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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1600 to 1800
The Dresden collection's singular group of Rembrandt works - about
20 drawings attributed to the master today and the nearly complete
oeuvre of etchings- will provide the basis for this remarkable
publication. It will have a particular focus on Rembrandt's
narrative compositions, printed self-portraits, studies of his wife
Saskia, and will include works from all periods of his oeuvre plus
prints and drawings by artists from his workshop and followers. The
list of artists who understood Rembrandt as a dynamic authority and
source of inspiration is long, reaching from his immediate
followers to masters of the 18th century, from Giovanni Benedetto
Castiglione to Jonathan Richardson to the kindred spirit Francisco
de Goya, into the 20th century and up to the present day. Examples
include Edouard Manet, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Lovis Corinth, Kathe
Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, Pablo Picasso, as well as Marlene Dumas and
William Kentridge and artists from the GDR such as A.R. Penck. By
including works by these artists, the exhibtion and catalogue
foreground Rembrandt as one of the most important 'artists' artist'
of all time. Select juxtapositions will help the reader better
understand the fi reworks of creativity that Rembrandt not only lit
in his own time but those he continues to ignite today. Rembrandt
remains eternally captivating, not only because of his radical
choices and unconventional interpretations of Christian and profane
pictorial subjects, but also because of his joy in experimentation,
especially in the use of printing and drawing techniques, and his
refl ective, humorous intellect, complemented by his sensually
direct approach to the world. With a light hand, he broke open the
conventions of his era. The pictorial worlds that he created with
his free, decisive mark convey his near inexhaustible interest in
nature as creation, whether it be the human exterior or interior,
and off er a wealth of connecting points and constellations for
other artists as well as for the viewer.
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) never left his homeland of the
Netherlands but in his massive body of painting, drawing, and
etching, he changed the course of Western art. His prolific oeuvre
encompasses religious, historical, and secular scenes, as well as
one of the most extraordinary series of portraits and
self-portraits in history. Rembrandt's work foregrounds texture,
light, and acute observation. Like sudden, startling apparitions in
a shadowy street, his subjects are illuminated against deep, dark
backgrounds and rendered with immense physical as well as
psychological scrutiny. Whether biblical or mythological figures,
powerful patrons, or fellow citizens, each subject is bestowed not
only with meticulous facial features but also with the intrigue of
thoughts and feelings so that even age-old narratives such as the
bible story of David and Bathsheba find a new level of human drama.
Rembrandt also left one of the most extensive series of
self-portraits of any artist, chronicling his own face from his
youth to the year of his death. Rembrandt's rise coincided with the
blossoming of the Dutch Golden Age, an era of prosperity in the
Netherlands. He was encouraged by wealthy patrons, but was above
all driven by a profound fascination with people. In this book, we
tour some of Rembrandt's key paintings, etchings, and drawings to
introduce his techniques, inspirations, and exceptional
achievements. From the Baroque Belshazzar's Feast to the
world-famous Night Watch we uncover a world of deep, rich tones,
masterful draftsmanship, and a remarkable sensitivity for the human
condition. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series
has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever
published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a
detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the
artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a
concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory
captions
While earlier studies have focused predominantly on artist Francois
Boucher's artistic style and identity, this book presents the first
full-length interdisciplinary study of Boucher's prolific
collection of around 13,500 objects including paintings, sculpture,
prints, drawings, porcelain, shells, minerals, and other imported
curios. It discusses the types of objects he collected, the
networks through which he acquired them, and their spectacular
display in his custom-designed studio at the Louvre, where he lived
and worked for nearly two decades. This book explores the role his
collection played in the development of his art, his studio, his
friendships, and the burgeoning market for luxury goods in
mid-eighteenth-century France. In doing so, it sheds new light on
the relationship between Boucher's artistic and collecting
practices, which attracted both praise and criticism from period
observers. The book will appeal to scholars working in art history,
museum studies, and French history.
