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 Wheat Field with Cypresses. Vincent Van Gogh composed this painting while he was in the Saint-Remy mental asylum, near Arles. The bold use of impasto and the beauty of the towering trees have made this one of his most recognisable works. There are various other versions of the painting, one of which features a closer view of the cypresses painted vertically, as well as a replica of this version that Van Gogh painted for his mother and sister.

This book reframes the formative years of three significant artists: Henri Fantin-Latour, Alphonse Legros, and James McNeill Whistler. The trio's coming together as the Societe des trois occurred during the emergence of the artistic avant-garde-a movement toward individualism and self-expression. Though their oeuvres appear dissimilar, it is imperative that the three artists' early work and letters be viewed in light of the Societe, as it informed many of their decisions in both London and Paris. Each artist actively cultivated a translocal presence, creating artistic networks that transcended national borders. Thus, this book will serve as a comprehensive resource on the development, production, implications, and eventual end of the Societe.

Based on extensive fieldwork, and research into John Ruskin's still little-interpreted archival material, notebooks and drawings (in the Ruskin Library, Lancaster University, UK and elsewhere), Stephen Kite offers an unprecedented account of the evolution of Ruskin's architectural thinking and observation in the context of Italy where his watching of building achieved its greatest intensity. Venice naturally figures large in a work that also examines other key sites including Verona, Lucca, Pisa, Florence, Milan and Monza; here, the fabrics are vividly read in their contexts against the rich evidence of Ruskin's diaries, his pocket-book sketches, architectural worksheets, drawings, and daguerrotypes (the early form of photography), and the drafts and published editions of the texts. Kite presents the complex story of Ruskin's visual thinking in architecture as a narrative of deepening interpretation and representation, focusing on the humbler monuments of Italy. He shows how Ruskin's early picturesque naturalism was transformed by the realisation that to understand the built realities confronting him in Italy demanded a closer engagement with the substance of the stones themselves; reflecting Ruskin's sense of his task as a near-archaeological gleaning and gathering of remains 'hidden in many a grass grown court, and silent pathway, and lightless canal'.

Highly innovative and long overdue, this study analyzes the visual culture of addiction produced in Britain during the long nineteenth century. The book examines well-known images such as William Hogarth's Gin Lane (1751), as well as lesser-known artworks including Alfred Priest's painting Cocaine (1919), in order to demonstrate how visual culture was both informed by, and contributed to, discourses of addiction in the period between 1751 and 1919. Through her analysis of more than 30 images, Julia Skelly deconstructs beliefs and stereotypes related to addicted individuals that remain entrenched in the popular imagination today. Drawing upon both feminist and queer methodologies, as well as upon extensive archival research, Addiction and British Visual Culture, 1751-1919 investigates and problematizes the long-held belief that addiction is legible from the body, thus positioning visual images as unreliable sources in attempts to identify alcoholics and drug addicts. Examining paintings, graphic satire, photographs, advertisements and architectural sites, Skelly explores such issues as ongoing anxieties about maternal drinking; the punishment and confinement of addicted individuals; the mobility of female alcoholics through the streets and spaces of nineteenth-century London; and soldiers' use of addictive substances such as cocaine and tobacco to cope with traumatic memories following the First World War.

During the Victorian period there developed a new anxiety about male-female relations and roles in modern society, as described by a member of the Athenaeum in 1858, 'the distinction of man and woman, their separate as well as their joint rights, begins to occupy the attention of our whole community, and with no small effect'. These essays examine Victorian painting in the light of this 'woman question' by analysing the change in representation of the family, romance, social issues such as emigration and colonialism, the use of the female nude and the traditions of portraiture, history-painting and still life. The art and artists are considered in a socio-political context, and the connections between Victorian sexism, racism and classism are examined. These essays bring to light much previously unknown work (especially by women) and reappraise many well-known paintings.

