Prophet, poet, painter and engraver -- Blake's uniqueness lies in no single achievement, but in the whole of what he was, which is more than the sum of all that he did. So writes Kathleen Raine in this classic study of William Blake, a man for whom the arts were not an end in themselves, but expressed his vision of the spiritual drama of the English national being. Profusely illustrated, this volume presents a comprehensive view of Blake's artistic achievements and a compelling and moving portrait of the life and thought of an extraordinary genius.

""Desire and Excess" is one of the most exciting and sophisticated books I have read for some time. It is capaciously learned, sensitively researched, and wonderfully graceful and witty. By reconsidering the institutions and aesthetics responsible for the culture of the museum in modernity, it offers a new history of art-historical discourse."--Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, London

""Desire and Excess" tells about the time a dazzling company of poets got lost inside the Louvre, and only got out once they had together created the giant figure of the Artist. Jonah Siegel's brilliance is continually breathtaking, so it's lucky that he has placed such solid ground beneath our feet by his luxurious, intricately wrought scholarship."--Elaine Scarry, author of "On Beauty and Being Just"

"A timely book on the relationship of art and experience to the hallowed sanctuaries of museum collections. Jonah Siegel is right on target in dealing with this hugely important issue. I can only admire the vast range of themes and the quiet display of learning so apparent in this text. The book kept me constantly alert and informed."--Robert Rosenblum, New York University

"This ambitious and fascinating work traces the relations between the development of the museum, the history of taste, and the figure of the artist/author in nineteenth-century England. Here Jonah Siegel reads the long collapse of neoclassicism as a productive crisis in the modern conception of originality. His argument is remarkably rich, subtle, learned, and provocative."--Ian Duncan, University of Oregon

""Desire and Excess" marks the emergence of a powerful and distinctive critical sensibility, remarkable both for itsrange of erudition and for the extraordinary quality of reflection brought to bear on the works explored here. Jonah Siegel mingles exacting close analysis and broad, confident historical and cultural reference in a manner that is almost unfailingly persuasive. The book will appeal to readers interested in the intellectual, artistic, literary, and cultural histories of Britain from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, as well as to those engaged in postmodern critical reflection on art institutions and artistic agency."--James Eli Adams, Indiana University

Thanks to its very nature, performance enters into natural dialogue with art, new media, politics, and the social sphere as a whole. Always happening in the here and now, and with a unique freedom and openness to the unknown, performance is a medium with a special ability to question its own subjects, materials, and languages. As a result, it is often best reflected in the dynamic character of contemporary art and contemporaneity in the broadest sense of the word. Points of Convergence explores these ideas and investigates critical approaches to performance, ultimately aiming to stimulate new discussion between theorists and practitioners. With twelve essays by leading figures in the field of performance arts, this illustrated volume is structured in two parts. The first, authored by academics in the discipline, features an introduction to key areas of scholastic research. The second part, authored by curators and other researchers, then focuses on an account of individual traditions of performance. Taken together, the contributions identify new possibilities for interaction between the theoretical aspects of performance art and the ways performance plays out within local contexts.

Nineteenth Century British Painting provides a succinct and informative chronological survey of a century of British painting which produced a great variety of work. It progresses from the beginnings of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century to the British adoption of Impressionism in the late nineteenth, dividing this prolific period into nine parts. In each part the work of the major figures in particular movements or genres is discussed and analysed, and each painter is presented in a biographical context. The artists are set in the framework of their historical, social and economic background. The majority of the paintings and drawings that are examined in detail are reproduced in the 323 plates, 82 of them in colour. The book is intended to be used more as an introduction, and where appropriate as a textbook, than as a work of reference, although its arrangement will enable readers to obtain fuller information about individual artists, with longer sections devoted to such major figures as Lawrence, Turner, Constable, Rossetti, Leighton and Whistler. The last decade has seen a growing interest in nineteenth century British art in this country, and also in the United States and on the Continent. During this time much has been published in the field and there has been a succession of important exhibitions. Even so, there is no up-to-date and comprehensive survey of the whole century on the market. Nineteenth Century British Painting fills the gap, meeting the need for such a book among undergraduate and graduate students, and among connoisseurs and collectors. It will also have a strong appeal for people with a general interest in the period.