This illustrated catalogue publishes the important collection of
Greek Geometric and Orientalizing pottery in the Ashmolean Museum,
Oxford. More than 200 vases and fragments are described and
illustrated in detailed
photographs and profile drawings.
There is abundant illustration of the geometric forms of ornament
from which the period takes its name, including fine examples of
meticulous brushwork. The figured pieces include many elements of
standard Late Geometric repertoire - male and female mourners at a
bier; files of warriors with shield, helmet, and spear; processing
two-horse chariots with their drivers; horses, deer, hounds, a fox,
and birds of different types.
The introduction gives a history of the collection and discusses
the changing attitudes to pottery from the 'Greek Dark Ages'.
By foregrounding the overlaps between sculpture and the decorative,
this volume of essays offers a model for a more integrated form of
art history writing. Through distinct case studies, from a
seventeenth-century Danish altarpiece to contemporary British
ceramics, it brings to centre stage makers, objects, concepts and
spaces that have been marginalized by the enforcement of boundaries
within art and design discourse. These essays challenge the
classed, raced and gendered categories that have structured the
histories and languages of art and its making. Sculpture and the
Decorative in Britain and Europe is essential reading for anyone
interested in the history and practice of sculpture and the
decorative arts and the methodologies of art history.
This handsome catalogue accompanies an exhibition celebrating the
bicentenary of the 60-year reign of King George III. It presents
one mezzotint portrait for each year of his reign. Mad about
Mezzotint traces the history of mezzotint in the reign of King
George III by looking at three aspects of the art form: the
astonishing method of mezzotint, the absorbing history of the form
in the late eighteenth century and Regency period and the endless
fascination with London as a subject. Although the mezzotint
originated in Germany as early as 1642, its golden age came in
England in the eighteenth century. Its beauty lay in its ability to
create the subtlety of tone found in an oil painting. Crowds
marvelled at the new technique and seized upon the opportunity to
popularize their work and disseminate their images more widely.
Conditions in eighteenth-century London were ripe for this
revolution in printing. England had a new king and queen on the
throne, an ever-expanding court and flourishing commercial
interests overseas. The city of London was expanding at an
astonishing rate and money was pouring into the capital. This fully
illustrated publication includes an introduction on the history of
mezzotint and full catalogue of the works, as well as indexes of
artists and persons depicted. Artists featured include Valentine
Green, John Hoppner, John Jones, Joshua Reynolds, George Romney and
Charles Turner. People depicted include King George, George, Prince
of Wales, the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, Admiral Horatio
Nelson and Earl and Lady Spencer.
This book opens a window onto a fascinating and understudied aspect
of the visual, material, intellectual, and cultural history of
seventeenth-century Amsterdam: the role played by its inns and
taverns, specifically the doolhoven. Doolhoven were a type of
labyrinth unique to early modern Amsterdam. Offering guest
lodgings, these licensed public houses also housed remarkable
displays of artwork in their gardens and galleries. The main
attractions were inventive displays of moving mechanical figures
(automata) and a famed set of waxwork portraits of the rulers of
Protestant Europe. Publicized as the most innovative artworks on
display in Amsterdam, the doolhoven exhibits presented the
mercantile city as a global center of artistic and technological
advancement. This evocative tour through the doolhoven pub
gardens-where drinking, entertainment, and the acquisition of
knowledge mingled in encounters with lively displays of animated
artifacts-shows that the exhibits had a forceful and transformative
impact on visitors, one that moved them toward Protestant reform.
Deeply researched and decidedly original, The Moving Statues of
Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam uncovers a wealth of information
about these nearly forgotten public pleasure parks, situating them
within popular culture, religious controversies, global trade
relations, and intellectual debates of the seventeenth century. It
will appeal in particular to scholars in art history and early
modern studies.
