Kathleen McCarthy here presents the first book-length treatment of the vital role middle- and upper-class women played in the development of American museums in the century after 1830. By promoting undervalued areas of artistic endeavor, from folk art to the avant-garde, such prominent individuals as Isabella Stewart Gardner, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller were able to launch national feminist reform movements, forge extensive nonprofit marketing systems, and "feminize" new occupations.

Informed by the analytical practices of the interdisciplinary 'material turn' and social historical studies of childhood, Childhood By Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood offers new approaches to the material world of childhood and design culture for children. This volume situates toys and design culture for children within broader narratives on history, art, design and the decorative arts, where toy design has traditionally been viewed as an aberration from more serious pursuits. The essays included treat toys not merely as unproblematic reflections of socio-cultural constructions of childhood but consider how design culture actively shaped, commodified and materialized shifting discursive constellations surrounding childhood and children. Focusing on the new array of material objects designed in response to the modern 'invention' of childhood-what we might refer to as objects for a childhood by design-Childhood by Design explores dynamic tensions between theory and practice, discursive constructions and lived experience as embodied in the material culture of childhood. Contributions from and between a variety of disciplinary perspectives (including history, art history, material cultural studies, decorative arts, design history, and childhood studies) are represented - critically linking historical discourses of childhood with close study of material objects and design culture. Chronologically, the volume spans the 18th century, which witnessed the invention of the toy as an educational plaything and a proliferation of new material artifacts designed expressly for children's use; through the 19th-century expansion of factory-based methods of toy production facilitating accuracy in miniaturization and a new vocabulary of design objects coinciding with the recognition of childhood innocence and physical separation within the household; towards the intersection of early 20th-century child-centered pedagogy and modernist approaches to nursery and furniture design; through the changing consumption and sales practices of the postwar period marketing directly to children through television, film and other digital media; and into the present, where the line between the material culture of childhood and adulthood is increasingly blurred.

When the author bought a falling down fortified house on the Staffordshire moorlands, he had no reason to anticipate the astonishing tale that would unfold as it was restored. An increasingly mysterious, set of relationships emerged amongst its former owners, revolving round a now almost forgotten artist. Robert Bateman, in his youth was a prominent Pre-Raphaelite and friend of Burne Jones. The son of a local millionaire, he was to marry the granddaughter of the Earl of Carlisle, and to be associated with both Disraeli and Gladstone, and other prominent political and artistic figures. But he had abandoned his life as a public artist in mid-career for no obvious reason, to live as a recluse, while his father lost his money, and his rich and glamorous wife-to-be had married the local vicar, already in his sixties and shortly to die. The discovery of two paintings by Bateman, both clearly autobiographical, led to an utterly absorbing forensic investigation into Bateman's life. The story moves from Staffordshire to Lahore in India, to Canada, to Wyoming, and then, via Buffalo Bill to Peru and back to England. It leads to the improbable respectability of the Wills (now Imperial Tobacco) cigarette business in Bristol, and then, less respectably, to a car park in Stoke on Trent. En route the author pieces together, and illustrates, an astonishing and deeply moving story of love and loss, of art and politics, of morality and hypocrisy, of family secrets, concealed but never quite completely obscured. The result is a page-turning combination of detective story and tale of human frailty, endeavour and love. It is also a portrait of a significant artist, a reassessment of whose work is long overdue

One of the most expressive artists of the Symbolism movement, Odilon (1840-1916) led a quiet life. Withdrawn in manner, conventional in dress, and virtually unknown for the first half of his career, the French painter and graphic artist drew upon his own startlingly complex and fantastic inner world to create haunting works that reveal an existence beyond that of everyday vision. He transformed common subjects and models into strange, eerie images and exhibited a predilection for spiders and serpents, skeletons and skulls, gnomes and monsters--all rendered in a distinctive style of controlled, delicate realism.
Redon's popularity arose chiefly among young progressive artists, who considered his works as visual correspondence to the literary symbolism of Mallarme. Modern devotees regard Redon's translation of the subconscious world of dreams into visual reality as a precursor to Surrealism. This modestly priced volume offers a rich compilation of the influential artist's graphic works, with 209 illustrations -- 72 lithographs, plus 37 etchings and engravings -- depicting unforgettable scenes of fantasy and mystery.

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.

Rare copyright-free design portfolio by high priest of Art Nouveau. Jewelry, wallpaper, stained glass, furniture; figure studies; plant and animal motifs, etc. Only complete one-volume edition.

