Published soon after his untimely death, this spirited memoir of the artist and illustrator Randolph Caldecott (1846-1886) will appeal as much for its value as a portrait composed by a close acquaintance, as for the many drawings it contains. Written by Henry Blackburn (the editor of the London Society, 'an illustrated magazine of light and amusing literature' to which Caldecott contributed a number of drawings), it uses a style similar to that of Caldecott himself, who often peppered his papers, personal letters to family and friends, and even official documents with small sketches. These would take as their subject some humorous remark, or simply illustrate the content of the text. Beyond illustration (in which he was highly successful) Caldecott had a varied career as a sculptor and oil painter (exhibiting at the Royal Academy) and as a watercolourist, being elected to the Royal Institute of Watercolour Painting in 1872.

This book aims to present trompe-l'oeil painting, which epitomizes the myth of the illusionistic image - an early modern way of thinking about pictures, according to which it is possible to create an image identical to what it represents that at the same time preserves its own pictorial identity. Trompe-l'oeil, despite being a marginal genre, embodied an ideal that painting should attain, and therefore is a good point of departure for analyzing issues such as (aesthetic) illusion in art. As the myth undermines Plato's aesthetics, it is his philosophy of art, with its dichotomies of appearance/reality or mimesis/diegesis that offers the most useful context for the discussion of this topic and shows that trompe-l'oeil is a playful and ironic genre, which has cognitive value as well.

Barry Parker (1867-1944) was a leading figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement in England. In partnership with Raymond Unwin he planned the world's first 'Garden City', at Letchworth, and London's Hampstead Garden Suburb. They also designed many individual houses and other buildings. In 1910 Parker began publication of a series of essays called 'Modern Country Homes in England' in The Craftsman, an influential American journal. It was his hope that these would be eventually collected together in book form, and would thus stand as a statement of his architectural beliefs. This volume, first published in 1986, is based upon these essays, and offers a critical evaluation of Parker's work. Many of the illustrations are taken from original drawings and photographs.

Russian portraiture enjoyed a golden age between the late 1860s and the First World War. While Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were publishing masterpieces such as Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov and Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov were taking Russian music to new heights, Russian art was developing a new self-confidence. The penetrating Realism of the 1870s and 1880s was later complemented by the brighter hues of Russian Impressionism and the bold, faceted forms of Symbolist painting. In providing a context, author Rosalind P. Blakesley looks in the first and second chapters at the portrait tradition in Russia: the rise of secular portrait painting following the founding of the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg in 1757; the shifting tastes of patrons and publics; the reception of portraits in exhibitions and collections (including those of the tsars); and the role of portraiture in the cultural politics of imperial Russia. Starting with the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867, at which a distinct Russian school of painting was recognised for the first time, the third chapter examines developments in theatre and music, the rising Realist aesthetic and the powerful voices of wealthy patrons from the worlds of industry and commerce, such as Pavel Tretyakov. Chapter Four looks at the rise of novel forms of visual expression through experimentation, from Impressionism to Symbolism, and the World of Art Movement, with its conscious reconnection with artistic developments in the West. The last chapter charts creative responses to political turmoil and social unrest in the early twentieth century, the new artistic societies and manifestos of the avant-garde and the dialogue between figurative painting and abstraction in the twilight of imperial rule.

This book investigates how identities have been constructed in Australian art from 1788 onwards. Ian McLean shows that Australian art, and the writing of its history, has, since settlement, been in a dialogue (although often submerged) with Aboriginal art and culture; and that this dialogue is inextricably interwoven with the struggle to find an identity in the antipodes. Beginning with a discussion of how Australia was imagined by Europeans before colonisation, McLean traces the representation of indigeneity through the history of Australian art, and the concomitant invention of an Australian subjectivity. He argues that the colonising culture invested far more in indigenous aspects of the country and its inhabitants than it has been willing to admit. McLean considers artists and their work within a cultural context, and also provides a contemporary theoretical and critical context for his claims.

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

A richly illustrated, comprehensive introduction to the visionary British artist William Blake Celebrated for his boundless imagination and unique vision, William Blake (1757–1827) created some of the most striking and distinctive imagery in art, often combining his poetry and visual images on the page through innovative graphic techniques. He has proven an enduring inspiration to artists, musicians, poets, and performers worldwide and a fascinating enigma to generations of admirers. Featuring over 130 color images, this catalogue brings together many of Blake’s most iconic works. Organized by theme, it explores Blake’s work as a professional printmaker, his roles as both painter-illustrator and poet-painter, his relationship to the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque artists that preceded him, and his legacy in the United States. It also examines his visionary prophetic books, including all eighteen plates of America a Prophecy.