Accompanying an exhibition of drawings by Guercino from the
collection of the Morgan Library & Museum, Guercino: Virtuoso
Draftsman offers an overview of the artist's graphic work, ranging
from his early genre studies and caricatures, to the dense and
dynamic preparatory studies for his paintings, and on to highly
finished chalk drawings and landscapes that were ends in
themselves. Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Guercino
(1591-1666), was arguably the most interesting and diverse
draftsman of the Italian Baroque era, a natural virtuoso who
created brilliant drawings in a broad range of media. The Morgan
owns more than twenty-five works by the artist, and these are the
subject of a focused exhibition, supplemented by a handful of loans
from public and private New York collections, to be held at the
Morgan in the autumn of 2019. This volume accompanies that
exhibition. It includes an introductory essay on Guercino's work as
a draftsman followed by entries on the Guercino drawings in the
Morgan's collection. These include sheets from all moments of the
artist's career. His early awareness of the work of the Carracci in
Bologna is documented by figures drawn from everyday life as well
as brilliant caricatures; two drawings for Guercino's own drawing
manual are further testament to his interest in questions of
academic practice. Following his career, a range of preparatory
drawings includes studies made in connection with his earliest
altarpieces as well as his mature masterpieces, including multiple
studies for several projects, allowing the visitor to see
Guercino's mind at work as he reconsidered his ideas. The Morgan's
holdings also include studies for engravings as well as highly
finished landscape and figure drawings that were independent works.
Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman continues a series of exhibition
catalogues focused on highlights from the Morgan's collection.
Previous volumes include Power and Grace: Drawings by Rubens, Van
Dyck, and Jordaens and Thomas Gainsborough: Experiments in Drawing,
also published by Paul Holberton. While some of the Morgan's
Guercino drawings are well known, they have never been exhibited or
published as a group, and the selection includes a number of new
acquisitions.
Roughness is the sensual quality most often associated with
Rembrandt's idiosyncratic style. It best defines the specific
structure of his painterly textures, which subtly capture and
engage the imagination of the beholder. Rembrandt's Roughness
examines how the artist's unconventional technique pushed the
possibilities of painting into startling and unexpected realms.
Drawing on the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl as well
as firsthand accounts by Rembrandt's contemporaries, Nicola Suthor
provides invaluable new perspectives on many of the painter's
best-known masterpieces, including The Anatomy Lesson of Dr.
Deyman, The Return of the Prodigal Son, and Aristotle with a Bust
of Homer. She focuses on pictorial phenomena such as the thickness
of the paint material, the visibility of the colored priming, and
the dramatizing element of chiaroscuro, showing how they constitute
Rembrandt's most effective tools for extending the representational
limits of painting. Suthor explores how Rembrandt developed a
visually precise handling of his artistic medium that forced his
viewers to confront the paint itself as a source of meaning, its
challenging complexity expressed in the subtlest stroke of his
brush. A beautifully illustrated meditation on a painter like no
other, Rembrandt's Roughness reflects deeply on the intellectual
challenge that Rembrandt's unrivaled artistry posed to the art
theory of his time and its eminent role in the history of art
today.
"Beginning with the arts produced in the Colonial period, Dr. Lewis
documents and interprets the flow of creative productions of an
important segment of the American population. Her book shows that
the range of art produced by African American artists covers the
entire spectrum of craft productions through painting, sculpture,
and printmaking. There is a progressive development of style that
not only reflects the trends in particular periods, but reveals an
evolving pattern of indigenous qualities that are distinct. The art
community in general and the African American community in
particular are fortunate to have Dr. Samella Lewis, for she has
developed unusual authority in the area of African American art. I
know that "African American Art and Artists "will be of great value
educationally and that it will offer a stimulating and rewarding
experience to all who have the opportunity to share in its
contents."--Jacob Lawrence
These ground-breaking essays, all based on original archival
research, consider the evolving interest in Bolognese art in
seventeenth-century Italy, particularly focusing on the period
after the death of Guido Reni in 1642. Edited by Bolognese
specialists Raffaella Morselli and Babette Bohn, the studies
collected here focus on the taste for Bolognese art within Bologna
itself and in other parts of the Italian peninsula, including
Mantua, Ferrara, Rome, and Florence. Essays examine the roles of
gender, class, and the social status of the artist in early modern
Bologna; approaches to exhibiting artworks in noble Bolognese
collections; the reputations of local women artists; the popularity
of Bolognese quadratura painting; and the relative success of both
contemporary and earlier Bolognese artists with Italian collectors.
