This beautiful book is a brilliant exploration of a fascinating artist who changed the world of art in the 20th century and inspired future painters such as Picasso and Matisse, who said of Cezanne that he was "the father of us all."

First published in 1960.
Patterns in Shakespearian Tragedy is an exploration of man's relation to his universe and the way in which it seeks to postulate a moral order. Shakespeare's development is treated accordingly as a growth in moral vision. His movement from play to play is carefully explored, and in the treatment of each tragedy the emphasis is on the manner in which its central moral theme shapes the various elements of drama

Photography, both in the form of contemporary practice and that of historical material, now occupies a significant place in the citadels of Western art culture. It has an institutional network of its own, embedded within the broader art world, with its own specialists including critics, curators, collectors, dealers and conservators. All of this cultural activity consolidates an artistic practice and critical discourse of photography that distinguishes what is increasingly termed 'art photography' from its commercial, scientific and amateur guises. But this long-awaited recognition of photography as high art brings new challenges. How will photography's newly privileged place in the art world affect how the history of creative photography is written? Modernist claims for the medium as having an aesthetic often turned on precedents from painting. Postmodernism challenged a cultural hierarchy organized around painting. Nineteenth-century photographs move between the symbolic spaces of the gallery wall and the archive: de-contextualized for art and re-contextualized for history. But what of the contemporary writings, images, and practices that negotiated an aesthetic status for 'the photographic'? Photography and the Arts revisits practices both celebrated and elided by the modernist and postmodernist grand narratives of art and photographic history in order to open up new critical spaces. Written by leading scholars in the fields of photography, art and literature, the book examines the metaphorical as well as the material exchanges between photography and the fine, graphic, reproductive and sculptural arts.

Long held as one of the most spiritually charged Zulu art forms, Zulu ceramics have entered the 21st century as a diversifying and vital art. From independent artists to craft cooperatives, Zulu Pottery examines the techniques and individuals continuing this great tradition. Zulu Pottery focuses on contemporary ceramics from the northern half of KwaZulu-Natal, where ongoing traditions are kept alive, to the heart of Durban, where newer artists are transforming and innovating. Masters such as Nesta Nala – as well as a new generation of artists, including Jabu Nala and Clive Sithole – have travelled the world demonstrating the art of Zulu pottery.

'A nourishing, occasionally provoking hybrid of group biography, cultural criticism and travelogue that seeks to restore to Romanticism its radicalism, and also show just how much the countryside shaped its manifesto' Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday '"Romanticism isn't a cultural artefact," [Sampson] writes. "It's a way for thought to move." She is taking her own mind for a walk and [...] the essence is intellectual and fully freighted. The cast list is long and international and the method shifting, subtle and demanding' Adam Nicolson, Guardian For the Romantics, the countryside was a place of radical change. But those real life experiences have been overlaid by two centuries of cliché. To rediscover - and learn from - their radicalism we need to find a fresh approach. In this extraordinary hybrid of scholarship, biography, cultural history, travelogue and lifewriting, acclaimed poet and Romantic biographer Fiona Sampson does just that. As she walks the British countryside, from the Isle of Wight to Kintyre, her evocative and thought-provoking book helps us see clearly what's hiding in plain sight.

Celebrates one of the giants of French Impressionism with luxurious, large-format images Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was one of the founders of Impressionism and a friend of Monet, Pissarro and Sisley. He worked side-by-side with Monet on the banks of the Seine, sharing his concern with light and colour, but landscape painting never displaced his enduring love of figure painting. Delighting in the ample curves of the nudes he painted increasingly frequently in his later years, Renoir was also a master at capturing the spirit of Parisian life. His art is filled with optimism - his lifelong philosophy was that he painted because it gave him pleasure, and he shares that pleasure with those who see his work. It is almost always summer in his pictures, and in paintings like Moulin de la Galette, The Dance at Bougival and The Luncheon of the Boating Party he gives us an enduring record of contemporaries relaxing and enjoying their leisure.

This is the story of Faberge's Imperial Easter eggs - of their maker, of the tsars who commissioned them, of the middlemen who sold them and of the collectors who fell in love with them. It's a story of meticulous craftsmanship and unimaginable wealth, of lucky escapes and mysterious disappearances, and ultimately of greed, tragedy and devotion. Moreover, it is a story that mirrors the history of twentieth-century Russia - a satisfying arc that sees eggs made for the tsars, sold by Stalin, bought by Americans and now, finally, returned to post-communist Russia. There is also an intriguing element of mystery surrounding the masterpieces. Of the fifty 'Tsar Imperial' eggs known to have been made, eight are currently unaccounted for, providing endless scope for speculation and forgeries. This is the first book to tell the complete history of the eggs, encompassing the love and opulence in which they were conceived, the war and revolution that scattered them, and the collectors who preserved them.

