainsborough himself, placing his family portraits in the context of earlier practice - including that of the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens and British portraitists from Mary Beale to Joseph Highmore . Ann Bermingham explores Gainsborough's portraits of his daughters, with particular reference to two finished double portraits painted seven years apart and the tragic story arising from them. Susan Sloman discusses Margaret's role as her husband's business manager, its effect on the family dynamic and hence the visual representation of its members.

Very little is known about The Green Florilegium. Neither signed nor dated, it is generally attributed to the German painter Hans Simon Holtzbecker and originates from the library at Gottorp Castle in Schleswig, on the border of Germany and Denmark. The album now resides at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. Recently the book was painstakingly restored, allowing the delicate illustrations to come to new life in their original colors. This beautiful and affordable volume reproduces the original work of 400 botanical illustrations in its entirety. It also includes an introductory essay and captions with basic information on each flower. This lovely book is a must-have for lovers of botanical illustration and a sublime example of the art of conservation.

The essays in this volume show that Versailles was not the static creation of one man, but a hugely complex cultural space; a centre of power, but also of life, love, anxiety, creation, and an enduring palimpsest of aspirations, desires, and ruptures. The splendour of the Château and the masterpieces of art and design that it contains mask a more complex and sometimes more sordid history of human struggle and achievement. The case studies presented by the contributors to this book cannot provide a comprehensive account of the Palace of Versailles and its domains, the life within its walls, its visitors, and the art and architecture that it has inspired from the seventeenth century to the present day: from the palace of the Sun King to the Penthouse of Donald Trump. However, this innovative collection will reshape—or even radically redefine—our understanding of the palace of Versailles and its posterity.

Artemisia Gentileschi is one of the most fascinating artists in history. Apprenticed at an early age to her father, the seventeenth-century painter Orazio Gentileschi, she rapidly became more famous than he was, for her rich, dramatic canvases. But her fame was tarnished by scandal. At the age of seventeen, she was violently raped by Agostino Tassi, an artist friend of Orazio's. On discovering Tassi's betrayal, Orazio took the case to court and there followed, in 1612, eight months of humiliation for Artemisia as the inhabitants of Rome's colourful artist's quarter came to give evidence. Their testimony - frank, partial, often cruel - in this first rape trial ever to be fully documented, made Artemisia and her father notorious.

Featuring major works from Caravaggio and his circle and the Italian Baroque period, this lavishly illustrated book looks at Rome as the center of European culture in the 17th century. The National Galleries Barberini Corsini in Rome host one of the major collections of Italian Baroque paintings. This art has been admired all over Europe. The monarchs aimed to transfer the glamour of Roman Baroque to their courts. In the 18th century Frederick II of Prussia modeled the Palais Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, after the Barberini Palace in Rome. In January 2017 the newly founded Museum Barberini moved into the recently reconstructed Palais Barberini in Potsdam. This book accompanies an exhibition in Potsdam of splendid 17th century works from the National Galleries Barberini Corsini in Rome. It provides not only a fitting background to Museum Barberini's fascinating architectural history but also highlights the important role of the Barberini family and Pope Urban VIII as patrons and art collectors.

The subject of writing and receiving letters, which recurs frequently in the work of Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), is given dramatic tension in this masterful painting of two women in a mysterious moment of crisis. The artist seldom, if ever, surpassed the subtly varied effects of light seen here as it gleams from the pearl jewellery, sparkles from the glass and silver objects on the table, and falls softly over the figures in their shadowy setting. The Frick Diptych series sparks a dialogue between creative spirits and art historians, promising new insights into some of the Frick's most famous masterpieces. The third volume, to be published in 2019, will have a contribution by author Edmund de Waal on a pair of porcelain and bronze candlesticks by the 18th-century French metalworker Pierre Gouthiere.

The Baroque was the first truly global culture. The Ibero-American Baroque illuminates its dissemination, dynamism, and transformation during the early modern period on both sides of the Atlantic. This collection of original essays focuses on the media, institutions, and technologies that were central to cultural exchanges in a broad early modern Iberian world, brought into being in the aftermath of the Spanish and Portuguese arrivals in the Americas. Focusing on the period from 1600 to 1825, these essays explore early modern Iberian architecture, painting, sculpture, music, sermons, reliquaries, processions, emblems, and dreams, shedding light on the Baroque as a historical moment of far-reaching and long-lasting importance. Anchored in extensive, empirical research that provides evidence for understanding how the Baroque became globalized, The Ibero-American Baroque showcases the ways in which the Baroque has continued to define Latin American identities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