A new interpretation of the development of artistic modernity in
eighteenth-century France What can be gained from considering a
painting not only as an image but also a material object? How does
the painter's own experience of the process of making matter for
our understanding of both the painting and its maker? The Painter's
Touch addresses these questions to offer a radical reinterpretation
of three paradigmatic French painters of the eighteenth century. In
this beautifully illustrated book, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth provides
close readings of the works of Francois Boucher, Jean-Simeon
Chardin, and Jean-Honore Fragonard, entirely recasting our
understanding of these painters' practice. Using the notion of
touch, she examines the implications of their strategic investment
in materiality and sheds light on the distinct contribution of
painting to the culture of the Enlightenment. Lajer-Burcharth
traces how the distinct logic of these painters' work-the operation
of surface in Boucher, the deep materiality of Chardin, and the
dynamic morphological structure in Fragonard-contributed to the
formation of artistic identity. Through the notion of touch, she
repositions these painters in the artistic culture of their time,
shifting attention from institutions such as the academy and the
Salon to the realms of the market, the medium, and the body.
Lajer-Burcharth analyzes Boucher's commercial tact, Chardin's
interiorized craft, and Fragonard's materialization of eros.
Foregrounding the question of experience-that of the painters and
of the people they represent-she shows how painting as a medium
contributed to the Enlightenment's discourse on the self in both
its individual and social functions. By examining what paintings
actually "say" in brushstrokes, texture, and paint, The Painter's
Touch transforms our understanding of the role of painting in the
emergence of modernity and provides new readings of some of the
most important and beloved works of art of the era.
By the age of just twenty-two, Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) had
produced over 160 paintings, many of them ambitious compositions of
remarkable quality. This book offers an in-depth study of the
artist's early career, spanning the eight years between 1613, when
the artist was just fourteen, to his departure for Italy from
Antwerp in October 1621. Were the paintings he created during these
years his only legacy, he would still be recognized as one of the
greatest artists of the 17th century. Van Dyck's precocious talents
are brilliantly demonstrated in the many important works reproduced
here, among them such strikingly original masterpieces as The
Betrayal of Christ and Saint Jerome in the Wilderness. Others - The
Entry of Christ into Jerusalem and The Lamentation, for example -
reveal Van Dyck at his most experimental, in search of new ways of
increasing the visual impact of his compositions. Van Dyck was also
one of the first painters to rise to the challenge of Rubens'
omnipresent influence, evident in works such as Christ Crowned with
Thorns.
The cultural milieu in the "Age of Goethe" of eighteenth-century
Germany is given fresh context in this art historical study of the
noted writers' patroness: Anna Amalia, Duchess of
Weimar-Sachsen-Eisenach. An important noblewoman and patron of the
arts, Anna Amalia transformed her court into one of the most
intellectually and culturally brilliant in Europe; this book
reveals the full scope of her impact on the history of art of this
time and place. More than just biography or a patronage study, this
book closely examines the art produced by German-speaking artists
and the figure of Anna Amalia herself. Her portraits demonstrate
the importance of social networks that enabled her to construct
scholarly, intellectual identities not only for herself, but for
the region she represented. By investigating ways in which the
duchess navigated within male-dominated institutions as a means of
advancing her own self-cultivation - or Bildung - this book
demonstrates the role accorded to women in the public sphere,
cultural politics, and historical memory. Cumulatively, Christina
K. Lindeman traces how Anna Amalia, a woman from a small German
principality, was represented as an active participant in
enlightened discourses. The author presents a novel and original
argument concerned with how a powerful woman used art to shape her
identity, how that identity changed over time, and how people
around her shaped it - an approach that elucidates the power of
portraiture in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe.