The first monograph to examine the depiction of reading women in French art of the early Third Republic, Women Readers in French Painting 1870-1890 evaluates the pictorial significance of this imagery, its critical reception, and its impact on notions of femininity and social relations. Covering a broad range of paintings, prints, and sculptures, this book shows how the liseuse was subjected to unprecedented levels of pictorial innovation by artists with widely differing aesthetic aims and styles. Depictions of readers are interpreted as contributions to changing notions of public and private life, female agency, and women's participation in cultural and political debates beyond the domestic household. This highly original book explores images of women readers from a range of social classes in both urban and rural settings. Such images are shown to have articulated concerns about the impact of female literacy on labour environments and family life while, in many cases, challenging conventions of gendered reading. Kathryn Brown also presents an alternative way of conceiving of modernity in relation to nineteenth-century art, a methodological departure from much recent art historical literature. Artists discussed range from Manet, Cassatt and Degas, to less familiar figures such as Lavieille, Carriere, Toulmouche and Tissot.

In 1864, Union soldier Charles George described a charge into battle by General Phil Sheridan: "Such a picture of earnestness and determination I never saw as he showed as he came in sight of the battle field . . . What a scene for a painter!" These words proved prophetic, as Sheridan's desperate ride provided the subject for numerous paintings and etchings as well as songs and poetry. George was not alone in thinking of art in the midst of combat; the significance of the issues under contention, the brutal intensity of the fighting, and the staggering number of casualties combined to form a tragedy so profound that some could not help but view it through an aesthetic lens, to see the war as a concert of death. It is hardly surprising that art influenced the perception and interpretation of the war given the intrinsic role that the arts played in the lives of antebellum Americans. Nor is it surprising that literature, music, and the visual arts were permanently altered by such an emotional and material catastrophe. In The Arts and Culture of the American Civil War, an interdisciplinary team of scholars explores the way the arts - theatre, music, fiction, poetry, painting, architecture, and dance - were influenced by the war as well as the unique ways that art functioned during and immediately following the war. Included are discussions of familiar topics (such as Ambrose Bierce, Peter Rothermel, and minstrelsy) with less-studied subjects (soldiers and dance, epistolary songs). The collection as a whole sheds light on the role of race, class, and gender in the production and consumption of the arts for soldiers and civilians at this time; it also draws attention to the ways that art shaped - and was shaped by - veterans long after the war.

Even before the upheaval of the Revolution, France sought a new formal language for a regenerated nation. Nowhere is this clearer than in its tombs, some among its most famous modern sculpture-rarely discussed as funerary projects. Unlike other art-historical studies of tombs, this one frames sculptural examples within the full spectrum of the material funerary arts of the period, along with architecture and landscape. This book further widens the standard scope to shed new and needed light on the interplay of the funerary arts, tomb cult, and the mentalities that shaped them in France, over a period famous for profound and often violent change. Suzanne Glover Lindsay also brings the abundant recent work on the body to the funerary arts and tomb cult for the first time, confronting cultural and aesthetic issues through her examination of a celebrated sculptural type, the recumbent effigy of the deceased in death. Using many unfamiliar period sources, this study reinterprets several famous tombs and funerals and introduces significant enterprises that are little known today to suggest the prominent place held by tomb cult in nineteenth-century France. Images of the tombs complement the text to underline sculpture's unique formal power in funerary mode.

Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding, 1870-1914 presents the first cross-disciplinary analysis of the visual and material representations and spaces of male same-sex culture in turn-of-the-century Britain which positions intimacy as its central object. Through both historical and theoretical lenses, this groundbreaking study considers photographs, interior design, decorative art, architecture and illustrations from the popular press to reveal the interwoven narratives of intimacy, aesthetics and identity. The author sustains close readings to expose the challenges the representations of 'men together' posed not only for the men of the time, but also for the contemporary viewer and scholar.

