This ground-breaking book presents a critical study of pictorial narrative in nineteenth-century European painting. Covering works from France, Germany, Britain, Italy and elsewhere, it traces the ways in which immensely popular artists like Jean-Leon Gerome, Karl von Piloty and William Quiller Orchardson used unique visual strategies to tell thrilling and engaging stories. Regardless of genre, content or national context, these paintings share a fundamental modern narrative mode. Unlike traditional art, they do not rely on textual sources; nor do they tell stories through the human body alone. Instead, they experiment with objects, spaces, cause-and-effect relations and open-ended ambiguity, prompting viewers and reviewers to read for clues in order to weave their own elaborate tales. -- .

Early American painter Gilbert Stuart has long been mistakenly represented as a hard-drinking rogue, habitual liar, and inexplicable financial failure. To explain his stylistic unevenness as an artist, he is assumed to have had an inferior assistant, but the documentary evidence for an assistant who painted on his portraits is non-existent-in fact, there is evidence to the contrary. This ground-breaking study demonstrates that Stuart suffered from a hereditary form of manic depression, leading him to create pictures that contain peculiar lapses characteristic of a manic-depressive, or bipolar, artist. Using documentary and empirical evidence-from diaries and letters to x-radiographs of paintings-this book fills important gaps in our knowledge of Stuart, and connects the strange visual effects in some of Stuart's paintings with cognitive deficits attendant with the disorder. In addition to Stuart, other bipolar artists, including George Romney, Raphaelle Peale, Gilbert Stuart Newton, and William Rimmer, are discussed in relation to these deficits, revealing patterns which carry broader implications for all manic-depressive artists. This volume is a significant contribution not only to studies of Stuart and the four other painters but also to our understanding of the mind of a manic-depressive artist. It bridges the broad disciplines of art history and psychopathology.

This is the story of the forging of a national cultural institution in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. The Royal Academy of Arts was the dominant art school and exhibition society in London and a model for art societies across the British Isles and North America. This is the first study of its early years, re-evaluating the Academy's significance in national cultural life and its profile in an international context. Holger Hoock reassesses royal and state patronage of the arts and explores the concepts and practices of cultural patriotism and the politicization of art during the American and French Revolutions. By demonstrating how the Academy shaped the notions of an English and British school of art and influenced the emergence of the British cultural state, he illuminates the politics of national culture and the character of British public life in an age of war, revolution, and reform.

This publication celebrates for the first time the important creative collaboration between the artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and his muse, the dancer Jane Avril (1868-1943). Avril was one of the stars of Moulin Rouge in the 1890s, and was nicknamed 'La Melinite' after a form of explosive. She was known for her alluring style and exotic persona, and her fame was assured by a series of dazzlingly inventive posters designed by Lautrec.

Reconciling Art and Mothering contributes a chorus of new voices to the burgeoning body of scholarship on art and the maternal and, for the first time, focuses exclusively on maternal representations and experiences within visual art throughout the world. This innovative essay collection joins the voices of practicing artists with those of art historians, acknowledging the fluidity of those categories. The twenty-five essays of Reconciling Art and Mothering are grouped into two sections, the first written by art historians and the second by artists. Art historians reflect on the work of artists addressing motherhood-including Marguerite Gerard, Chana Orloff, and Renee Cox-from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Contributions by contemporary artist-mothers, such as Gail Rebhan, Denise Ferris, and Myrel Chernick, point to the influence of past generations of artist-mothers, to the inspiration found in the work of maternally minded literary and cultural theorists, and to attempts to broaden definitions of maternity. Working against a hegemonic construction of motherhood, the contributors discuss complex and diverse feminist mothering experiences, from maternal ambivalence to queer mothering to quests for self-fulfillment. The essays address mothering experiences around the globe, with contributors hailing from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

An original and overdue exploration of the representation of masculinity in British academic art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Painted Men in Britain, 1868-1918 analyzes transgressions of gender and sexuality as represented in paintings by Leighton, Sargent, Tuke, and their contemporaries in the Royal Academy. This volume treats paintings as eloquent objects, no narratives of which are too elusive to be traced, and challenges conventional binaries of masculine versus feminine or heterosexual versus homosexual. Consulting not only the paintings themselves but also newspapers, journals, criticism, novels, and poetry of the day, Painted Men argues against the misconception of British academic art as merely reactionary and even blind to the dynamism of its own time. Instead, this art is shown to engage with broader social attitudes and contemporary sexual debates. As the book reveals the complexities of specific paintings, it illuminates different and competing attitudes toward masculinity and modernity in British art of the period.

