Illuminating the history of collecting Japanese art This richly illustrated volume addresses the history of collecting Japanese art and the factors that contributed to the growth of collections in North America following the Meiji Restoration in 1868. With wide-ranging essays that fill in gaps in the scholarly investigation of the subject, art historians discuss the historical development of the Japanese aesthetic and examine questions of connoisseurship, authenticity, and controversial collectors and their current-day reception. The volume also features case studies on the formation of Japanese art collections in North America, exploring the diverse array of factors that contributed to their quality, contents, and the role that these collections play for their respective communities. Contributors delve into university and museum archives and interview art dealers, collectors, and artists to better understand their own collections. They present original research on cross-pollination and dialogue between artists from Japan and the United States, the development and growth of museums, and the personal histories of the people who shaped art collections. Together, these essays illustrate the shifting priorities in the collection of Japanese art across 150 years.

A groundbreaking new exhibition will be presented by the Het Noordbrabants Museum, focusing on the impact of Van Gogh's interpersonal relationships on his work. Part biography, part art history, the catalogue of this exhibition will dismantle the commonly-held conception that Van Gogh's genius stemmed from his mental illness and isolation. Revealing a complex, emotionally engaging picture of the man behind some of the most celebrated works in history, this catalogue includes well-known works and pieces from private collections, as well as rare documents virtually unknown to the public, such as a never-before exhibited sketchbook that Vincent gifted to Betsy Tersteeg, daughter of an art dealer at The Hague; poetry he sent to his dear brother and confidante Theo; and six rarely featured letters of condolence received by Theo after Vincent's death. Masterpieces include Still life with Bible (1885), Madame Roulin Rocking the Cradle (La berceuse) 1889, and L'Arlesienne (Madame Ginoux) (1890). The catalogue also contains numerous less well-known portraits of family and friends, revealing how they appeared through the artist's eyes. Van Gogh's Inner Circle sheds light on Vincent's often tempestuous personality, his love affairs, his eventual estrangement from many of his colleagues, and how his relationships influenced the work he produced in the years leading up to his premature death. Van Gogh's Inner Circle was curated by Sjraar van Heugten, former Head of Collections at the Van Gogh Museum. He has curated exhibitions such as Van Gogh and the Seasons in Melbourne, at the National Gallery of Victoria - the largest exhibition of Vincent van Gogh's work in Australia. He co-authored Van Gogh (Thames & Hudson, 2005) and Van Gogh in Provence: Modernizing Tradition (Actes Sud, 2016) among many more.

Artist-explorer John Mix Stanley (1814-1872), one of the most celebrated chroniclers of the American West in his time, was in a sense a victim of his own success. So highly regarded was his work that more than two hundred of his paintings were held at the Smithsonian Institution - where in 1865 a fire destroyed all but seven of them. This volume, featuring a comprehensive collection of Stanley's extant art, reproduced in full color, offers an opportunity - and ample reason - to rediscover the remarkable accomplishments of this outsize figure of nineteenth-century American culture. Originally from New York State, Stanley journeyed west in 1842 to paint Indian life. During the U.S.-Mexican War, he joined a frontier military expedition and traveled from Santa Fe to California, producing sketches and paintings of the campaign along the way - work that helped secure his fame in the following decades. He was also appointed chief artist for Isaac Stevens's survey of the 48th parallel for a proposed transcontinental railroad. The essays in this volume, by noted scholars of American art, document and reflect on Stanley's life and work from every angle. The authors consider the artist's experience on government expeditions; his solo tours among the Oregon settlers and western and Plains Indians; and his career in Washington and search for government patronage, as well as his individual works. With contributions by Emily C. Burns, Scott Manning Stevens, Lisa Strong, Melissa Speidel, Jacquelyn Sparks, and Emily C. Wilson, the essays in this volume convey the full scope of John Mix Stanley's artistic accomplishment and document the unfolding of that uniquely American vision throughout the artist's colorful life. Together they restore Stanley to his rightful place in the panorama of nineteenth-century American life and art.