In the late 1790s, British Prime Minister William Pitt created a crisis of representation when he pressured the British Parliament to relieve the Bank of England from its obligations to convert paper notes into coin. Paper quickly became associated with a form of limitless reproduction that threatened to dematerialize solid bodies and replace them with insubstantial shadows. Media Critique in the Age of Gillray centres on printed images and graphic satires which view paper as the foundation for the contemporary world. Through a focus on printed, visual imagery from practitioners such as James Gillray, William Blake, John Thomas Smith, and Henry Fuseli, the book addresses challenges posed by reproductive technologies to traditional concepts of subjective agency. Joseph Monteyne shows that the late eighteenth-century paper age's baseless fabric set the stage for contemporary digital media's weightless production. Engagingly written and abundantly illustrated, Media Critique in the Age of Gillray highlights the fact that graphic culture has been overlooked as an important sphere for the production of critical and self-reflective discourses around media transformations and the visual turn in British culture.

The second largest city in 17th-century Europe, Naples constituted a vital Mediterranean center in which the Spanish Habsburgs, the clergy, and Neapolitan aristocracy, together with the resident merchants, and other members of the growing professional classes jostled for space and prestige. Their competing programs of building and patronage created a booming art market and spurred painters such as Jusepe de Ribera, Massimo Stanzione, Salvator Rosa, and Luca Giordano as well as foreign artists such as Caravaggio, Domenichino, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Giovanni Lanfranco to extraordinary heights of achievement. This new reading of 17th-century Italian Baroque art explores the social, material, and economic history of painting, revealing how artists, agents, and the owners of artworks interacted to form a complex and mutually sustaining art world. Through such topics as artistic rivalry and anti-foreign labor agitation, art dealing and forgery, cultural diplomacy, and the rise of the independently arranged art exhibition, Christopher R. Marshall illuminates the rich interconnections between artistic practice and patronage, business considerations, and the spirit of entrepreneurialism in Baroque Italy.

The end of the eighteenth century saw the start of a new craze in Europe: tiny portraits of single eyes that were exchanged by lovers or family members. Worn as brooches or pendants, these minuscule eyes served the same emotional need as more conventional mementos, such as lockets containing a coil of a loved one's hair. The fashion lasted only a few decades, and by the early 1800s eye miniatures had faded into oblivion. Unearthing these portraits in "Treasuring the Gaze", Hanneke Grootenboer proposes that the rage for eye miniatures - and their abrupt disappearance - reveals a knot in the unfolding of the history of vision. Drawing on Alois Riegl, Jean-Luc Nancy, Marcia Pointon, Melanie Klein, and others, Grootenboer unravels this knot, discovering previously unseen patterns of looking and strategies for showing. She shows that eye miniatures portray the subject's gaze rather than his or her eye, making the recipient of the keepsake an exclusive beholder who is perpetually watched. These treasured portraits always return the looks they receive and, as such, they create a reciprocal mode of viewing that Grootenboer calls intimate vision. Recounting stories about eye miniatures - including the role one played in the scandalous affair of Mrs. Fitzherbert and the Prince of Wales, a portrait of the mesmerizing eye of Lord Byron, and the loss and longing incorporated in crying eye miniatures - Grootenboer shows that intimate vision brings the gaze of another deep into the heart of private experience. With a host of fascinating imagery from this eccentric and mostly forgotten yet deeply private keepsake, "Treasuring the Gaze" provides new insights into the art of miniature painting and the genre of portraiture.

In Enchanted Islands, renowned art historian Mary D. Sheriff explores the legendary, fictional, and real islands that filled the French imagination during the ancien regime as they appeared in royal ballets and festivals, epic literature, paintings, engravings, book illustrations, and other objects. Some of the islands were mythical and found in the most popular literary texts of the day--islands featured prominently, for instance, in Ariosto's Orlando furioso, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, and Fenelon's, Telemachus. Other islands--real ones, such as Tahiti and St. Domingue--the French learned about from the writings of travelers and colonists. All of them were imagined to be the home of enchantresses who used magic to conquer heroes by promising sensual and sexual pleasure. As Sheriff shows, the theme of the enchanted island was put to many uses. Kings deployed enchanted-island mythology to strengthen monarchical authority, as Louis XIV did in his famous Versailles festival Les Plaisirs de l'ile enchantee. Writers such as Fenelon used it to tell morality tales that taught virtue, duty, and the need for male strength to triumph over female weakness and seduction. Yet at the same time, artists like Boucher painted enchanted islands to portray art's purpose as the giving of pleasure. In all these ways and more, Sheriff demonstrates for the first time the centrality of enchanted islands to ancient regime culture in a book that will enchant all readers interested in the art, literature, and history of the time.