This book offers a comprehensive description of how writers, in particular poets in nineteenth-century France, became increasingly aware of the visual element in writing from the point of view both of content and of the formal organisation of the words in the text. This interest encouraged writers such as Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud to recreate in language some of the vivid, sensual impact of the graphic or painterly image. This was to be achieved by organising texts according to aesthetic criteria so that as far as possible the form of the text as visually perceived would be closely interrelated to its content as reconstructed through the reading process. The result of this development was a radical redefinition of the scope and function of poetry, raising important general questions about the nature of the relationship between language and the visual image that are still very much of concern today.

One of England's most famous caricaturists, James Gillray, was an immensely successful and popular artist, yet there were no accounts of his work published in England during his lifetime. The single contemporary source on Gillray is a series of commentaries published in the German journal London und Paris between 1798 and 1806. Christine Banerji and Diana Donald have translated and edited selected commentaries, with accompanying illustrations, to reveal how Gillray's art was understood by his contemporaries. The edition offers a unique insight into the role of satire in British politics during the Napoleonic era and shows the subtle artistry of Gillray's designs. The volume also includes an informative introduction which places Gillray and his work in the context of a fascinating episode in Anglo-German relations at the turn of the eighteenth century.

This bibliography provides a source for reviews of the state-sponsored Parisian exhibitions of painting and sculpture (Salons) held during the July Monarchy and Second Republic (1831-1851). It includes an extensive list of references, each presented in a standard format, with titles, dates and ordering codes based upon the holdings of the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris. It is indexed both by authors and by periodicals. The essays and articles that are catalogued are of fundamental importance in establishing a picture of contemporary reactions to art in mid-nineteenth-century France and yet the standard work by Maurice Tourneux, Salons et expositions d'art a Paris, 1801-1870, has been out of print for several decades. By incorporating and correcting the relevant material from Tourneux and adding new references gathered from unpublished nineteenth-century manuscript bibliographies and a broad sample of the periodical press, this work offers a substantial increase in the volume and range of criticism available for analysis by cultural and literary historians.

When Paula Modersohn-Becker's artistfriends examined her extensive estate afew weeks after her death, they were overwhelmed. They only gradually realised thatin the painter, who had died so young, theyhad had an outstanding artist in their midst.Modersohn-Becker was largely unrecognisedduring her lifetime but is regarded today asone of the pioneers of Expressionism.The sculptor Bernhard Hoetger was one of the few who recognised hertalent from an early stage. Hoetger's memories of Paula Modersohn werepublished in 1920 as an authentic contemporary document in the seriesJunge Kunst. They are reprinted as a facsimile in this revised and extendededition. The volume is a bibliophilic highlight with an essay explaining theartist's life and work from a present-day perspective, together with herbiography and some 40 illustrations of her most important works.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) felt a profound empathy with the natural environment, and considered the spiritual essence of trees to be comparable with that of human figures. Vincent's Trees traces Van Gogh's development as a painter of trees in the natural landscape - from his home province of North Brabant, through Paris to Provence. Ralph Skea's elegant prose is accompanied by Van Gogh's vibrant illustrations of trees, which range from pencil and ink sketches to watercolours and oil. Stylistic experiments encompassing Pointillism and compositions inspired by Japanese prints give way to the expressive, painterly depictions of his later work. The book also includes quotes from Van Gogh's letters, which convey the depth of his feeling for the natural landscape, and the force with which it affected him.

This bibliography provides a source for reviews of the state-sponsored Parisian exhibitions of painting and sculpture (Salons) held during the period 1699-1827. It includes an extensive list of references, each presented in a standard format with titles, dates and ordering codes based upon the holdings of the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris. It is indexed both by authors and by periodicals. The essays and articles that are catalogued are of fundamental importance in establishing a picture of contemporary reactions to art in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France, and yet the standard work by Maurice Tourneux, Salons et expositions d'art a Paris, 1801-1870, has been out of print for several decades. By incorporating and correcting the relevant material from Tourneux, adding references from the Deloynes collection (together with full details of original sources) and incorporating a broad sample from the periodical press, the authors have achieved a substantial increase in the volume and range of criticism available for analysis by cultural and literary historians.

