The Drowned Muse is a study of the extraordinary destiny, in the history of European culture, of an object which could seem, at first glance, quite ordinary in the history of European culture. It tells the story of a mask, the cast of a young girl's face entitled "L'Inconnue de la Seine," the Unknown Woman of the Seine, and its subsequent metamorphoses as a cultural figure. Legend has it that the "Inconnue" drowned herself in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. The forensic scientist tending to her unidentified corpse at the Paris Morgue was supposedly so struck by her allure that he captured in plaster the contours of her face. This unknown girl, also referred to as "The Mona Lisa of Suicide", has since become the object of an obsessive interest that started in the late 1890s, reached its peak in the 1930s, and continues to reverberate today. Aby Warburg defines art history as "a ghost story for grown-ups." This study is similarly "a ghost story for grown-ups", narrating the aura of a cultural object that crosses temporal, geographical, and linguistic frontiers. It views the "Inconnue" as a symptomatic expression of a modern world haunted by the earlier modernity of the nineteenth century. It investigates how the mask's metamorphoses reflect major shifts in the cultural history of the last two centuries, approaching the "Inconnue" as an entry point to understand a phenomenon characteristic of 20th- and 21st-century modernity: the translatability of media. Doing so, this study mobilizes discourses surrounding the "Inconnue", casting them as points of negotiation through which we may consider the modern age.

Including previously unpublished and recently re-discovered designs for the interior of the Museum, Olivia Horsfall Turner's fascinating new book, the latest in the V&A 19th-Century Series, looks at the relationship between architect and designer Owen Jones and the South Kensington Museum (later the V&A) in the period from the Museum's establishment in the 1850s to Jones's death in 1874. It focuses on key moments in Jones's relationship with the Museum: the creation of his well-known publication The Grammar of Ornament (1856) and his less widely known Examples of Chinese Ornament (1867), and the decoration of the Museum's so-called Oriental Court between 1863 and 1865. Jones's collaboration with the Museum over a period of almost 20 years is of special interest not only thanks to his status as one of the most influential design theorists of the 19th century, but also for the light that it sheds on the identity of the early Museum and its imperial context.

The importance of A. W. N. Pugin (1812-52) in architecture and design in England and beyond is incontestable. The leading architect of the Gothic Revival, Pugin is one of the most significant figures of the mid-nineteenth century and one of the greatest designers. His correspondence furnishes more insight into the man and more information about his work than any other source. This volume, the last of five, contains letters from 1851 and the first months of 1852; after that, Pugin's health failed and he died in September. In the great event of the period, the international exhibition held in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, the display of objects made to Pugin's design, which he planned and oversaw, was an outstanding success, bringing substantial commercial benefit to his colleagues and spreading Pugin's influence even more widely than before. The value of his judgment was recognized in his appointment to two committees in connection with the Great Exhibition. Frantic though the preparations for what came to be known as the Medieval Court were, Pugin made time to write for publication. He issued letters and pamphlets in explanation, defence, and support of the Catholic Church and its re-established hierarchy, and turned again to the conundrum that had long teased him, the relation between the faith and the form, not only architectural, in which it found expression. He completed the book on chancel screens conceived some years before. At home in The Grange at Ramsgate, he continued to design stained glass windows, for other architects as well as his own clients, and supervised the production of cartoons; he poured out designs in his usual fields of metalwork, ceramics, furniture, carving, and wallpaper, and branched out, not always happily, into new areas such as embroidery and the decoration of piano cases. The demand for drawings for Westminster, where the House of Commons was due to open early in 1852, was as incessant as ever. His last child, Edmund Peter, was born in 1851 only a few months before his first grandchild, Mildred. Both were baptized in the church of St Augustine which he was still building next to his house and where he himself was soon to be laid in the vault he provided for the purpose. The volume also includes some letters which have come to light too late for inclusion in their proper chronological places and some texts of doubtful authenticity.