"Unfolding the South" presents a new vision of Anglo-Italian cultural relations in the late Romantic and Victorian periods. Responding to recent developments in the fields of literary criticism and art history, the book covers a stimulating range of canonical and non-canonical writers and artists. Eleven essays offer new perspectives on well-known figures such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Mary Shelley, together with discussions of writers and artists of newly-emerging importance. -- .

This is an analytical survey of the thought about painting and sculpture as it unfolded from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. This was the period during which theories of the visual arts, particularly of painting and sculpture, underwent a radical transformation, as a result of which the intellectual foundations of our modern views on the arts were formed. Because this transformation can only be understood when seen in a broad context of cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical developments of the period, Moshe Barasch surveys the opinions of the artists, and also treats in some detail the doctrines of philosophers, poets, and critics. Barasch thus traces for the reader the entire development of modernism in art and art theory.

The 4th Marquess of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace were both passionate collectors of miniatures, exquisite small paintings in watercolor or enamel, generally made for private contemplation and one of the most popular mediums of portraiture in an age before the advent of photography. This book features over seventy of the finest miniatures in the Wallace Collection, all of them reproduced in color, most for the first time. The volume spans the period from the mid-16th to the late-19th centuries. The entries include much new information on the miniatures and are accompanied by images of related works in the Wallace Collection and elsewhere. There are introductory essays on the history of the collection and on French eighteenth-century miniatures, a particular highlight of the collection.

Exceptional among English-language publications in its focus on French miniatures, this book offers a fascinating and tantalizing glimpse into the magical world of the miniature.

An overdue study of a groundbreaking event, this is the first book-length examination of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. Intended to rehabilitate Manchester's image at a heady time of economic prosperity, the Exhibition became a touchstone for aesthetic, social, and economic issues of the mid-nineteenth century. Reverberations of this moment can be followed to the present day in the discipline of art history and its practice in public museums of Europe and America. Highlighting the tension between art and commerce, philanthropy and profit, the book examines the Exhibition's organization and the presentation of the works of art in the purpose-built Art Treasures Palace. Pergam places the Exhibition in the context of contemporary debates about museum architecture and display. With an analysis of the reception of both "Ancient" and "Modern" paintings, the book questions the function of exhibitions in the construction of an art historical canon. The book also provides an essential reference tool: a compiled list of all of the paintings exhibited in 1857 that are now in public collections throughout the world, with an analysis of the collecting trends manifest in their provenance.

The English Romantic painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775-19 December 1851) was a brilliant landscape artist, a watercolourist and printmaker. His style, powerful and fierce, melding the elements with humankind are thought by many to have prepared the way for Impressionism. In his time he was controversial, but his focus on land and seascapes widened the palette of artists and their audience, and his impressionistic brushwork prepared the way for the fragmentation of the modern era. This wonderful new book brings to life his greatest achievements, with such paintings as The Fighting 'Temeraire', Inside Tintern Abbey and Rain, Steam and Speed (The Great Western Railway).

A definitive new biography, deftly interweaving an account of Turner's early life with profound scholarly and aesthetic appreciation of his work A complex figure, and divisive during his lifetime, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) has long been considered Britain's greatest painter. An artist of phenomenal invention, complexity, and industry, Turner is now one of the world's most popular painters. This comprehensive new account of his early life draws together recent scholarship, corrects errors in the existing literature, and presents a wealth of new findings. In doing so, it furnishes a more detailed understanding than ever before of the connections between Turner's life and art. Taking a strictly chronological approach, Eric Shanes addresses Turner's intellectual complexity and depth, his technical virtuosity, his personal contradictions, and his intricate social and cultural relations. Shanes draws on decades of familiarity with his subject, as well as newly discovered source material, such as the artist's principal bank records, which shed significant light on his patronage and sales. The result, written in a warm, engaging style, is a comprehensive and magnificently illustrated volume which will fundamentally shape the future of Turner studies.

The elegant Matisse retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 1992 was the first king-sized retrospective of Matisse's work anywhere in the world for more than twenty years. Appropriately labelled "the most beautiful show in the world," this giant new look at Matisse and his pursuit of pleasure was a consummate success. Henri Matisse: A Bio-Bibliography provides the scholar, student, artist, and layperson with an extended primary and secondary bibliography with which to study and enjoy this great artist. These works cover his life, career, oeuvre, and influence on other artists. Though many of the entries are annotated, this is not meant to be a critical guide; rather, it is a way to get to know a great artist through the literature surrounding him and his art.