Post-Impressionism is a movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style's inherent limitations. The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. Most of these painters began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however, to form his own highly personal art. Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light. The Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favour of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colours of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken colour. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century modernism.

It is often forgotten just how provocative Impressionist canvases seemed when they were first exhibited in 1874. The advocates of the new style rejected the established principles of art prevalent at that time in France.

This book traces Impressionism’s origins to its spread to America and Australia. Ralph Skea shows how Impressionist artists transformed everyday subject matter. Daringly using colour and rapid brushstrokes, the Impressionists worked out of doors, creating paintings that captured the transient effects of light and feeling. Impressionism’s initial shock factor gradually gave way to widespread acceptance, but only now can we appreciate how profound its influence has been on modern art.

How the urban spectator became the archetypal modern viewer and a central subject in late nineteenth-century French art Gawkers explores how artists and writers in late nineteenth-century Paris represented the seductions, horrors, and banalities of street life through the eyes of curious viewers known as badauds. In contrast to the singular and aloof bourgeois flaneur, badauds were passive, collective, instinctive, and highly impressionable. Above all, they were visual, captivated by the sights of everyday life. Beautifully illustrated and drawing on a wealth of new research, Gawkers excavates badauds as a subject of deep significance in late nineteenth-century French culture, as a motif in works of art, and as a conflicted model of the modern viewer. Bridget Alsdorf examines the work of painters, printmakers, and filmmakers who made badauds their artistic subject, including Felix Vallotton, Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Honore Daumier, Edgar Degas, Jean-Leon Gerome, Eugene Carriere, Charles Angrand, and Auguste and Louise Lumiere. From morally and intellectually empty to sensitive, empathetic, and humane, the gawkers these artists portrayed cut across social categories. They invite the viewer's identification, even as they appear to threaten social responsibility and the integrity of art. Delving into the ubiquity of a figure that has largely eluded attention, idling on the margins of culture and current events, Gawkers traces the emergence of social and aesthetic problems that are still with us today.

This book offers a path-breaking analysis of the transformations that occurred in the art and aesthetic values of Bengal during the colonial and nationalist periods. Tapati Guha-Thakurta moves beyond most existing assumptions and narratives to explore the complexities and diversities of the changes generated by Western contacts and nationalist preoccupations in art. She examines the shifts both in the forms and practices of painting as well as in the ideas and opinions about Indian art during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author investigates the complex processes of westernisation of Calcutta's art world: the shifting status of artisans and artists, the emergence of new professional and commercial opportunities and the permeation of Western standards and techniques that both created a new Indian 'high art' and transformed popular commercial art. Against this background, she analyses the role and nature of nationalist ideology in art, tracing its changing priorities over the period and the multiplicity of attitudes and convictions about 'Indian' art. The study deals particularly with the ways in which a dominant nationalist discourse evolved in the Swadeshi period and was mobilised to the cause of a new movement. Led by the reformist art teacher, E. B. Havell, and the pioneer artist, Abanindranath Tagore, it staked its exclusive claim to artistic regeneration, the recovery of tradition and the creation of a new 'national art'. The author shows how the flourishing of an alternative 'Indian-style' painting was tied to the reconstruction of an Indian aesthetic, to a new vocabulary of art criticism and a new language of aesthetic discourse. These orientalist andnationalist formulations of Indian art, she argues, operated within a wider milieu of aesthetic self-awareness and a thriving middle-class art culture in Bengal. The making of a new 'Indian' art will be widely read by students and specialists of South Asian studies and art history as well as by Orientalists.

Beginning with the premise that the portrait was undergoing a shift in both form and function during the Romantic age, Joe Bray examines how these changes are reflected in the fiction of writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Elizabeth Hamilton and Amelia Opie. Bray considers portraiture in a broad sense as encompassing caricature and the miniature, as well as the classic portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds and others. He argues that the portrait in fiction often functions not as a transparent index to character or as a means of producing a straightforward likeness, but rather as a cue for misreading and a sign of the slipperiness and subjectivity of interpretation. The book is concerned with more than simply the appearance of portraits in Romantic fiction, however. More broadly, The Portrait in Fiction of the Romantic Period investigates how the language of portraiture pervades the novel in this period and how the two art forms exert mutual stylistic influence on each other.