This fully illustrated study examines the construction of masculinity in culture based on an analysis of pictorial representations of the male in a wide range of contexts: social, historical, legal, literary, institutional, anthropological, educational, marital, imperial and aesthetic. Powerful images from the work of dozens of Victorian artists - from Leighton, Waterhouse, Burne-Jones and Alma-Tadema to Dicksee, Pettie, Watts, Woodville and Tuke to name a few - are used to illustrate the 5 key paradigms of masculinity: the classical hero, the gallant knight, the challenged paterfamilias, the valiant soldier and the male nude. Aspects of 20th-century theory such as rescue compulsion, male sexuality, the male gaze and racial ideas are also considered. The author concludes that maleness was, and is, learned and 19th-century ideas still influence the construction of manhood today; that social institutions are influenced by, and themselves use, artistic representation; that artistic images strongly influence ideas of gender; and that multi-disciplinary cultural study is the best way to examine the formation of gender ideologies.

Representations of music were employed to create a wider 'Orient' on the pages, stages and walls of nineteenth-century Britain. This book explores issues of orientalism, otherness, gender and sexuality that arise in artistic British representations of non-European musicians during this time, by utilizing recent theories of orientalism, and the subsidiary (particularly aesthetic and literary) theories both on which these theories were based and on which they have been influential. The author uses this theoretical framework of orientalism as a form of othering in order to analyse primary source materials, and in conjunction with musicological, literary and art theories, thus explores ways in which ideas of the Other were transformed over time and between different genres and artists. Part I, The Musical Stage, discusses elements of the libretti of popular musical stage works in this period, and the occasionally contradictory ways in which 'racial' Others was represented through text and music; a particular focus is the depiction of 'Oriental' women and ideas of sexuality. Through examination of this collection of libretti, the ways in which the writers of these works filter and romanticize the changing intellectual ideas of this era are explored. Part II, Works of Fiction, is a close study of the works of Sir Henry Rider Haggard, using other examples of popular fiction by his contemporary writers as contextualizing material, with the primary concern being to investigate how music is utilized in popular fiction to represent Other non-Europeans and in the creation of orientalized gender constructions. Part III, Visual Culture, is an analysis of images of music and the 'Orient' in examples of British 'high art', illustration and photography, investigating how the musical Other was visualized.

For most of the twentieth century, modernist viewers dismissed the architectural ornament of Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924) and the majority of his theoretical writings as emotional outbursts of an outmoded romanticism. In this study, Lauren Weingarden reveals Sullivan's eloquent articulation of nineteenth-century romantic practices - literary, linguistic, aesthetic, spiritual, and nationalistic - and thus rescues Sullivan and his legacy from the narrow role imposed on him as a pioneer of twentieth-century modernism. Using three interpretive models, discourse theory, poststructural semiotic analysis, and a pragmatic concept of sign-functions, she restores the integrity of Sullivan's artistic choices and his historical position as a culminating figure within nineteenth-century romanticism. By giving equal weight to Louis Sullivan's writings and designs, Weingarden shows how he translated both Ruskin's tenets of Gothic naturalism and Whitman's poetry of the American landscape into elemental structural forms and organic ornamentation. Viewed as a site where various romantic discourses converged, Sullivan's oeuvre demands a cross-disciplinary exploration of each discursive practice, and its "rules of accumulation, exclusion, reactivation." The overarching theme of this study is the interrogation and restitution of those Foucauldian rules that enabled Sullivan to articulate architecture as a pictorial mode of landscape art, which he considered co-equal with the spiritual and didactic functions of landscape poetry.