In this bold exploration of the political forces that shaped Impressionism, Albert Boime proposes that at the heart of the modern is a "guilty secret"--the need of the dominant, mainly bourgeois, classes in Paris to expunge from historical memory the haunting nightmare of the Commune and its socialist ideology. The Commune of 1871 emerged after the Prussian war when the Paris militia chased the central government to Versailles, enabling the working class and its allies to seize control of the capital. Eventually violence engulfed the city as traditional liberals and moderates joined forces with reactionaries to restore Paris to "order"--the bourgeois order. Here Boime examines the rise of Impressionism in relation to the efforts of the reinstated conservative government to "rebuild" Paris, to return it to its Haussmannian appearance and erase all reminders of socialist threat.

Boime contends that an organized Impressionist movement owed its initiating impulse to its complicity with the state's program. The exuberant street scenes, spaces of leisure and entertainment, sunlit parks and gardens, the entire concourse of movement as filtered through an atmosphere of scintillating light and color all constitute an effort to reclaim Paris visually and symbolically for the bourgeoisie. Amply documented, richly illustrated, and compellingly argued, Boime's thesis serves as a challenge to all cultural historians interested in the rise of modernism.

John Singer Sargent's approach to watercolor was unconventional. Going beyond turn-of-the-century standards for carefully delineated and composed landscapes filled with transparent washes, his confidently bold, dense strokes and loosely defined forms startled critics and fellow practitioners alike. One reviewer of an exhibition in London proclaimed him "an eagle in a dove-cote"; another called his work "swagger" watercolors. For Sargent, however, the watercolors were not so much about swagger as about a renewed and liberated approach to painting. In watercolor, his vision became more personal and his works more interconnected, as he considered the way one image--often of a friend or favorite place--enhanced another. Sargent held only two major watercolor exhibitions in the United States during his lifetime. The contents of the first, in 1909, were purchased in their entirety by the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The paintings exhibited in the other, in 1912, were scooped up by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. "John Singer Sargent Watercolors" reunites nearly 100 works from these collections for the first time, arranging them by themes and subjects: sunlight on stone, figures reclining on grass, patterns of light and shadow. Enhanced by biographical and technical essays, and lavishly illustrated with 175 color reproductions, this publication introduces readers to the full sweep of Sargent's accomplishments in this medium, in works that delight the eye as well as challenge our understanding of this prodigiously gifted artist.
The international art star of the Gilded Age, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was born in Italy to American parents, trained in Paris and worked on both sides of the Atlantic. Sargent is best known for his dramatic and stylish portraits, but he was equally active as a landscapist, muralist, and watercolor painter. His dynamic and boldly conceived watercolors, created during travels to Tuscan gardens, Alpine retreats, Venetian canals and Bedouin encampments, record unusual motifs that caught his incisive eye.

The Arts and Crafts Movement produced some of the country's most popular, loved and recognizable buildings. This book guides the general reader through its history from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth. Of equal interest to those with a more informed interest, it will open your eyes to the richness and beauty of one of the most important artistic movements the British Isles ever produced. This beautifully illustrated book includes a comprehensive thematic introduction; an up-to-date history of Arts and Crafts architecture, the key individual and the characteristics of the buildings. In-depth case-studies of all the major buildings are given, as well as those overlooked by the current literature. There is a useful accompanying guide to places to visit and, finally, a list of stunning Arts and Crafts buildings you can stay in.

Many people know that Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) was a 19th-century Dutch artist, a leading light of the Post-Impressionist movement who painted 'Sunflowers' and cut off his own ear. What, perhaps, they don't know is that he sold, in his lifetime, only one of the 2,100 artworks he painted; that, in 1998, his work 'Self- Portrait Without Beard' sold for $71.5 million; that he wrote over 800 letters; and that he sent that famous ear wrapped in brown paper to a brothel. Biographic: Van Gogh presents an instant impression of his life and work, with an array of irresistible facts and figures converted into infographics to reveal the artist behind the pictures.

One of the most important British graphic artists of the nineteenth century, George Cruikshank (1792-1878) illustrated over 860 books, including several by Charles Dickens, and produced a vast number of etchings, paintings, and caricatures. The ten essays collected here first appeared in a special limited edition. In a new preface written for this paperback edition, Robert Patten shows how the insights of these seminal essays have been amplified by recent exhibitions and scholarship. The introduction by John Fowles has been retained and an index has been added. In addition to the many Cruikshank illustrations reproduced in the volume, there are original drawings by contemporary artists David Levine and Ronald Searle.

Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media-from poetry and screen painting to tea ceremonies, flower arrangements, and annual observances. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery. Refuting the belief that this tradition reflects Japan's agrarian origins and supposedly mild climate, Shirane traces the establishment of seasonal topics to the poetry composed by the urban nobility in the eighth century. After becoming highly codified and influencing visual arts in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the seasonal topics and their cultural associations evolved and spread to other genres, eventually settling in the popular culture of the early modern period. Contrasted with the elegant images of nature derived from court poetry was the agrarian view of nature based on rural life. The two landscapes began to intersect in the medieval period, creating a complex, layered web of competing associations. Shirane discusses a wide array of representations of nature and the four seasons in many genres, originating in both the urban and rural perspective: textual (poetry, chronicles, tales), cultivated (gardens, flower arrangement), material (kimonos, screens), performative (noh, festivals), and gastronomic (tea ceremony, food rituals). He reveals how this kind of "secondary nature," which flourished in Japan's urban architecture and gardens, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment it was disappearing. Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane clarifies the use of natural images and seasonal topics and the changes in their cultural associations and function across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this fascinating book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world.

A vivid tour of the town of Arles, guided by one of its most famous visitors: Vincent van Gogh. Once admired as "a little Rome" on the banks of the Rhone, the town of Arles in the south of France had been a place of significance long before the painter Vincent van Gogh arrived in February of 1888. Aware of Arles's history as a haven for poets, van Gogh spent an intense fifteen months there, scouring the city's streets and surroundings in search of subjects to paint when he wasn't thinking about other places or lamenting his woeful circumstances. In Vincent's Arles, Linda Seidel serves as a guide to the mysterious and culturally rich town of Arles, taking us to the places immortalized by van Gogh and cherished by innumerable visitors and pilgrims. Drawing on her extensive expertise on the region and the medieval world, Seidel presents Arles then and now as seen by a walker, visiting sites old and new. Roman, Romanesque, and contemporary structures come alive with the help of the letters the artist wrote while in Arles. The result is the perfect blend of history, art, and travel, a chance to visit a lost past and its lingering, often beautiful, traces in the present.

'For as I look deeper into the mirror, I find myself a more curious person than I had thought.' John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a towering figure of the nineteenth century: an art critic who spoke up for J. M. W. Turner and for the art of the Italian Middle Ages; a social critic whose aspiration for, and disappointment in, the future of Great Britain was expressed in some of the most vibrant prose in the language. Ruskin's incomplete autobiography was written between periods of serious mental illness at the end of his career, and is an eloquent analysis of the guiding powers of his life, both public and private. An elegy for lost places and people, Praeterita recounts Ruskin's intense childhood, his time as an undergraduate at Oxford, and, most of all, his journeys across France, the Alps, and northern Italy. Attentive to the human or divine meaning of everything around him, Praeterita is an astonishing account of revelation. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Robert Ross was one of the first people that Aubrey Beardsley met when he arrived in London to make his name in 1892. Within six years the young artist was dead; but the work he produced in that short time revolutionized British art, and he was fixed forever in the public imagination as one of the leading spirits of the decadent era. Like many others, Ross was taken not only by the evident originality and genius of Beardsley's work, but also by his character, remembering the "delightful and engaging smile both for friends and strangers," his modesty, wit, erudition, and--contrary to popular opinion--his "briskness and virility," or, as Beerbohm put it, his "stony common sense." Beardsley's reputation, both artistic and personal, was caught up in the hurricane that overtook avant garde art after the trial of Oscar Wilde. Ross set out in his pioneering biography to redress the balance. He memorialized the worth of the man he knew, and established the seriousness of his art, its roots in the work of the Old Masters (of whom Beardsley had considerable knowledge) and tracing the dramatic transformation as Beardsley matured in the six short years of his working life in London. This combination of personal memoir and informed analysis by someone at the heart of the artistic world of the 1890s makes this biography one of the most fascinating and evocative documents of the period. This republication is a close copy of the first stand-alone edition of 1909. It comes complete with all its original illustrations (and the advertisements for Beardsley's publications) and the catalogue of Beardsley's works by Aymer Vallance, which is still the cornerstone of Beardsley studies. It is introduced by Matthew Sturgis, Beardsley's most distinguished recent biographer. Robert Ross, son of the Attorney-General of Canada, was a key figure in avant garde arts and letters of the 1890's. Very unusually for this period, he acknowledged and accepted his homosexuality. It was he who first seduced Wilde, who helped him in his imprisonment and exile, and who rescued the estate to provide for Wilde's sons. His posthumous rehabilitation of Beardsley rescued the artist's reputation for future generations.

Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and others began as Impressionists but soon extended their explorations of the world around them to create highly personal work. With their foundations in the bright colours of Impressionism and the break from traditional representational art, the Post-Impressionists worked alone but collectively created the bridge into the expressionism of the 20th Century. Their delightful and evocative masterpieces are celebrated in this gorgeous new book.

Discover how scenes of daily life and delicate dabs of color shocked the art world establishment. In this TASCHEN Basic Art introduction to Impressionism, we explore the artists, subjects, and techniques that first brought the easel out of the studio and shifted artistic attention from history, religion, or portraiture to the evanescent ebb and flow of modern life. As we tour the theaters, bars, and parks of Paris and beyond, we take in the movement's radical innovations in style and subject, from the principle of plein air painting to the rapid, broken brushwork that allowed the Impressionists to emphasize spontaneity, movement, and the changing qualities of light. We take a close look at their unusual new perspectives and their fresh palette of pure, unblended colors, including many vividly bright shades that brought a whole new level of chromatic intensity to the canvas. Along the way, we recognize Impressionism's established greats, such as Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, and Camille Pissarro, as well as many associated artists worthy of closer attention, including Marie Bracquemond, Medardo Rosso, and Fritz von Uhde. 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

Compiled by a pioneer in Art Nouveau design, these 72 plates of floral images are reproduced from an edition of a Belle Epoque classic. The book features full-page images, borders, and inserts include illustrations, both real and fanciful, by M.P. Verneuil and others.

The story of how a group of precocious young artists shook up the British art establishment, told through their works, letters and diaries. An illustrated history of the linked lives and loves of a group of supremely talented artists of late Victorian Britain through their passionate writings. It features the painters, poets, critics and designers: Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, Fanny Cornforth, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, William and Janey Morris, Christina, Dante Gabriel, and William Rossetti, John Ruskin, William Bell Scott and Lizzie Siddal. The artistic aspirations and achievements of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood are revealed alongside the interwoven dramas of their personal lives, in letters, diaries and reminiscences, while their genius is displayed in vivid paintings, drawings, designs and poems. The Pre-Raphaelites was a charmed circles of love, friendship and art. Within an ever-changing flow of affections, and intimacies as richly patterned as a tapestry, they worked together as companions, lovers and partners. They shared tragedy as well as happiness, critical hostility as well as success, even the griefs of infidelity and discord. These creative partnerships, which also created the firm William Morris and Co, revitalised Victorian art and design. The new edition publishes in time for the start of the Burne Jones Exhibition at Tate Britain, starting in October 18. It is a vital book in understanding the Pre-Raphaelite art, which remains as popular and moving as ever.

Embrace the not-so-small world of minis--and your own tiny book! From teeny burritos and miniscule Chanel handbags to furniture no larger than a quarter, this mind-blowing collection of squeal-worthy miniatures features more than 250 of the tiniest creations from all over the world. Kate UEnver, a lifelong collector of nearly 1,000 items, has curated unique and extraordinary miniatures on her Instagram account, @dailymini, since 2012. In The Book of Mini, she selects hundreds of pieces of artwork--many of which have never been seen before--and organizes them into sections on tiny food, diminutive wildlife, petite pottery, and more. Also included are interviews with collectors and artists exploring their methods, influences, and how they came to adore everything mini. Featuring hundreds of photographs and a collectible miniature book, The Book of Mini is a must-have book for the tiny lover in your life.

Two Literary Critics Romancing the Archive at London's National Portrait Gallery. Part biography, part detective novel, part love story, and part meta archival meditation, Love Among the Archives is an experiment in writing a life. Our subject is Sir George Scharf, the founding director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, well known and respected in the Victorian period, strangely obscure in our own. We tell of discovering Scharf's souvenirs of a social life among the highest classes, and then learning he was the self made son of an impoverished immigrant. As we comb through 50 years of daily diaries, we stumble against plots we bring to the archive from our reading of novels. We ask questions like, did Scharf have a beloved? Why did Scharf kick his aged father out of the family home? What could someone like Scharf mean when he referred to an earl as his "best friend"? The answers turn out never to be what Victorian fiction - or Victorianist Studies - would have predicted. Presents a unique approach to life writing that foregrounds the process of archival discovery; a contribution to sexuality studies of the Victorian period that focuses on domestic arrangements between middle class men; offers an intervention into identity studies going beyond class, gender, and sexuality to try out new categories like "extra man" or "perpetual son" and a humorous critique of what literary critics do when they turn to "the archive" for historical authenticity.