Written between 1913 and 1929, revolutionary years in art history, Dix Portraits conveys the deep human engagement between an artist and her subject. The artist's book unites Stein's ten portraits in prose with sketches by five artists: Pablo Picasso, Christian Berard, Eugene Berman, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Kristians Tonny. Utilizing the interplay between word and image, Stein's writing and the artists' images provide nuance and depth, balancing humor and sincerity. With a new introduction by Lynne Tillman, Dix Portraits is an unforgettable artistic collaboration. The subjects represented include Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Erik Satie, Pavel Tchelitchew, Virgil Thomson, Christian Berard, Bernard Fay, Kristians Tonny, Georges Hugnet, and Eugene Berman. Originally printed in an edition of 100 copies with the lithography, and now widely accessible for the first time, Dix Portraits captures Stein's legacy as a champion of artists and a pioneer of creativity.

As an artist, Edgar Degas (1834-1917) defies easy description. Allied with the French impressionists through his commitment to portraying modern life, he also took an independent course, preferring line over color and the visible brushstroke, and working in a studio instead of out-of-doors. He is perhaps best known as a painter, but his most widely known work is a sculpture, "Little Dancer Aged Fourteen." Executed in wax, near life-sized, dressed in a ballerina's tutu, with real ballet slippers and real hair, the sculpture caused a sensation when it was exhibited in 1881. It is the only sculpture Degas ever showed publicly, though more than one hundred--of dancers, horses, and bathers--were found in his studio after he died, all dusty, some fallen apart. For almost forty years after his death, these works were known only through the bronzes his heirs had cast from the originals.Then, in 1955, the waxes themselves appeared on the art market. Thanks to the discernment and generosity of Paul Mellon, the majority are now preserved at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, most on permanent display.

This groundbreaking volume honors this extraordinary gift by linking art and science. It brings together the insights of a distinguished art historian of nineteenth-century painting and sculpture and the specialized knowledge of National Gallery conservators and scientists who have published pioneering technical studies. Including essays on Degas' life and work, his sculptural technique and materials, and the story of the sculptures after his death, it features art-historical and technical discussions of every work in the collection as well as indispensable concordances and bibliography. The richly illustrated text is intended for both art lover and specialist. Was Degas the sculptor technically inept or unusually inventive? How do we understand his sculpture in light of his paintings, prints, and photographs? These questions and many others are explored with originality and depth, adding immeasurably to our understanding of the artistic avant-garde in the late nineteenth century and to our appreciation of this controversial artist.

Continental Crosscurrents is a series of case studies reflecting British attitudes to continental art during the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. It stresses the way in which the British went to the continent in their search for origins or their pursuit of sources of purity and originality. This cult of the primitive took many forms; it involved a reassessment of medieval German and Italian art and offered new ways of interpreting Venetian painting; it opened up new readings of architectural history and the "discovery" of the Romanesque; it generated a debate about the value of returning to religious subjects in art and it raised the question of the relationship between modern art and Byzantine art in the early twentieth century.
J. B. Bullen's original study presents some exciting findings. Few critics have noticed how much in advance of his time was Coleridge's passion for medieval art; Ruskin's debt in the Stones of Venice to Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris has hardly been noted; and Browning's involvement with the debate on the morality of Christian art is explored more extensively than previously. Three chapters are devoted to the role of British criticism in identifying the Romanesque style in architecture and differentiating it from the Gothic. They trace the concept as it arose in criticism at the beginning of the nineteenth century; its employment in the remarkable buildings of Edmund Sharpe and Sara Losh and the way in which it reached a climax in Waterhouse's enigmatic choice of Romanesque for the Natural History Museum in London. The collection concludes with two continental episodes from the history of modernism. One is the explosive British reaction tothe primitivism of Gauguin; the other involves the identifying of one of the characters in D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love. Curious evidence suggests that the malevolent figure of Loerke was based on a German sculptor whom Lawrence met in Italy before the First World War.

Hailed the "Prince of the Impressionists", Claude Monet (1840-1926) transformed expectations for the purpose of paint on canvas. Defying the precedent of centuries, Monet did not seek to render only reality, but the act of perception itself. Working "en plein air" with rapid, impetuous brush strokes, he interrogated the play of light on the hues, patterns, and contours and the way in which these visual impressions fall upon the eye. Monet's interest in this space "between the motif and the artist" encompassed too the ephemeral nature of each image we see. In his beloved water lily series, as well as in paintings of poplars, grain stacks, and the Rouen cathedral, he returned to the same motif in different seasons, different weather conditions, and at different times of the day, to explore the constant mutability of our visual environment. This book offers the essential introduction to an artist whose works simultaneously reflected upon the purpose of a picture and the passage of time, and in so doing transformed irrevocably the story of art. 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

This groundbreaking reconstruction of Goya's so-called 'Witches and Old Women' album will offer rich insights into the artist's concerns and preoccupations and will immeasurably deepen our understanding of the artist. With its themes of witchcraft, madness and nightmares, the predominant imagery of the album offers a particularly important perspective on the development of Goya's interest in old age and its relationship to the fantastic and diabolical.