Following a spectacular surge in interest for Egyptian masters, Modern Art in Egypt fills the void in Egyptian art history, chronicling the lives and legacies of six pioneering artists working under the British occupation. Using Western-style academic art as a starting point, these artists championed cultural progress, re-appropriating Egyptian visual culture from European orientalists to found a neo-Pharaonic School of Realism. Modern Art in Egypt charts the years from Muhammad Ali's educational reforms to the mass influx of foreigners during the nineteenth-century. With a focus on the al-Nahda thought movement, this book provides an overview of the key policy-makers, reformists and feminists who founded the first School of Fine Arts in Egypt, as well as cultural salons, museums and arts collectives. By combining political and aesthetic histories, Fatenn Mostafa breaks the prevailing understanding that has preferred to see non-Western art as derivatives of Western art movements. Modern Art in Egypt re-establishes Egypt's presence within the global Modernist canon.

Reprinted for the first time since 1889, this is the first biography and considered appraisal of one of England's most prodigiously talented painters. Sir John Everett Millais, P. R. A. (1829-1896) was the most precociously talented artist England has ever produced. His astonishing facility gained him entry as the Royal Academy's youngest ever pupil. At just 19 he founded with six other painters the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which revolutionized the English art world with a visionary intensity of both subject matter and style. Millais was its most creative member; as Jason Rosenfeld says in the introduction to this volume, "the sheer quality and distinctness of each of Millais's paintings of the 1850s is unmatched by any Western artist of the period." Yet there is much more to Millais' career than Pre-Raphaelitism. Some of the most emotive narrative paintings of the Victorian era, its greatest portraits, and especially some of its most beautiful, if neglected, landscapes, came from his brush--as did some of its most notoriously successful paintings, like "Bubbles," the "fancy picture" that was made into an advertisement for Pears' Soap. This volume includes not only Millais's only published work of art criticism, the pithy "Thoughts on Our Art of Today," but also the first extended biography and appraisal of his work by the important critic M. H. Spielmann. This hugely engaging "Sketch "gives both a warm and personal picture of the man and a level-headed evaluation of the qualities--and defects--of his work as they appeared to contemporaries. Neither essay has been in print for more than a century.

"Object Lessons ... is a grand tour of the latest obsession of an indefatigable collector. For the last decade ... George Loudon has gathered some 200 extraordinary natural-history specimens, scientific models and botanical drawings from the Darwinian age. And the Boston photographer Rosamond Purcell has documented every last one of them in this thoughtfully compiled, scrapbook-style compendium." - The New York Times Style Magazine Assembling nearly 200 pieces from the collection of George Loudon, this volume encompasses a vast assortment of objects relating to nineteenth-century life sciences. Originally designed to capture the complex structures of nature, they range from books and illustrations to botanical specimens and anatomical models. Having lost most of their original pedagogical function over time, the objects are now open for contemporary reappraisal - acquiring new values that can inspire, seduce and even disorientate today's viewer. Offering a unique perspective on the intersection of art and science, the historic curiosities in this collection reveal their creators' remarkable capacity for artistic expression. Alongside new images by celebrated photographer Rosamond Purcell, explanatory texts on the objects by Loudon, an essay by Robert McCracken Peck, and a conversation between Loudon and art historian Lynne Cooke together offer insight into the objects' original context and potential for new perspectives.

"A painting must stand as a painting, made by human hand," wrote Caspar David Friedrich, "not seek to disguise itself as Nature." One of his generation's most popular painters, Friedrich imagined landscapes of powerful beauty and spirituality from within the confines of his studios. This breathtaking monograph, filled with glorious reproductions and details of his paintings, argues for Friedrich's reputation as a sublime artist and interpreter of nature. In his thoughtful and well-researched commentary, author Johannes Grave explores Friedrich's approach to landscape painting as well as his revolutionary thoughts about how these paintings should be received by their viewers. Looking closely at pieces such as Monk by the Sea, Abbey in the Oakwood, and the Tetschener Altar, Grave shows how Friedrich developed an innovative approach to landscape painting, one that communicated a new sense of space and time, and which draws the viewer into a unique aesthetic experience. Highly readable, insightful, and copiously illustrated, this compelling book sheds crucial light on Friedrich's celebrated body of work.