This is the catalogue of the 2018 Leeds exhibition celebrating the tercentenary of Thomas Chippendale's birth. It covers all 95 exhibits including furniture, drawings, engravings, textiles and wallpaper, together with other contemporary and later material. Each entry is illustrated in colour, with supporting images in both colour and black and white. Also included are introductory essays to each section of the exhibition, covering Chippendale's life and career, his furniture styles, his relationships with customers, and his legacy from the 18th century to the present day.

The whimsical imagery of four tapestries in the permanent collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum and currently on display at the Getty Center is perplexing. Created in France at the Beauvais manufactory between 1690 and 1730, these charming hangings, unlike most French tapestries of the period, appear to be purely decorative, with no narrative thread, no theological moral, and no allegorical symbolism. They belong to a series called the Grotesques, inspired by ancient frescos discovered during the excavation of the Roman emperor Nero's Domus Aurea, or Golden House, but the origins of their mysterious subject matter have long eluded art historians. Based on seven years of research, Conundrum: Puzzles in the Grotesques Tapestry Series reveals for the first time that the artist responsible for these designs, Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer (1636-1699), actually incorporated dozens of motifs and vignettes from a surprising range of sources: antique statuary, Renaissance prints, Mannerist tapestry, and Baroque art, as well as contemporary seventeenth century urban festivals, court spectacle, and theater. Conundrum illustrates the most interesting of these sources alongside full-color details and overall views of the four tapestries. The book's informative and engaging essay identifies and decodes the tapestries' intriguing visual puzzles, enlightening our understanding and appreciation of the series' unexpectedly rich intellectual underpinnings.

The only contemporary account of the life and work of George Stubbs, unavailable since it was privately printed over 125 years ago. George Stubbs (1724-1806) was one of the most original artists Britain has produced. Far from being merely a horse painter, Stubbs' perfectionism and passion transformed the possibilities of nature painting. His extraordinary dedication to accuracy caused him to spend 18 solitary months dissecting and drawing horses to make his book, The Anatomy of the Horse, a landmark in the study of anatomy and used by artists and scientists alike long after Stubbs' death. His portraits of horses as well as people combine an unflinchingly accurate gaze with profound psychological truth; yet he also created some of the most lyrical paintings of the age. Ozias Humphry was a colleague and friend of Stubbs and brought together recollections of many conversations with the painter in an as yet unpublished manuscript now in Liverpool. This manuscript was the basis for the present book, which was edited by the famous Liverpudlian patron and historian Joseph Mayer for private circulation in the 1870's. Although it is almost the only biographical source for Stubbs, it has never been reprinted. This edition is the first publication since 1876 of Ozias Humphry's Memoir. It is introduced by one of the leading experts on the painter, Anthony Mould, who discusses Stubbs' career, his posthumous reputation, and the context and value of Humphrys' and Mayer's work. Forty-two pages of colour illustrations cover the span of Stubbs' output.

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.

In a long career that spanned the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, and the Bourbon Restoration, Louis-Leopold Boilly (1761-1845) created innovative and daring paintings in the midst of the most turbulent times. Bringing together two dozen of Boilly's works-the majority of which have never before been published-this handsome volume includes portraiture, scenes of seduction, and groundbreaking representations of raucous Parisian street life. A master technician with acute powers of observation and a wry sense of humor, Boilly invented the term trompe l'oeil and popularized the genre through his stunningly realistic compositions. In this first English-language publication on Boilly in more than 20 years, Francesca Whitlum-Cooper vividly brings the artist and the period he lived in to life, shedding new light on Boilly's work and expanding our understanding of how art functioned within France's rapidly changing political environment.

Universally regarded as the father of French painting, Nicolas Poussin is arguably the greatest of all painters of that school. Yet Poussin's reputation has been founded more on the intellectual and philosophical qualities of his art than its sheer visual beauty. In Poussin as a Painter: From Classicism to Abstraction, Richard Verdi redresses the balance, describing and analyzing Poussin's outstanding gifts as a pictorial storyteller, designer and colourist - in short, on the purely aesthetic (and often abstract) aspects of his art that have inspired so many later painters, from Cezanne to Picasso. The book features more than 220 fine illustrations, the majority in colour, and encompasses all aspects of Poussin's art from the mid 1620s to his death in 1665. This ground-breaking study gives new insight into Poussin, and is essential reading for all who admire this seminal French painter.