The Grosvenor Gallery was the most progressive exhibition space of the Victorian age. The paintings and works of art shown there - by Burne-Jones, Watts, Whistler and a host of other figures associated with the aesthetic movement - challenged artistic convention and were the cause of virulent debate about the means and purpose of modern art, while the very existence of a gallery which attracted so much fashionable attention and which lent such great prestige to the artists who exhibited there served to overthrow the stultifying influence of the contemporary Royal Academy. Christopher Newall's book tells the story of the rise and fall of the Grosvenor Gallery, and his invaluable index of exhibitors, compiled from the now very rare original catalogues, allows the reader to discover which artists showed which works and what they were during the fourteen years of the Grosvenor's summer exhibitions.

Collectors played an essential yet misunderstood role in the success of Impressionism. Even though they were not immune to economic and social woes, they were often engaged in defending this artistic movement that they had helped come to life, establish itself or make known, each according to their times. It is this group of committed collectors that the present work seeks to examine. From assembling a collection to donating it to a museum, from supporting artists within the borders of France to publicising the movement internationally, from the first intimate private showings to the questions raised by the presentation of these works in museums, collectors were present at every stage of the development of Impressionism, from the dawn of the movement to the middle of the 20th century. This volume aims to re-examine and reassess the importance of these collectors in the political, social and economic contexts of their times through the contributions of 16 international specialists. Depeaux, De Nittis, the Palmers, O'Hara, Buhrle, Caillebotte, Fayet: whether they are the subjects of dedicated case studies or part of a broader discourse, the multiplicity of profiles of these collectors and the paths they followed will allow readers to gain a better understanding of their importance in the history of the Impressionist movement.

Light was central to the visual politics and imaginative geographies of empire, even beyond its role as a symbol of knowledge and progress in post-Enlightenment narratives. This book describes how imperial mappings of geographical space in terms of 'cities of light' and 'hearts of darkness' coincided with the industrialisation of light (in homes, streets, theatres) and its instrumentalisation through new representative forms (photography, film, magic lanterns, theatrical lighting). Cataloguing the imperial vision in its engagement with colonial India, the book evaluates responses by the celebrated Indian painter Ravi Varma (1848-1906) to reveal the centrality of light in technologies of vision, not merely as an ideological effect but as a material presence that produces spaces and inscribes bodies. -- .

William Morris was an outstanding character of many talents, being an architect, writer, social campaigner, artist and, with his Kelmscott Press, an important figure of the Arts and Crafts movement. Many of us probably know him best, however, from his superb furnishings and textile designs, intricately weaving together natural motifs in a highly stylized two-dimensional fashion influenced by medieval conventions. William Morris Masterpieces of Art offers a survey of his life and work alongside some of his finest decorative work.

Nicholas Capaldi's biography of John Stuart Mill traces the ways in which Mill's many endeavors are related and explores the significance of his contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of education. Capaldi shows how Mill was groomed for his life by both his father James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, the two most prominent philosophical radicals of the early 19th century. Mill, however, revolted against this education and developed friendships with both Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who introduced him to Romanticism and political conservatism. A special feature of this biography is the attention devoted to Mill's relationship with Harriet Taylor. No one exerted a greater influence than the woman he was eventually to marry. Capaldi reveals just how deep her impact was on Mill's thinking about the emancipation of women. Nicholas Capaldi was until recently the McFarlin Endowed Professor of Philosophy and Research Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa. He is the founder and former Director of Legal Studies. His principal research and teaching interest is in public policy and its intersection with political science, philosophy, law, religion, and economics. He is the author of six books, including The Art of Description (Prometheus, 1987) and How to Win Every Argument (MJF Books, 1999), over fifty articles, and editor of six anthologies. He is a recent recipient of the Templeton Foundation Freedom Project Award.