The wood engravers' self-portrait tells the story of the image-making firm Dalziel Brothers, investigating and interpreting a unique archive from the British Museum. The study takes a creative-critical approach to illustration, alongside detailed investigation of print techniques and history. Five siblings ran the wood engraving firm Dalziel Brothers: George, Edward, Margaret, John and Thomas Dalziel. Prospering through five decades of work, Dalziel became the major capitalist image makers of Victorian Britain. This book, based on AHRC-funded research, outlines the achievements of these remarkable siblings and uncovers the histories of some of the 36 unknown artisan employees that worked alongside them. Dalziel Brothers made works of global importance: illustrations to Lewis Carroll's Alice books, novels by Charles Dickens, and landmark Pre-Raphaelite prints, as well as other, brilliant works that are published here for the first time since their initial creation. -- .

A FLAME TREE POCKET NOTEBOOK. Beautiful and luxurious the journals combine high-quality production with magnificent art. Perfect as a gift, and an essential personal choice for writers, notetakers, travellers, students, poets and diarists. Features a wide range of well-known and modern artists, with new artworks published throughout the year. BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED. The highly crafted covers are printed on foil paper, embossed then foil stamped, complemented by the luxury binding and rose red end-papers. The covers are created by our artists and designers who spend many hours transforming original artwork into gorgeous 3d masterpieces that feel good in the hand and look wonderful on a desk or table. PRACTICAL, EASY TO USE. Flame Tree Notebooks come with practical features too: a pocket at the back for scraps and receipts; two ribbon markers to help keep track of more than just a to-do list; robust ivory text paper, printed with lines; and when you need to collect other notes or scraps of paper the magnetic side flap keeps everything neat and tidy. THE ARTIST. 'All of a sudden,' Monet would one day recall, 'I had the revelation of the enchantment of my pond. I took up my palette...' And the rest is art-history. Again and again - well over 200 times, and often working on an enormous scale - Claude Monet would return to water lilies as his subject. THE FINAL WORD. As William Morris said, "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

Presented in a style as stunning as the prints it celebrates, this survey of Hiroshige tells the fascinating story of the last great practitioner of ukiyo-e, or "pictures of the floating world." Hiroshige is considered to be the tradition's most poetic artist and his work had a marked influence on Western painting towards the end of the 19th century. Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Paul Ce zanne, and James Whistler were inspired by Hiroshige's serene depictions of the natural world. Arranged chronologically, this book illustrates through text and magnificent reproductions Hiroshige's youth and early career; his artistic development in the genre of landscape prints; his depictions of Edo and the provinces; the flower and bird prints; and his many popular books and paintings. It discusses the historic and cultural environment in which Hiroshige flourished and the many reasons his art continues to be revered and imitated. Filled with 300 color reproductions, and featuring a clamshell box and Japanese-style binding, this volume is destined to become the definitive examination of Hiroshige's oeuvre.

By 1862, just a decade after its launch as a study collection for art and design, the Victoria and Albert Museum had become a reference resource for collectors, scholars and art-market experts. Enriching the V&A, the final volume in a trilogy of books on the museum's 19th-century history, describes how the young museum's rapid growth in the following decades was driven more by collectors, agents and dealers, through loans, gifts and bequests, than by the combined expertise, acquisitions policies and buying power of its directors and curators. The V&A soon became a collection of collections, embodying a new age of collecting that benefitted from the break-up of historic institutions and ancestral collections across Europe, and imperial expeditions in Asia and Africa. The industrial revolution had created a new social class with the resources to buy from the expanding art market, especially in the decorative arts. Many were touched by a new moral imperative to collect for the home, however humble, and to share their specialist knowledge and enthusiasm by lending to the new public museums. Enriching the V&A explores the formative influence on the museum, and on pioneering fields of scholarship, of the V&A's leading Victorian and Edwardian benefactors. It also shares uncomfortable truths about the sources of some objects from the age of empires and shows how the meanings of things can change through the transformation of private property into public museum collections.