Between 1667 and 1792, the artists and amateurs of the Acade mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris lectured on the Acade mie's 'confe rences', foundational documents in the theory and practice of art. These texts and the principles they embody guided artistic practice and art theory in France and throughout Europe for two centuries. In the 1800s, the Acade mie's influence waned, and few of the 388 Acade mie lectures were translated into English. Eminent scholars Christian Michel and Jacqueline Lichtenstein have selected and annotated forty-two of the most representative lectures, creating the first authoritative collection of the 'confe rences' for readers of English. Essential to understanding French art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these lectures reveal what leading French artists looked for in a painting or sculpture, the problems they sought to resolve in their works, and how they viewed their own and others' artistic practice.

Each masterpiece of the series is a fascinating art-history novella and, at the same time, an invitation to the following tale, the next chapter in this never-ending cycle of astonishing stories, of which the museum has so many. This whole work is dominated by the idea of the victory of love, goodness and charity. The event is treated as the highest act of human wisdom and spiritual nobility, and it takes place in absolute silence and stillness. The drama and depth of feeling are expressed in the figures of both father and son, with all the emotional precision with which Rembrandt was endowed. This parable in Rembrandt's treatment is addressed to the heart of everyone.

Precisely rendered to dazzle the eye with their botanical accuracy, the sumptuous arrays of fruit and flowers by Dutch painter Jan van Huysum (1682-1749) were among the most avidly collected paintings of the 18th century. The arrangements were painstakingly executed over many months and commanded exceptionally high prices from collectors throughout Europe. This delightful little book explores two of Van Huysum's most important still-life paintings, "Vase of Flowers" and "Fruit Piece", showing how his inimitable technique resulted in an illusion that continues to captivate us today. The book's sumptuous plates reveal the artist's highly nuanced palette, and his exuberant, asymmetrical arrangements reflect emerging rococo rhythms.

With over six thousand objects coming largely from Europe and Asia, the Villa San Luca in Ospedaletti (province of Imperia) is a splendid villa-museum set up by antique dealers and collectors Luigi Anton and Nera Laura, donated to the FAI - Fondo Ambiente Italiano, in 2001. It is one of Italy's most important private collections dedicated to the decorative arts. This catalogue presents a selection of the most representative pieces of the vast and diverse collection of silver produced in various European nations from the 17th to the first third of the 19th century: from the old Germanic States to those of the Italian peninsula, from France to England. The objects described in these pages testify to the great skill of master silversmiths in forging the precious metal while following the artistic trends of the moment, as well as proposing a 'nearly complete' compendium of the main types of tableware and household utensils in use on the tables of the upper classes over three centuries of European history. Text in English and Italian.

Meticulously woven by hand with wool, silk, and gilt-metal thread, the tapestry collection of the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, represents the highest achievements of the art form. Intended to enhance the king's reputation by visualizing his manifest glory and to promote the kingdom's nascent mercantile economy, the royal collection of tapestries included antique and contemporary sets that followed the designs of the greatest artists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, including Raphael, Giulio Romano, Rubens, Vouet, and Le Brun. Ranging in date from about 1540 to 1715 and coming from weaving workshops across northern Europe, these remarkable works portray scenes from the bible, history, and mythology. As treasured textiles, the works were traditionally displayed in the royal palaces when the court was in residence and in public on special occasions and feast days. They are still little known, even in France, as they are mostly reserved for the decoration of elite state residences and ministerial offices. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition of fourteen marvelous examples of the former royal collection that will be displayed exclusively at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from December 15, 2015, to May 1, 2016. Lavishly illustrated, the volume presents for the first time in English the latest scholarship of the foremost authorities working in the field.

16 essays by a group of internationally acclaimed authors help contribute to a clearer perception of the complex facets of Jacob Jordaens' oeuvre -- and moreover to distinguish it from the works of Rubens, van Dyck, and his contemporaries. The title "Genius of Grand Scale" refers to the spectrum from history to genre as well as to Jordaens' preference for large formats. The greatness of the artist Jacob Jordaens needs to be emphasized, since even though he outlived Rubens for four whole decades, he was never able to escape from under his shadow. By reference to iconographic and iconological studies, single works are identified and presented in a broad review and the long, in many aspects fragmentary reception of his artistic work also forms a large part of the interpretations presented here. Furthermore, technical examinations of paintings assist in defining more precisely how they were generated.This overdue volume presents essential reading for anyone interested in Jacob Jordaens.