In this life of painter John Singleton Copley, Jane Kamensky
untangles the web of principles and interests that shaped the age
of America's revolution. Copley's talent earned him the patronage
of Boston's leaders but he did not share their politics and
painting portraits failed to satisfy his lofty artistic goals. A
British subject who lamented America's provincialism, Copley looked
longingly across the Atlantic. When resistance escalated into war,
he was in London. A painter of America's revolution as Britain's
American War, the magisterial canvases he created made him one of
the towering figures of the British art scene. Kamensky brings
Copley's world alive and explores the fraught relationships between
liberty and slavery, family duty and personal ambition, legacy and
posterity-tensions that characterised the era of the American
Revolution and that beset us still.
Was there a continuity between the "vigorous art and the seminal
science" of the seventeenth century? How did they affect one
another? Which, if either, was dominant? Four distinguished
scholars explore the relation between seventeenth century science
and the creative arts in a series of four essays: Introduction, by
Stephen E. Toulmin of Columbia; Science and Literature, by Douglas
Bush of Harvard; Science and Visual Art, by James S. Ackerman of
Harvard; and Scientific Empiricism in Musical Thought, by Claude V.
Palisca of Yale. Originally published in 1961. The Princeton Legacy
Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make
available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished
backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the
original texts of these important books while presenting them in
durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton
Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly
heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton
University Press since its founding in 1905.
Taking the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas episodes as a focal
point, this study examines how visual representations of two of the
most compelling and related Christian stories engaged with changing
devotional and cultural ideals in Renaissance and Baroque Italy.
This book reconsiders depictions of the ambiguous encounter of Mary
Magdalene and Christ in the garden (John 20:11-19, known as the
Noli me tangere) and that of Christ's post-Resurrection appearance
to Thomas (John 20:24-29, the Doubting Thomas) as manifestations of
complex theological and art theoretical milieus. By focusing on key
artistic monuments of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods,
the authors demonstrate a relationship between the rise of
skeptical philosophy and empirical science, and the efficacy of the
senses in the construction of belief. Further, the authors
elucidate the differing representational strategies employed by
artists to depict touch, and the ways in which these strategies
were shaped by gender, social class, and educational level. Indeed,
over time St. Thomas became an increasingly public--and therefore
masculine--symbol of devotional verification, juridical inquiry,
and empirical investigation, while St. Mary Magdalene provided a
more private model for pious women, celebrating, mostly behind
closed doors, the privileged and active participation of women in
the faith. The authors rely on primary source material--paintings,
sculptures, religious tracts, hagiography, popular sermons, and new
documentary evidence. By reuniting their visual examples with
important, often little-known textual sources, the authors reveal a
complex relationship between visual imagery, the senses,
contemporary attitudes toward gender, and the shaping of belief.
Further, they add greater nuance to our understanding of the
relationship between popular piety and the visual culture of the
period.
During his lifetime, Hokusai was one of the most revered artists
working in the ukiyo-e school of painting and printmaking. This
book gathers the finest examples of Hokusai's breathtaking prints,
including his iconic The Great Wave off Kanagawa, views of Mt.
Fuji, landscapes, domestic scenes, and painstakingly rendered flora
and fauna. An introduction by Matthi Forrer offers a brief
biography of Hokusai and commentary on his practice and influence.
Each full color poster is backed with a substantial caption that
provides insights into the piece's significance and notable
characteristics. Printed on heavy coated paper, these detachable
posters are suitable for framing, but also taken together create a
lasting and illuminating introduction to Hokusai's extraordinary
accomplishment.
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