The book will provides the first detailed history of the Bridgewater collection. The story extends from the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater's purchases in Rome in the 1750s, then on to the major acquisitions of the 1790s (especially from the Orleans collection), then through the incorporation of the collection into the Stafford Gallery by the 2nd Marquess of Stafford (1st Duke of Sutherland), and finally to its reinstallation by Lord Francis Egerton in the new Bridgewater House in 1851. As well as providing a detailed account of the personalities and differing motives of three generations of collectors and owners, the book examines the ways in which the collection was arranged and displayed. It also discusses reactions to it by contemporaries, from sophisticated critics such as William Hazlitt, to the general public, and analyses major publications on it such as the four-volume illustrated catalogue by William Young Ottley of 1818. The illustrations will include many works sold from the collection aft er 1946 and now widely dispersed.

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.

A fun and fact-filled introduction to the dismissed Black art masters and models who shook up the world. Elegant. Refined. Exclusionary. Interrupted. The foundations of the fine art world are shaking. Beyonce and Jay-Z break the internet by blending modern Black culture with fine art in their iconic music video filmed in the Louvre. Kehinde Wiley powerfully subverts European masterworks. Calls resonate for diversity in museums and the resignations of leaders of the old guard. It's clear that modern day museums can no longer exist without change-and without recognizing that Black people have been a part of the Western art world since its beginnings. Quietly held within museum and private collections around the world are hundreds of faces of Black men and women, many of their stories unknown. From paintings of majestic kings to a portrait of a young girl named Isabella in Amsterdam, these models lived diverse lives while helping shape the art world along the way. Then, after hundreds of years of Black faces cast as only the subject of the white gaze, a small group of trailblazing Black American painters and sculptors reached national and international fame, setting the stage for the flourishing of Black art in the 1920s and beyond. Captivating and informative, BLK ART is an essential work that elevates a globally dismissed legacy to its proper place in the mainstream art canon. From the hushed corridors of royal palaces to the bustling streets of 1920s Paris-this is Black history like never seen before.

A radical, lively departure from received notions about art of the Romantic period For many, the term "neoclassicism" has come to imply discipline, order, restraint, and a certain myopia. Leaving the term behind, this book radically challenges enduring assumptions about the art produced from the late 18th century to the early Victorian period, casting new light on appropriations of the classical body by British artists. It is the first to foreground the intersections of gender, race, and class in discussions of British visual classicism, laying bare artists' alternately politicizing and emphatically sensual engagements with Greco-Roman art. Rather than rely exclusively on subsequent scholarship, the book takes up the poet John Keats (1795-1821) as a theoretical framework. Eschewing the "Golden Age" narrative, which sees J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) as the pinnacle of the period's artistic achievement, the book examines overlooked artists, such as Henry Howard (1769-1847) and John Graham Lough (1798-1876). The result is a fresh account of underappreciated works of British painting and sculpture.

Paul Cezanne was a French Post-Impressionist painter whose works inspire us all with his beautiful use of colour and light. Our Cezanne Still Lifes FlipTop Notecard set comes in a FlipTop box with magnetic closure and features 20 note cards - 4 each of 5 images - featuring gorgeously reproduced still life images. This collection of cards contains a variety of still life painting reproductions, incorporating one of them wrapping around the outside of the box, creating a lovely keepsake when the cards are done. 20 notecards and envelopes 4 each of 5 images Each card: 177 x 120mm. Flip top box with magnetic closure Box measures 139 x 196 x 8mm.

Inspired by the Charles Darwin bicentennial, The Art of Evolution presents a collection of essays by international scholars renowned for their groundbreaking work on Darwin. The book not only includes a discussion of the popular imagery that immediately followed the publication of On the Origin of Species, but it also traces the impact of Darwin's ideas on visual culture over time and throughout the Western world. The contributors analyze the visual expression of a broad range of Darwin-inspired subjects, including eugenics, aesthetics and sexual selection, monera and protoplasm theories, social Darwinism and colonialism, the Taylorized body, and the natural history of surrealism. The visual imagery responding to Darwin and Darwinism ranges from popular caricature to state propaganda to major trends within Modern Art and Modernism. This rarely addressed subject will enrich our understanding of Darwin's impact across disciplines and reveal how transformations in science were manifested visually in so many enticingly unexpected ways. Contributors: Sara Barnes, Robert Michael Brain, Fae Brauer, Janet Browne, James Krasner, Barbara Larson, Marsha Morton, Gavin Parkinson, Andrew Patrizio, Phillip Prodger, Pat Simpson