A novel investigation into art pedagogy and constructions of national identities in Britain and Ireland, this collection explores the student-master relationship in case studies ranging chronologically from 1770 to 2013, and geographically over the national art schools of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Essays explore the manner in which the Old Masters were deployed in education; fuelled the individual creativity of art teachers and students; were used as a rhetorical tool for promoting cultural projects in the core and periphery of the British Isles; and united as well as divided opinions in response to changing expectations in discourse on art and education. Case studies examined in this book include the sophisticated tradition of 'academic' inquiry of establishment figures, like Joshua Reynolds and Frederic Leighton, as well as examples of radical reform undertaken by key individuals in the history of art education, such as Edward Poynter and William Coldstream. The role of 'Modern Masters' (like William Orpen, Augustus John, Gwen John and Jeff Wall) is also discussed along with the need for students and teachers to master the realm of art theory in their studio-based learning environments, and the ultimate pedagogical repercussions of postmodern assaults on the academic bastions of the Old Masters.

Should sight trump the other four senses when experiencing and evaluating art? Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present questions whether the authority of the visual in 'visual culture' should be deconstructed, and focuses on the roles of touch, taste, smell, and sound in the materiality of works of art. From the nineteenth century onward, notions of synaesthesia and the multi-sensorial were important to a series of art movements from Symbolism to Futurism and Installations. The essays in this collection evaluate works of art at specific moments in their history, and consider how senses other than the visual have (or have not) affected the works' meaning. The result is a re-evaluation of sensory knowledge and experience in the arts, encouraging a new level of engagement with ideas of style and form.

This vibrant collection of essays claims that a complex network of texts by critics, biographers and diarists established the credibility and influence of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Throughout the twentieth century, Modernist taste failed to acknowledge the achievement of oppositional groupings such as the Pre-Raphaelites. The essays collected here, however, reveal that the British group anticipated later avant-gardes by using the written word to configure for itself a radical artistic identity. Public and critics alike were scandalized by the radicalism of Pre-Raphaelite painting, its unflinching portrayal of historical figures and of contemporary life, and its irreverent attitude to artistic convention. Pre-Raphaelitism's innovations were not confined to style: new forms of artistic identity and behaviour were explored. As the contributors interrogate the texts through which Pre-Raphaelitism was constructed, they demonstrate that the movement's wide influence as a cultural phenomenon derived from the interplay between exhibited works and critical discourse. Applying a range of sophisticated methodologies from the fields of literary studies, art history, and cultural studies, these interdisciplinary essays uncover the neglected role of texts in the success of the Pre-Raphaelite rebellion and argue in favor of a new centrality for this movement in the history of nineteenth-century European culture.

A study of the ways landscape was perceived in nineteenth-century Britain and France, this book draws on evidence from poetry, landscape gardens, spectacular public entertainments, novels and scientific works as well as paintings in order to develop its basic premise that landscape and the processes of perceiving it cannot be separated. Vision embraces panoramic seeing from high places, but also the seeing of ghosts and spectres when madness and hallucination impinge upon landscape. The rise of geology and the spread of empires upset the existing comfortable orders of comprehension of landscape. Reverie and imagination produced powerful interpretive actions, while landscape in French culture proved central to the rejection of conservative classicism in favour of perceptual questioning of experience. The experience of subjectivity proved central to the perception of landscape while the visual culture of landscape became of paramount importance to modernity during the period in question.

Museum Bodies provides an account of how museums have staged, prescribed and accommodated a repertoire of bodily practices, from their emergence in the eighteenth century to the present day. As long as museums have existed, their visitors have been scrutinised, both formally and informally, and their behaviour calibrated as a register of cognitive receptivity and cultural competence. Yet there has been little sustained theoretical or practical attention given to the visitors' embodied encounter with the museum. In Museum Bodies Helen Rees Leahy discusses the politics and practice of visitor studies, and the differentiation and exclusion of certain bodies on the basis of, for example, age, gender, educational attainment, ethnicity and disability. At a time when museums are more than ever concerned with size, demographic mix and the diversity of their audiences, as well as with the ways in which visitors engage with and respond to institutional space and content, this wide-ranging study of visitors' embodied experience of the museum is long overdue.

In Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siecle France, Robyn Roslak examines for the first time the close relationship between neo-impressionist landscapes and cityscapes and the anarchist sympathies of the movement's artists. She focuses in particular on paintings produced between 1886 and 1905 by Paul Signac and Maximilien Luce, the neo-impressionists whose fidelity to anarchism, to the art of landscape and to a belief in the social potential of art was strongest. Although the neo-impressionists are best known for their rational and scientific technique, they also heeded the era's call for art surpassing the mundane realities of everyday life. By tempering their modern subjects with a decorative style, they hoped to lead their viewers toward moral and social improvement. Roslak's ground-breaking analysis shows how the anarchist theories of Elisee Reclus, Pierre Kropotkin and Jean Grave both inspired and coincided with these ideals. Anarchism attracted the neo-impressionists because its standards for social justice were grounded, like neo-impressionism itself, in scientific exactitude and aesthetic idealism. Anarchists claimed humanity would reach its highest level of social and moral development only in the presence of a decorative variety of nature, and called upon progressive thinkers to help create and maintain such environments. The neo-impressionists, who primarily painted decorative landscapes, therefore discovered in anarchism a political theory consistent with their belief that decorative harmony should be the basis for socially responsible art.

Could the vitality of embodied experience create a foundation for a new form of revolutionary authority? The Life of the City is a bold and innovative reassessment of the early urban avant-garde movements that sought to re-imagine and reinvent the experiential life of the city. Constructing a ground-breaking theoretical analysis of the relationships between biological life, urban culture, and modern forms of biopolitical 'experiential authority', Julian Brigstocke traces the failed attempts of Parisian radicals to turn the 'crisis of authority' in late nineteenth-century Paris into an opportunity to invent new forms of urban commons. The most comprehensive account to date of the spatial politics of the literary, artistic and anarchist groups that settled in the Montmartre area of Paris after the suppression of the 1871 Paris Commune, The Life of the City analyses the reasons why laughter emerged as the unlikely tool through which Parisian bohemians attempted to forge a new, non-representational biopolitics of sensation. Ranging from the carnivalesque performances of artistic cabarets such as the Chat Noir to the laughing violence of anarchist terrorism, The Life of the City is a timely analysis of the birth of a carnivalesque politics that remains highly influential in contemporary urban movements.

Originally describing language use and class position, vulgarity became, over the course of the nineteenth century, a word with wider social implications. Variously associated with behavior, the possession of wealth, different races, sexuality and gender, the objects displayed in homes, and ways of thinking and feeling, vulgarity suggested matters of style, taste, and comportment. This collection examines the diverse ramifications of vulgarity in the four areas where it was most discussed in the nineteenth century: language use, changing social spaces, the emerging middle classes, and visual art. Exploring the dynamics of the term as revealed in dictionaries and grammars; Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor; fiction by Dickens, Eliot, Gissing, and Trollope; essays, journalism, art, and art reviews, the contributors bring their formidable analytical skills to bear on this enticing and divisive concept. Taken together, these essays urge readers to consider the implications of vulgarity's troubled history for today's writers, critics, and artists.

In a moving intervention into Romantic-era depictions of the dead and wounded, Philip Shaw's timely study directs our gaze to the neglected figure of the common soldier. How suffering and sentiment were portrayed in a variety of visual and verbal media is Shaw's particular concern, as he examines a wide range of print and visual media, from paintings to sketches to political prose and anti-war poetry, and from writings on culture and aesthetics to graphic satires and early photographs. Whilst classical portraiture and history painting certainly conspired with official ideologies to deflect attention from the true costs of war, other works of art, literary as well as visual, proffered representations that countered the view that suffering on and off the battlefield is noble or heroic. Shaw uncovers a history of changing attitudes towards suffering, from mid-eighteenth century ambivalence to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century concepts of moral sentiment. Thus, Shaw's story is one of how images of death and wounding facilitated and queried these shifts in the perception of war, qualifying as well as consolidating ideas of individual and national unanimity. Informed by readings of the letters and journals of serving soldiers, surgeons' notebooks and sketches, and the writings of peace and war agitators, Shaw's study shows how an attention to the depiction of suffering and the development of 'liberal' sentiment enables a reconfiguring of historical and theoretical notions of the body as a site of pain and as a locus of violent national imaginings.