Claude Monet's water lily paintings are among the most iconic and beloved works of art of the past century. Yet these entrancing images were created at a time of terrible private turmoil and sadness for the artist. The dramatic history behind these paintings is little known; Ross King's Mad Enchantment tells the full story for the first time and, in the process, presents a compelling and original portrait of one of our most popular and cherished artists. By the outbreak of war in 1914, Monet, then in his mid-seventies, was one of the world's most famous and successful painters, with a large house in the country, a fleet of automobiles and a colossal reputation. However, he had virtually given up painting following the death of his wife Alice in 1911 and the onset of blindness a year later. Nonetheless, it was during this period of sorrow, ill health and creative uncertainty that - as the guns roared on the Western Front - he began the most demanding and innovative paintings he had ever attempted. Encouraged by close friends such as Georges Clemenceau, France's dauntless prime minister, Monet would work on these magnificent paintings throughout the war years and then for the rest of his life. So obsessed with his monumental task that the village barber was summoned to clip his hair as he worked beside his pond, he covered hundreds of yards of canvas with shimmering layers of pigment. As his ambitions expanded with his paintings, he began planning what he intended to be his legacy to the world: the `Musee Claude Monet' in the Orangerie in Paris. Drawing on letters and memoirs and focusing on this remarkable period in the artist's life, Mad Enchantment gives an intimate portrayal of Claude Monet in all his tumultuous complexity, and firmly places his water lily paintings among the greatest achievements in the history of art.

In "Keywords of Nineteenth-Century Art", Christine Lindey offers a fresh approach to the study of the theory and practice of the century's fine art. Fifty key art terms provide a context for copious contemporary quotations from those with direct experience of the creative process: artists, critics, writers and thinkers. The book thus avoids the hackneyed definition of major movements and artists' groups, and instead discusses these through a rich diversity of attitudes to each keyword; those, for example, of the Romantic, Barbizon and Symbolist artists and their publics to issues such as art institutions, exhibitions, landscape, drawing and the pervasive influence of the antique. The quotations are drawn from a wide range of sources. Chosen to exemplify particular historical, geographical, socio-political and aesthetic tendencies, these provide familiar pivotal figures to help guide the reader through a highly populated and fast-changing art world. The emphasis is on French and, to a lesser degree, British art but a range of European and North American art is also discussed. Academic art and the views of its conservative champions are set alongside those of avant-garde artists to convey the major aesthetic debates and public tastes of the century. The struggle of women artists to overcome social and professional exclusion is discussed in relation to male-dominated norms. Associated ideas are appended to each term, guiding the reader towards further readings so that the book provides quick reference, a rich source of quotations and an overall insight into the major preoccupations of nineteenth-century art and artists.

The Invention of Melbourne defines the relationship between an architect of genius, William Wardell, and the first Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, James Goold, an Irishman educated in Risorgimento, Italy. Their partnership produced St Patrick's, the largest cathedral of the 19th century anywhere in the world, and some thirteen churches, decorated with hundreds of Baroque paintings. These ambitious policies coincided with the Gold Rush, which contributed financially to their success. The contribution made by Wardell and Goold to the built environment of Melbourne remains significant, and the essays in this volume radically reassess Goold, who until now has been either dismissed as a stern, aloof Irish cleric, or viewed more favourably for his achievements as a champion of Catholic education. Similarly, Wardell's legacy to Melbourne has been forgotten despite the conspicuous presence of Government House and the Gothic Bank, for many Melburnians their most favourite building. Together, they actively and creatively shaped the city that became a major international metropolis.