The private studioli of Italian rulers are among the most revealing interior spaces of the Renaissance. In them, ideals of sober recreation met with leisured reality in the construction of a private princely identity performed before the eyes of a select public. The decorative schemes installed in such rooms were carefully designed to prompt, facilitate and validate the performances through which that identity was constituted. Echoing Helicon reconstructs, through the (re)interpretation of painted and intarsia decoration, the role played by music, musicians and musical symbolism in those performances. Drawing examples from the Este dynasty - despotic rulers of Ferrara throughout the Renaissance who employed such musicians as Pietrobono, Tromboncino and Willaert, and such artists as Tura, Mantegna and Titian - author Tim Shephard reaches new conclusions about the integration of musical and visual arts within the courtly environment of renaissance Italy, and about the cultural work required of music and of images by those who paid for them.
Relying on Renaissance-era source material from a wide range of disciplines as well as new approaches derived from critical and cultural theory, Shephard provides a fresh look at the music of this ninety-year period of the Italian Renaissance. While much has been written about the studiolo by historians of art and architecture, it has only recently become a growing area of interest among musicologists. As the first English language monograph devoted to the music of the studiolo, Echoing Helicon is a significant contribution to this developing area of research and essential reading for both musicologists and art historians specializing in the Italian Renaissance.

"Fascinating and lucid . . . a stunningly illustrated and illuminating life of a singular painter." - Sue Roe, Wall Street Journal "Not just another art history book, no title in recent memory recalls with such exactitude the style of an era that, in retrospect, has become increasingly golden. . . . The book and its prose shimmer." - New York Times "Never before have Sargent's talents been so gloriously displayed as they are here. Quite simply, this Abbeville edition is a stunner, a book as satisfyingly extravagant as a Sargent portrait." - Christian Science Monitor "The spontaneity, elegance, and grace that characterize Sargent's work are everywhere evident on these large, luminous pages. . . . A visual delight, well written." - Art and Antiques The classic monograph on a much-loved artist-reissued in a spectacular oversize format In the early work of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Henry James saw "the slightly 'uncanny' spectacle of a talent which on the threshold of its career has nothing more to learn." Sargent's talent, nay, genius was indeed uncanny, sustained with equal intensity through his famed society portraits, like the scandalous Madame X; his full-size showpieces, like The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit; his thousands of watercolours executed en plein air from Venice to Corfu to Maine to Montana; and his ambitious mural decorations for the public monuments of Boston. In Carter Ratcliff, Sargent has found a biographer and critic nearly his match in style and subtlety. Ratcliff expertly evokes the expatriate American milieu into which the artist was born, and offers penetrating insights into every phase of his career, every aspect of his work. Now, for the first time, this landmark monograph is offered in a special oversize format, with all of its 310 illustrations reproduced in stunning full colour, many at full-page size, allowing the reader to appreciate the master's every brushstroke. This new edition of John Singer Sargent will be a treasured reference for artists and an unalloyed delight for art lovers.

The Ashmolean collection of miniatures was begun in the 17th century by the Tradescants, father and son, gardeners to Charles I and Henrietta Maria. Among its most generous benefactors was the Reverend Bentinck Hawkins, chaplain to the Dukes of Cambridge and an insatiable 19th-century collector. The miniatures, mostly of very high quality, range from the Tudor and Stuart era to Victorian times, and include specially distinguished works by Isaac Oliver, Cooper, Zincke, Smart, Cosway and Engleheart.

Arts & Crafts: Masterpieces of Art is a celebration of the design movement that spread rapidly around the world at the end of the nineteenth century. Depicting both well-known and unusual artworks, textile patterns and decorations from this most fascinating of eras, this book provides a wealth of information about the lives and times of the designers, architects and artists who created them, from Voysey and Morris to Lindsay Butterfield.

In serveying how painting and sculpture were considered through the early 18th to the mid-19th century, this volume traces the development of modernism in art and theory.

This third volume traces the hidden patterns and interlocking themes in the study of art from impressionism to abstract art. Barasch details the immense social changes in the creation, presentation and reception of art that have set the history of art theory on a vertiginous new course.