John Leslie Breck (1860-1899) was one of the founders of the American art colony at Giverny and was among the earliest American artists to embrace the Impressionist style. He was also one of the first to exhibit his Impressionist paintings in America and helped to popularize the style during his years working in the Boston area in the 1890s. Between 1887 and 1888 he and a handful of his American colleagues began visiting the French village of Giverny, where they met Claude Monet and subsequently explored the new approach to painting that Monet had helped to pioneer. Breck's canvases from this period, loosely brushed and filled with light and color, are a marked departure from his earlier works that are characterized by darker tonalities and tighter brushwork that typified the preferred style of the era. When Breck returned to America in 1892, he applied what he had learned to paintings of the New England landscape and frequently exhibited his work. Inspired by The Mint Museum's 2016 acquisition of John Leslie Breck's canvas Suzanne Hoschede-Monet Sewing, this volume includes approximately 70 of Breck's finest works, drawn from public and private collections. Along with his scenes of Giverny and America, this volume features a selection of paintings from his sojourn in Venice in 1897. Always interested exploring in new ways of seeing the world, Breck had begun to explore aspects of post-Impressionism and Asian aesthetics in the years before his early death, at the age of 39, in 1899. This volume also features up to 36 additional comparative images, including details, photographs, and paintings by Monet and other leading American impressionists including Willard Metcalf, Theodore Robinson, Lila Cabot Perry, Childe Hassam, and Arthur Wesley Dow, presented throughout the main essays and chronology and appendices.

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.

Giovanni Segantini's (1858-99) three paintings La Vita-La Natura-La Morte (Becoming-Being-Passing) of 1898/99 do not reveal at first glance anything about their equally complex and interesting background. Originally planned for the 1900 Paris Exposition of 1900 as a gigantic, multimedia "Alpine symphony" panorama 722 ft long and 66 ft high, Segantini was forced to reduce his work to three purely pictorial main paintings, owing to a lack of financial means. When he died in 1899, whilst still working on it, he left behind an incomplete triptych that was intended to embody "the spirit of nature, of life, and of death." In this book, Swiss art historian and Segantini-expert Juerg Albrecht traces this monumental landmark piece in the artist's oeuvre as one of the last programmatic works of fin de siecle art. Apart from its genesis, the book explains, as well the cycle of life and death that the three paintings visualise, whose origins Segantini sought both privately and creatively in the mountains of the upper Engadine valley during his lifetime. Text in English and German.

The Neolithic saw the spread of the first farmers, and the formation of settled villages throughout Europe. Traditional archaeology has interpreted these changes in terms of population growth, economic pressures and social competition, but in The Domestication of Europe Ian Hodder works from a new, controversial theory focusing instead on the enormous expansion of symbolic evidence from the homes, settlements and burials of the period. Why do the figurines, decorated pottery, elaborate houses and burial rituals appear and what is their significance? The author argues that the symbolism of the Neolithic must be interpreted if we are to understand adequately the associated social and economic changes. He suggests that both in Europe and the Near East a particular set of concepts was central to the origins of farming and a settled mode of life. These concepts relate to the house and home - termed `domus' - and they provided a metaphor and a mechanism for social and economic transformation. As the wild was brought in and domesticated through ideas and practices surrounding the domus, people were brought in and settled into the social and economic group of the village. Over the following millennia cultural practices relating to the domus continued to change and develop, until finally overtaken by a new set of concepts which became socially central, based on the warrior, the hunter and the wild. This book is an exercise in interpretive prehistory. Ian Hodder shows how a contextual reading of the evidence can allow symbolic structures to be cautiously but plausibly identified, and sets out his arguments for complex dialectical relationships between long-term symbolic structures and economic causes of cultural change.

The Wilhelmine Empire's opening decades (1870s - 1880s) were crucial transitional years in the development of German modernism, both politically and culturally. Here Marsha Morton argues that no artist represented the shift from tradition to unsettling innovation more compellingly than Max Klinger. The author examines Klinger's early prints and drawings within the context of intellectual and material transformations in Wilhelmine society through an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses Darwinism, ethnography, dreams and hypnosis, the literary Romantic grotesque, criminology, and the urban experience. His work, in advance of Expressionism, revealed the psychological and biological underpinnings of modern rational man whose drives and passions undermined bourgeois constructions of material progress, social stability, and class status at a time when Germans were engaged in defining themselves following unification. This book is the first full-length study of Klinger in English and the first to consistently address his art using methodologies adopted from cultural history. With an emphasis on the popular illustrated media, Morton draws upon information from reviews and early books on the artist, writings by Klinger and his colleagues, and unpublished archival sources. The book is intended for an academic readership interested in European art history, social science, literature, and cultural studies.

In Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited, photographer Sarah Quill has selected passages from Ruskin's The Stones of Venice and has linked them to her own photographs of Venetian architecture, so creating a fascinating guide that fuses Ruskin's vision of the city with images of the present day. Covering a wide range of subjects from palaces, churches and town houses, to bridges, courtyards and capitals Quill's glorious photographs illuminate Ruskin's words and record with skill and precision the fine architectural details described by him. This edition of Sarah Quill's bestselling book incorporates up-to-date views of buildings which have been cleaned since originally photographed. Several of Ruskin's watercolours are included, with extracts and reproductions from his Venetian notebooks, now publicly available, and some of his original daguerreotype photographs of Venice. Sarah Quill's expert editorial annotations and commentary, incorporating extracts from Ruskin's letters from Venice, enhance our understanding of Ruskin's text and provide an essential linking thread throughout. The book has been completely re-designed to be even more user-friendly as both a reference book and a guide for travellers to Venice. The result is a beautifully illustrated book that successfully communicates Ruskin's passion for Venice and concern for the city's architectural heritage. Uniting the historical with the present day, Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited is a unique companion guide for both seasoned and first-time travellers to Venice, and will leave the reader determined to retrace Ruskin's footsteps time and time again.

Impressionism captured the world's imagination in the late nineteenth century and remains with us today. Portraying the dynamic effects of modernity, impressionist artists revolutionized the arts and the wider culture. Impressionism transformed the very pattern of reality, introducing new ways to look at and think about the world and our experience of it. Its legacy has been felt in many major contributions to popular and high culture, from cubism and early cinema to the works of Zadie Smith and W. G. Sebald, from advertisements for Pepsi to the observations of Oliver Sacks and Malcolm Gladwell. Yet impressionism's persistence has also been a problem, a matter of inauthenticity, superficiality, and complicity in what is merely "impressionistic" about culture today. Jesse Matz considers these two legacies-the positive and the negative-to explain impressionism's true contemporary significance. As Lasting Impressions moves through contemporary literature, painting, and popular culture, Matz explains how the perceptual role, cultural effects, and social implications of impressionism continue to generate meaning and foster new forms of creativity, understanding, and public engagement.

The revolutionary boy at the barricades was memorably envisioned in Eugene Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) and Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables (1862). Over the course of the nineteenth century, images of the Paris urchin entered the collective social imaginary as cultural and psychic sites of memory, whether in avant-garde or more conventional visual culture. Visual and literary paradigms of the mythical gamin de Paris were born of recurring political revolutions (1830, 1832, 1848, 1871) and of masculine, bourgeois identity constructions that responded to continuing struggles over visions and fantasies of nationhood. With the destabilization of traditional, patriarchal family models, the diminishing of the father's symbolic role, and the intensification of the brotherly urchin's psychosexual relationship with the allegorical motherland, what had initially been socially marginal eventually became symbolically central in classed and gendered inventions and repeated re-inventions of "fraternity," "people," and "nation." Within a fundamentally split conception of "the people," the bohemian boy insurrectionary, an embodiment of freedom, was transformed by ongoing discourses of power and reform, of victimization and agency, into a capitalist entrepreneur, schoolboy, colonizer, and budding military defender of the fatherland. A contested figure of the city became a contradictory emblem of the nation.

The first substantial Mexican colonial art historiography in English, this book examines the origin of the study of colonial art in Mexico as a symptom of the development of modern museum practice in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico City. Also an intellectual history, this study recognizes the role of nationalism in the initiation of art historical practice in what is understood today more broadly as Latin America. Although there has been a steady stream of scholarship produced about the subject, beginning in Mexico and increasingly in the United States, what is variably known as viceregal or colonial Mexican, Spanish colonial, and colonial Latin American art continues to be underplayed or overlooked by most art historians and is thus marginal in the field of art history. Ray Hernandez-Duran redresses that omission, presenting a detailed examination of the origin of the study of colonial art in Mexico. Drawing upon archival research, this volume touches upon the role of politics on the formation of the first gallery of Mexican painting in the Academy of San Carlos and the first comprehensive historical treatment of the material in the form of a dialogue. Furthermore, this study promotes further research in colonial art historiography and underlines the pivotal role that the Indo-Hispanic Americas played in the emergence of early modernity and the process of globalization.