There has never been a book about Blake's last period, from his meeting with John Linnell in 1818 to his death in 1827, although it includes some of his greatest works. In The Traveller in the Evening, Morton Paley argues that this late phase involves attitudes, themes, and ideas that are either distinctively new or different in emphasis from what preceded them. After an introduction on Blake and his milieu during this period, Paley begins with a chapter on Blake's illustrations to Thornton's edition of Virgil. Paley relates these to Blake's complex view of pastoral, before proceeding to a history of the project, its near-abortion, and its fulfillment as one of Blake's greatest accomplishments as an illustrator. In Yah and His Two Sons the presentation of the divine, except where it is associated with art, is ambiguous where it is not negative. Paley takes up this separate plate in the context of artists's representations of the Laocoon that would have been known to Blake, and also of what Blake would have known of its history from classical antiquity to his own time. Blake's Dante water colours and engravings are the most ambitious accomplishment of the last years of his life, and Paley shows that the problematic nature of some of these pictures, with Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car as a main example, arises from Blake's own divided and sharply polarized attitude toward Dante's Comedy. The closing chapter, called 'Blake's Bible', is on the Bible-related designs and writings of Blake's last years. Paley discusses The Death of Abel (addressed to Lord Byron 'in the Wilderness') as a response to its literary forerunners, especially Gessner's Death of Abel and Byron's Cain. For the Job engravings Paley shows how the border designs and the marginal texts set up a dialogue with the main illustrations unlike anything in Blake's Job water colours on the same subjects. Also included here are Blake's last pictorial work on a Biblical subject, The Genesis manuscript, and Blake's last writing on a Biblical text, his vitriolic comments on Thornton's translations of the Lord's Prayer.

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles is art critic Martin Gayford's account of the tumultuous nine weeks in which the famous nineteenth century artists Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin shared a house in the small French town of Arles. Two artistic giants. One small house. From October to December 1888 a pair of at the time largely unknown artists lived under one roof in the French provincial town of Arles. Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh ate, drank, talked, argued, slept and painted in one of the most intense and astonishing creative outpourings in history. Yet as the weeks passed Van Gogh buckles under the strain, fought with his companion and committed an act of violence on himself that prompted Gauguin to flee without saying goodbye to his friend. The Yellow House is an intimate portrait of their time together as well as a subtle exploration of a fragile friendship, art, madness, genius behind a shocking act of self-mutilation that the world has sought to explain ever since. 'Gayford's fascinating depiction of the Odd Couple of art history is both moving and riveting' Daily Mail 'Masterly...a wonderfully alert and moving portrait' Mail on Sunday 'Profoundly absorbing. Gayford has reconstructed these tumultuous weeks...the reader lives them day by day, almost minute by minute. Delightful, utterly fascinating' Independent on Sunday Martin Gayford is a celebrated art critic and journalist who has written for the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph and is the current Chief European Art Critic for Bloomberg. In his other book, Constable in Love: Love, Landscape, Money and the Making of a Great Painter, Gayford tells the true story of Romantic painter John Constable's life and loves.

Founded in 1848 as a secret society, the Pre-Raphaelites rejected classical ideals and the dominant artistic genre painting of their era for what they saw as a more spiritual, sincere, and naturalistic approach. Founded by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, they evolved into a seven-member "brotherhood" that included poets and critics as well as painters. Moving away from the classical compositions exemplified by Raphael (hence the group's name), the Pre-Raphaelites rather turned to medieval culture and the jewel-like colors of Quattrocento art for inspiration. Their principal themes were initially religious, but also included subjects from literature and poetry, as exemplified by Sir John Everett Millais's famous Ophelia, drawn from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Inspired by the theories of John Ruskin, they were also committed to the close study of nature. This book presents key works from the Pre-Raphaelite group to introduce their reactionary principles, their dazzling colors, their interest in love, death, and nature, and their extensive influence on latter-day Symbolism and beyond. 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 History series features: approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions a detailed, illustrated introduction a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a two-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist

Over 300 spectacular pendants, combs, buckles, rings, bracelets, brooches, umbrella handles, penknives, buttons, clasps and scissors in detailed photographs reprinted from rare, turn-of-the-century folio. Elegant, copyright-free illustrations exquisitely detailed with flower, foliage and butterfly motifs. Readily adaptable to any design use.

Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was a major European artist and critic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, whose statements on art from the 1880s to the 1930s have been used by artists and writers on art for more than half a century. His criticism is provocative and penetrating, his style brilliant and entertaining. This is the most comprehensive selection of his writings to date.

Toward the end of his monumental career as a painter, sculptor, and lithographer, an elderly, sickly Matisse was unable to stand and use a paintbrush for long. In this late phase of his life-he was almost 80 years of age-he developed the technique of "carving into color," creating bright, bold paper cut-outs. Though dismissed by some contemporary critics as the folly of a senile old man, these gouaches decoupees (gouache cut-outs) in fact represented a revolution in modern art, a whole new medium that reimagined the age-old conflict between color and line. This edition of the first volume of our original award-winning XXL book provides a thorough historical context to Matisse's cut-outs, tracing their roots to his 1930 trip to Tahiti and continuing through to his final years in Nice. It includes many photos of Matisse, as well as some rare images by Henri Cartier-Bresson and the filmmaker F. W. Murnau, with texts by Matisse, publisher E. Teriade, the poets Louis Aragon, Henri Michaux, and Pierre Reverdy, and Matisse's son-in-law Georges Duthuit. In their deceptive simplicity, the cut-outs achieved both a sculptural quality and an early minimalist abstraction, which would profoundly influence generations of artists to come. Exuberant, multi-hued, and often grand in scale, these works are true pillars of 20th-century art, and as bold and innovative to behold today as they were in Matisse's lifetime. About the series TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program-now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.

Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was a major European artist and critic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, whose statements on art from the 1880s to the 1930s have been used by artists and writers on art for more than half a century. His criticism is provocative and penetrating, his writing style brilliant and entertaining. The need for a comprehensive edition of Sickert's art-critical writings is overwhelming, and the texts gathered together by Anna Gruetzner Robins, a leading expert on the subject, prove that his contribution as an art-writer was a major one in its own right. The texts are presented chronologically and supported by notes which give the information necessary to situate the figures and events to which Sickert refers.

This book addresses the little-studied area of Russian genre painting in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. Rosalind Gray begins by examining artistic patronage and published texts which engaged with the visual arts, in order to illustrate the context in which Russian artists were working. Five major painters - Venetsianov, Bryullov, Ivanov, Fedotov and Perov - are then discussed in detail.

When all that was solid melted into air... For decades, intellectuals from Benjamin to Bourdieu, Berman to Foucault, have been in thrall to this vision of the mid-nineteenth century. It shaped and underpinned their most influential thoughts, its legacy insinuated into institutionalized theories of culture. In this new book, that vision implodes, as if in a cultural supernova, its exceptionalism and limitations exposed. The story of modernity fades before a spectacle of linkages, stretching from and into the depths of history, the breadths of place. And, in a parallel substitution, the vast territories of the former Spanish Empire's thread through the narrative, rather than lurking on the peripheries, no longer just the fallen founders of modernity. Instead of modernity goes to the very heart of comparative cultural study: the question of what happens when intimate, dynamic connections are made over place and time, what it is to feel at home amid the lavish diversity of culture. This ambitious interdisciplinary book reconsiders foundational figures of the modern western canon, from Darwin to Cameron, Baudelaire to Whistler. It weaves together brain images from France, preserved insects from the Americas, glass in London, poetry from Argentina, paintings from Spain. Flaubert, Whitman, and Nietzsche find themselves with Hostos from Puerto Rico and Gorriti from Argentina. The flotsam and jetsam of history - optical toys from Madrid - sit with Melville and Marx. The book ranges over theoretical fields: trauma and sexuality studies, theories of visuality, the philosophy of sacrifice and intimacy, the thought of Wittgenstein. Instead of modernity is an adventure in the practice of comparative writing: resonances join suggestively over place and time, the textures of words, phrases and images combine to form moods. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the question of modernity and with the fate of cultural theory and comparison. -- .

The late 19th century in France represents an extraordinary period of artistic achievement in the history of Western art. The successive artistic revolutions of Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism are here charted through more than 300 biographies of the most important painters, sculptors, and graphic artists of the time. Extensive surveys examine the life, training, work, personality, and influence of the renowned leaders of each movement, from Millet and Courbet to Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Degas, and Cezanne and Gauguin. With further in-depth articles on the lesser-known artists, this dictionary is the most comprehensive and authoritative guide to one of the most popular periods of art.

The Grove Art series, focusing on the most important periods and areas of art history, is derived from the critically acclaimed and award-winning The Grove Dictionary of Art. First published in 1996 in 34 volumes, The Dictionary has quickly established itself as the leading reference work on the visual arts, used by schools, universities, museums, and public libraries throughout the world. With articles written by leading scholars in each field, The Dictionary has frequently been praised for its breadth of coverage, accuracy, authority, and accessibility.

This book demonstrates that numerous prominent artists in every period of the modern era were expressing spiritual interests when they created celebrated works of art. This magisterial overview insightfully reveals the centrality of an often denied and misunderstood element in the cultural history of modern art.

Mess is age-old and universal, as phenomenon and as topic. The evidence collected in this book suggests, however, that the second half of the nineteenth century saw the first stirrings in Western culture of a primary interest in mess for its own sake. Messes, like modern identities, happen by accident; their representation in painting and fictionDSfrom Turner to Degas, and from Melville to Maupassant and the New Woman writersDS made it possible to think boldly and inventively about chance.

In this beautifully illustrated overview, Renee Worringer provides a clear and comprehensive account of the longevity, pragmatism, and flexibility of the Ottoman Empire in governing over vast territories and diverse peoples. A Short History of the Ottoman Empire uses clear headings, themes, text boxes, primary source translations, and maps to assist students in understanding the Empire's complex history.

Until now, no detailed examination has been made of the twenty-four portraits known to have been painted of Coleridge during his life. Most of these are still extant, and together they constitute a kind of biography, as well as revealing the assumptions, not only of the sitter and the artists, but also of the culture to which they belong. Each in its different way seems to reveal some aspect of Coleridge's personality. This sequence of images - to which various posthumous and imaginary portraits supply an interesting postscript - are the subject of this illustrated study and catalogue by the eminent Coleridgean and Romantic scholar Morton D. Paley. There are reproductions throughout, two of them in colour.