Searing disputes over caricature have recently sparked flames across the world"the culmination, not the beginning, of the story of one of modernity's definitive artistic practices. Modern visual satire erupts during a period marked by reform and revolution, by cohering nationalisms and expanding empires, and by the emerging discipline of art history. This has long been recognized as its Golden Age. It is time to look anew. In The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759-1838, an international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational team of scholars reconfigures the geography of modern visual satire, as the expansive narrative reaches from North America to Europe, to China and the Ottoman Empire. Caricature's specific visual cultures are also laid bare, its iconographic means and material support, as well as the diverse milieu of its making"the military, the art academy, diplomacy, politics, art criticism, and popular entertainment. Some of its greatest practitioners"James Gillray and Honore Daumier"are seen in a new light, alongside some of their far flung and opportunistic pastichers. Most trenchantly, assumptions about the consequences of caricature's rise come under intense scrutiny, interrogated for its cherished and long-vaunted civilizational claims on individual character, artistic supremacy, political liberty, and global domination.

Revealing that nineteenth-century photography goes beyond the functional to reflect the aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural concerns of the time, this study proposes that each photographic image of architecture be studied both as a primary visual document and an object of aesthetic inquiry. This multi-faceted approach drives Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Photographs: Essays on Reading a Collection. Despite three decades of post-colonial, post-structuralist and gender-conscious criticism, the study of architectural photography continues to privilege technical virtuosity. This volume offers a thematic exploration of the material, and a socio-historical examination that allows consideration of questions that have not been addressed comprehensively before in a single publication. Themes include exoticism and "armchair tourism"; the absence of women from architectural photography; the role of photographs as commodities; vernacular architecture and the picturesque; and historic preservation, urban renewal, and nationalism. Micheline Nilsen analyzes photographs from France and England"the two countries where photography was invented"and from around the world, representing a corpus of over 10,000 photographs from the Janos Scholz Collection of Nineteenth-Century Photographs of the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame.

Painting Labour in Scotland and Europe, 1850-1900 explores hitherto unrecognized European variations in the phenomena of rural labour imagery, particularly in Scotland. In exploring these distinctions relative to Scotland and Europe it looks to develop a new understanding of the commonalities and idiosyncrasies of rural labour imagery which have often been treated as homogenous. Lacking the detailed analysis that has been accorded other images, writing about Scottish painting has often been appended to analyses of English or French imagery. It has generally been understood as intellectually divorced from the sometimes brutal realities of evolving Scottish nineteenth-century urbanism, or simply ignored. Painting Labour in Scotland and Europe, 1850-1900 sets out systematically to discuss the Scottish rural painting in relation to its particular Scottish historical context, both sociological and aesthetic and its English and European counterparts. Alongside canonical Scottish images by major figures such as James Guthrie, the book explores many hitherto under researched and unconsidered paintings by nineteenth-century Scottish artists, and considers them in relation to major English and Continental Realist and Romantic painters. The juxtaposition of J.F. Millet with W.D. McKay, and Edwin Landseer with George Reid makes for a volume that will appeal both to an academic audience and to one interested in European art history more generally.

Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History is a significant contribution to the fields of theory, Darwin studies, and cultural history. This collection of eight essays is the first volume to address, from the point of view of art and literary historians, Darwin's intersections with aesthetic theories and cultural histories from the eighteenth century to the present day. Among the philosophers of art influenced by Darwinian evolution and considered in this collection are Alois Riegl, Ruskin, and Aby Warburg. This stimulating collection ranges in content from essays on the influence of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory on Darwin and nineteenth-century debates circulating around beauty to the study of evolutionary models in contemporary art.