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text explores the genesis, production and the critical appreciation of the illustrations to the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson is one of the most copied and interpreted authors of the late nineteenth century, especially his novels Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. These interpretations began with the illustration of his texts in their early editions, often with Stevenson's express consent, and this book traces Stevenson's understanding and critical responses to the artists employed to illustrate his texts. In doing so, it attempts to position Stevenson as an important thinker and writer on the subject of illustrated literature, and on the marriage of literature and visual arts, at a moment preceding the dawn of cinema, and the rejection of such popular tropes by modernist writers of the early twentieth century.

In his study of the journalist George Augustus Sala, Peter Blake discusses the way Sala's personal style, along with his innovations in form, influenced the New Journalism at the end of the nineteenth century. Blake places Sala at the centre of nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals and examines his prolific contributions to newspapers and periodicals in the context of contemporary debates and issues surrounding his work. Sala's journalistic style, Blake argues, was a product of the very different mediums in which he worked, whether it was the visual arts, bohemian journalism, novels, pornographic plays, or travel writing. Harkening back to a time when journalism and fiction were closely connected, Blake's book not only expands our understanding of one of the more prominent and interesting journalists and personalities of the nineteenth century, but also sheds light on prominent nineteenth-century writers and artists such as Charles Dickens, Mathew Arnold, William Powell Frith, Henry Vizetelly, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

The project of global art history calls for balanced treatment of artifacts and a unified approach. This volume emphasizes questions of transcultural encounters and exchanges as circulations. It presents a strategy that highlights the processes and connections among cultures, and also responds to the dynamics at work in the current globalized art world. The editors' introduction provides an account of the historical background to this approach to global art history, stresses the inseparable bond of theory and practice, and suggests a revaluation of materialist historicism as an underlying premise. Individual contributions to the book provide an overview of current reflection and research on issues of circulation in relation to global art history and the globalization of art past and present. They offer a variety of methods and approaches to the treatment of different periods, regions, and objects, surveying both questions of historiography and methodology and presenting individual case studies. An 'Afterword' by James Elkins gives a critique of the present project. The book thus deliberately leaves discussion open, inviting future responses to the large questions it poses.

William Hogarth is a house-hold name across the country, his prints hang in our pubs and leap out from our history-books. He painted the great and good but also the common people. His art is comically exuberant, 'carried away by a passion for the ridiculous', as Hazlitt said. Jenny Uglow, acclaimed author of Elizabeth Gaskell, Nature's Engraver and In These Times, uncovers the man, but also the world he sprang from and the lives he pictured. He moved in the worlds of theatre, literature, journalism and politics, and found subjects for his work over the whole gamut of eighteenth century London, from street scenes to drawing rooms, and from churches to gambling halls and prisons. After striving years as an engraver and painter, Hogarth leapt into lasting fame with A Harlot's Progress and A Rake's Progress, but remained highly critical of the growing gulf between the luxurious lives of the ruling elite and the wretched poverty of the massess. William Hogarth was an artist of flamboyant, overflowing imagination, he was a satirist with an unerring eye; a painter of vibrant colour and tenderness; an ambitious professional who broke all the art-world taboos. Never content, he wanted to excel at everything - from engraving to history painting - and a note of risk runs through his life. Shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, Hogarth: A Life and a World brings art history to life in the voices of Hogarth's own age. The result is an unforgettable portrait of a great artist and a proud, stubborn, comic, vulnerable man.

It was in The Germ (1850), the first British magazine with an aesthetic manifesto, that the interart theories of the Pre-Raphaelites took shape. The thirteen young contributors advocated an ethical approach to art while at the same time acknowledging self-referentiality and meta-discoursivity. They defined the specificity of each mode of artistic expression while exploring the dynamic between word and image, moving from realism towards Symbolism and even anticipating Surrealism. The Aesthetes and Decadents were fascinated; the Modernists felt challenged. Later in the twentieth century a succession of reappraisals transformed the Pre-Raphaelites into a well-marketed group of eccentrics, but neglected the complexity of their cross-cultural, verbal/visual art. This study aims to explain why claims about the autonomy and interrelatedness of the arts, expressed in the form of a provocative monthly journal, proved so influential as to be a source of inspiration for the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The Century Guild Hobby Horse, The Yellow Book, The Savoy, and even for Modernist periodicals. Often regarded as a juvenile venture, The Germ was in fact a laboratory for expressive forms, themes, and ideas that had an enormous impact on the history of British culture.

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