Cultural modernity has been defined as a focus on the means of representation themselves. The crucial moment is usually located in France, with the emergence of Edouard Manet, but cultural historians often speak of a plurality of modernities. This study in cultural history explores how a radical turn to cultural modernity occurred in the Spain of the 1850s and early 1860s. The book investigates the key painter Eugenio Lucas Velazquez, and his continual, playful, art historical pastiche. Unlike the treatment of pastiche in Manet and his successors, Lucas's paintings refuse any assertion of a unique artistic identity or modern manner, thus challenging many theorizations of modernity. This highly interdisciplinary book focuses on the interaction between Lucas and his dynamic context. In exploring the potentially irresolvable nature of many of the dilemmas facing intellectuals of the time, it argues that cultural modernity is a plural series of problems resistant to closed description. The book includes twenty-five illustrations, eight of which are in color.

Demonstrates how the textual output of settler emigration shapes the nineteenth-century literary and artistic imagination Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art is the first book to undertake a comprehensive survey of the literature produced by nineteenth-century settler emigration. Arguing that the demographic shift to settler colonies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand was supported and underpinned by a vast outpouring of text, this monograph brings printed emigrants' letters, manuscript shipboard newspapers and settler fiction into conversation with the works of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Catherine Helen Spence and Ford Madox Brown, amongst others. The monograph demonstrates how the textual cultures of settler emigration pervaded the nineteenth-century cultural imagination and provided authors and artists with a means of interrogating representations of space and place, home-making and colonial encounters. Key features First study to make the case for the literature arising from nineteenth-century settler emigration as the distinct genre of 'emigration literature' Interdisciplinary approach combining literary criticism, art history and cultural geography Studies canonical authors and artists (Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ford Madox Brown, James Collinson, Richard Redgrave, Abraham Solomon, and Thomas Webster) alongside ephemera, leading to an integrated and comprehensive study of settler culture

Migrating the Black Body explores how visual media-from painting to photography, from global independent cinema to Hollywood movies, from posters and broadsides to digital media, from public art to graphic novels-has shaped diasporic imaginings of the individual and collective self. How is the travel of black bodies reflected in reciprocal black images? How is blackness forged and remade through diasporic visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past? And how do visual technologies structure the way we see African subjects and subjectivity? This volume brings together an international group of scholars and artists who explore these questions in visual culture for the historical and contemporary African diaspora. Examining subjects as wide-ranging as the appearance of blackamoors in Russian and Swedish imperialist paintings, the appropriation of African and African American liberation images for Chinese Communist Party propaganda, and the role of YouTube videos in establishing connections between Ghana and its international diaspora, these essays investigate routes of migration, both voluntary and forced, stretching across space, place, and time.

These etchings depict the major themes and grandeur of Goya's incomparable work, The Bible, human folly, the brutal pageantry of bullfighting, while the accompanying text sheds light on the life and times of the Spanish master.

The importance of the late 18th century in the genesis of modern art emerges in these four essays on various aspects of the art and architecture of a neglected period.

William Pressly presents for the first time a close analysis of two important, neglected paintings, arguing that they are among the most extraordinary works of art devoted to the French Revolution. Johan Zoffany's "Plundering the King's Cellar at Paris, August 10, 1792," and "Celebrating over the Bodies of the Swiss Soldiers," both painted in about 1794, represent events that helped turn the English against the Revolution.
Pressly places both paintings in their historical context--a time of heightened anti-French hysteria--and relates them to pictorial conventions: contemporary history painting, the depiction of urban mobs in satiric and festival imagery, and Hogarth's humorous presentation of modern moral subjects, all of which Zoffany adopted and reinvented for his own purposes. Pressly relates the paintings to Zoffany's status as a German-born Catholic living in Protestant England and to Zoffany's vision of revolutionary justice and the role played by the sansculottes, women, and blacks. He also examines the religious dimension in Zoffany's paintings, showing how they broke new ground by conveying Christian themes in a radically new format.
Art historians will find Pressly's book of immense value, as will cultural historians interested in religion, gender, and race.