Victorian churches were often of high quality, reflecting in physical terms the intense theological debates of the time. This highly-illustrated book by a leading authority describes many of the finest examples. Many churches were built in England during the reign of Queen Victoria: most were in various varieties of Gothic Revival. Often exquisitely furnished, they were visible expressions of the presence and importance of religion at the time. Their architectural qualities reflected aspirations of clergy, laity, and individual benefactors. The finest were the results of passionate commitment to an architecture soundly based on scholarly studies known as Ecclesiology. James Stevens Curl places English churches of the period in their complex social and denominational settings, giving comprehensive accounts of the religious atmosphere and controversies of the times. He charts the progress and development of the Gothic Revival, explains differences in the architecture of various denominations, outlines the influences of the chief protagonists involved, and describes the demands made on craftsmen and industry to produce the materials, furnishings, and fittings necessary in making some of the finest buildings ever created in England. He reveals something of the individuals and events that shaped the religious climate of the epoch, while specially commissioned illustrations reveal the rich variety found in Victorian churches.

The Rob Roy Kelly Wood Type Collection is a comprehensive collection of wood type manufactured and used for printing in nineteenth-century America. Comprising nearly 150 typefaces of various sizes and styles, it was amassed by noted design educator and historian Rob Roy Kelly starting in 1957 and is now held by the University of Texas. Although Kelly himself published a 1969 book on wood type and nineteenth-century typographic history, there has been little written about the creation of the wood type forms, the collection, or Kelly. In this book, David Shields rigorously updates and expands upon Kelly's historical information about the types, clarifying the collection's exact composition and providing a better understanding of the stylistic development of wood type forms during the nineteenth century. Using rich materials from the period, Shields provides a stunning visual context that complements the textual history of each typeface. He also highlights the non-typographic material in the collection-such as borders, rules, ornaments, and image cuts-that have not been previously examined. Featuring over 300 color illustrations, this written history and catalog is bound to spark renewed interest in the collection and its broader typographic period.

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Sketch Books. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. The thick paper stock makes them perfect for sketching and drawing. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features Van Gogh's Sunflowers. Van Gogh painted a series of pictures depicting sunflowers, having first been inspired by the yellow flowers in Paris when he saw them growing in the gardens of Montmartre. Sunflowers were symbolic of life and hope to the artist, and could also be associated with his concept of the sun - glowing, yellow and hopeful.

The building of the Victoria and Albert Museum, begun in 1857, is the most elaborately designed and decorated museum in Britain. This book is the first to consider the V&A as a work of art in itself, presenting drawings, watercolours and historic photographs relating to the Museum's 19th-century interiors. Much of this visual material is previously unpublished and is outside the canon of Victorian art and design. The V&A's first Director, Henry Cole, conceived the Museum's building as a showcase for leading Victorian artists to design and decorate. This book reveals for the first time the ways in which Cole's expressed policy to 'assemble a splendid collection of objects representing the application of Fine Arts to manufacture' was applied to the fabric of the building, as he engaged leading painters such as Frederic Leighton , G.F. Watts and Edward Burne-Jones, as well as specialists in decoration such as Owen Jones and Morris and Company, to decorate and design for a building raised by engineers using innovatory materials and techniques.It represents a fascinating, untold chapter in the history of British 19th-century art, design, architecture and museums, and an essential backdrop to understanding the evolution of the Museum's early collections and identity.

People all over the world have always used symbols to express and communicate the things that mean most to them. From a country's flag, which can signify more than patriotism, to a charm bracelet, with its 'portable memories', symbolism takes various forms. Familiarity with symbolism opens up levels of understanding most of us have probably never been aware of. Why, for instance, do we share a secret with the words 'a little bird told me'? What is it about a horseshoe that, in the right circumstances, brings luck? Why a horse's shoe? How old is the swastika, and where has it been used as a symbol (and what was Jung getting at when he said the Nazi's used it 'backwards')? In nearly 1500 entries, many of them strikingly and often surprisingly illustrated, J.C. Cooper has documented the history and evolution of symbols from prehistory to our own day. Lively, informative and often ironic, she discusses and explains an enormous variety of symbols extending from the Arctic to Dahomey, from the Iroquios to Oceania, and coming from systems as diverse as Tao, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Tantra, the cult of Cybele and the Great Goddess, the Pre-Columbian religions of the Western Hemisphere and the Voodoo cults of Brazil and West Africa.