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris examines a history of contact between modern Europe and East Asia through three collectors: Henri Cernuschi, Emile Guimet, and Edmond de Goncourt. Drawing on a wealth of material including European travelogues of the East and Asian reports of the West, Ting Chang explores the politics of mobility and cross-cultural encounter in the nineteenth century. This book takes a new approach to museum studies and institutional critique by highlighting what is missing from the existing scholarship -- the foreign labors, social relations, and somatic experiences of travel that are constitutive of museums yet left out of their histories. The author explores how global trade and monetary theory shaped Cernuschi's collection of archaic Chinese bronze. Exchange systems, both material and immaterial, determined Guimet's museum of religious objects and Goncourt's private collection of Asian art. Bronze, porcelain, and prints articulated the shifting relations and frameworks of understanding between France, Japan, and China in a time of profound transformation. Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris thus looks at what Asian art was imagined to do for Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in art history, travel imagery, museum studies, cross-cultural encounters, and modern transnational histories.

Paul Gauguin's "Vision of the Sermon" (1888), one of the iconic works of the late nineteenth century, continues to provoke profound reassessment and interpretation by art historians, and it is central to this third volume of "Van Gogh Studies". Dario Gamboni discusses the painting as a self-reflexive work dealing in visual terms with issues of perception, cognition and representation; Juliet Simpson addresses the art critic Aurier's contribution to the promotion of Gauguin as the exemplary symbolist artist; while Rodolphe Rapetti examines Emile Bernard's artistic response to 'Vision of the sermon' in the context of Rosicrucianism; the Belgian art world's critical reaction to this and other works by the artist is meticulously described and analysed in Elise Eckermann's essay; while June Hargrove presents a challenging vision of Gauguin's portraits of his 'alter ego' Meijer de Haan. Other contributions include Sandra Kister's examination of the way the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen functioned as a role model for the Musee Rodin in Paris; Richard Thomson's discussion of the diverse ways in which French artists working in the early Third Republic responded to contemporary concepts of 'la psychologie nouvelle'; and, finally, a fresh view of nineteenth-century illustrations, including caricatures, offered by Patricia Mainardi.

The introduction of iron - and later steel - construction and decoration transformed architecture in the nineteenth century. While the structural employment of iron has been a frequent subject of study, this book re-directs scholarly scrutiny on its place in the aesthetics of architecture in the long nineteenth century. Together, its eleven unique and original chapters chart - for the first time - the global reach of iron's architectural reception, from the first debates on how iron could be incorporated into architecture's traditional aesthetics to the modernist cleaving of its structural and ornamental roles. The book is divided into three sections. Formations considers the rising tension between the desire to translate traditional architectural motifs into iron and the nascent feeling that iron buildings were themselves creating an entirely new field of aesthetic expression. Exchanges charts the commercial and cultural interactions that took place between British iron foundries and clients in far-flung locations such as Argentina, Jamaica, Nigeria and Australia. Expressing colonial control as well as local agency, iron buildings struck a balance between pre-fabricated functionalism and a desire to convey beauty, value and often exoticism through ornament. Transformations looks at the place of the aesthetics of iron architecture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period in which iron ornament sought to harmonize wide social ambitions while offering the tantalizing possibility that iron architecture as a whole could transform the fundamental meanings of ornament. Taken together, these chapters call for a re-evaluation of modernism's supposedly rationalist interest in nineteenth-century iron structures, one that has potentially radical implications for the recent ornamental turn in contemporary architecture.

Repainting the work of another into one's own canvas is a deliberate and often highly fraught act of reuse. This book examines the creation, display, and reception of such images. Artists working in nineteenth-century London were in a peculiar position: based in an imperial metropole, yet undervalued by their competitors in continental Europe. Many claimed that Britain had yet to produce a viable national school of art. Using pictures-within-pictures, British painters challenged these claims and asserted their role in an ongoing visual tradition. By transforming pre-existing works of art, they also asserted their own painterly abilities. Recognizing these statements provided viewers with pleasure, in the form of a witty visual puzzle solved, and with prestige, in the form of cultural knowledge demonstrated. At stake for both artist and audience in such exchanges was status: the status of the painter relative to other artists, and the status of the viewer relative to other audience members. By considering these issues, this book demonstrates a new approach to images of historic displays. Through examinations of works by J.M.W. Turner, John Everett Millais, John Scarlett Davis, Emma Brownlow King, and William Powell Frith, this book reveals how these small passages of paint conveyed both personal and national meanings.