Accompanying a major retrospective of Anders Zorn's work, this is the first volume in English to explore the Swedish Impressionist's entire career in depth. Anders Zorn (1860-1920) is one of Sweden's most accomplished and beloved artists. Renowned for his light, expressive watercolors, he attained mastery of the genre at an early age and later applied his techniques to oil painting. Zorn is often compared with the artists John Singer Sargent and Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, contemporaries who also were known for their portraits of high-society figures. Taking up residence in London and then in Paris, Zorn established himself as an international portrait painter, depicting fashionable clients in a style both elegant and relaxed. He became a favorite among wealthy American collectors, bankers, and industrialists who sat for him, including art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner and three U.S. presidents. Although perhaps best known for his portraits, Zorn brought equal skill to painting genre scenes and views of nature. This handsome volume provides a thorough introduction to the artist and his works, from portraiture to landscapes and his famous nudes. Four illustrated essays are accompanied by a chronology, selected bibliography, an exhibition checklist, and an index.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) is one of the best-known and most beloved painters in the history of art, with myriad publications and exhibitions devoted to his oeuvre. And yet there remains a previously undiscovered aspect of his career: his surprisingly significant role as a draftsman. This book is the first to focus on Monet's pastels, drawings, and sketchbooks, offering a revolutionary new interpretation of the artist's life and work. Monet has long been seen as an anti-draftsman, an artist who painted his subjects directly and whose rarely seen graphic works were marginal to his artistic process. In an effort to develop his public image, Monet denied the role of drawing in his working method. In actuality, Monet began his career as a caricaturist and as a teenager developed a passion for drawing that was never extinguished. He went on to master the medium of pastel and included seven in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. Citing recently discovered, unpublished documents that overturn the accepted image of the artist, The Unknown Monet reveals an extensive group of graphic works created over the course of the artist's career, many of which are unknown to the general public and to scholars: beautiful pastels, stunning black chalk drawings, and fascinating sketchbooks, which include pencil studies that relate to many of his paintings. The book also shows how Monet exploited the print media to promote his art. The most important publication on Monet to appear in a generation, this illuminating volume is essential to anyone interested in his work, Impressionism, and nineteenth-century French culture. Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts Exhibition Schedule: Royal Academy of Arts, London (March 17 - June 10, 2007) Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts (June 24 - September 16, 2007)

Originally published in 1999, Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture focuses on representations of work in American sculpture, from the decade in which the American Federation of Labor was formed, to the inauguration of the federal works project that subsidized American artists during the Great Depression. Monumental in form and commemorative in function, these sculptural works provide a public record of attitudes toward labor in a transitional moment in the history of relations between labor and management. Melissa Dabakis argues that sculptural imagery of industrial labor shaped attitudes towards work and the role of the worker in modern society. Restoring a group of important monuments to the history of labor, gender studies and American art history, her book focuses on key monuments and small-scale works in which labor was often constituted as 'manly' and where the work ethic mediated both production and reception.

The last work of Burne-Jones: a series of woodcut illustrations to the first chapters of Genesis, making a perfect epitome of his art. Reprinted from the original edition of 1902.

Raphael Ritz (1829-1894) is one of the most important artists to have emerged from the Swiss canton of Valais. In the 1850s, Ritz, who later became famous as the "Raphael of the Alps," studied at the renowned Academy of Art in Dusseldorf, Germany, and perfected his technique in the genre of mountain painting, which focuses on the relationship between landscape and man. Ritz, who felt a strong connection to his roots, created landscape idylls in faraway Dusseldorf for an audience that appreciated regional peculiarities. At times with a touch of irony, he put his works at the service of a modern effort to illustrate the timeless character of everyday life. This new monograph looks at the work of the Valais-born artist beyond national borders and frames it in both the Swiss and international artistic contexts of the time. Ritz's correspondence with his father, Lorenz Justin Ritz, who was a painter as well, is also comprehensively examined for the first time: it constitutes an important testimony to his artistic self-discovery. Selected photographs by Swiss contemporary artists from the museum's collection show the Valais of today and establish a connection between Ritz's ethnographic view of his own origins and the present. Text in French and German.