Vincent van Gogh continues to fascinate more than a century after his death in 1890. Yet how much of what is commonly known about this world-renowned artist is accurate? Though he left thousands of works and a trove of letters, the definitive Van Gogh remains elusive. Was he a madman who painted his greatest pieces in a passionate fury, or a lifelong student of art, literature and science who carefully planned each composition? Was he a loner dedicated only to his craft or an active collaborator with his contemporaries? Why is he best known for self-mutilation and ""The Starry Night""? This book has biographers, scriptwriters, lyricists, actors, museum curators and tour guides, among others, presenting diverse interpretations of his life and work, creating a mythic persona that may in fact help us in the search for the real van Gogh.

Whistler was one of the most original, if also tirelessly self-promoting artists of the later 19th century. After his disastrous run-in with John Ruskin, the greatest critic of the previous generation, Whistler poured his thoughts and feelings about art into this lecture, which made him if anything more notorious, but was also widely admired for its insights and wit. It is reproduced here exactly as he had it printed, with an essay by the leading scholar Margaret MacDonald putting it into the context of Whistler's career and times.

Munch's "The Scream." Van Gogh's "Starry Night." Rodin's "The Thinker." Monet's "Water Lilies." Constable's landscapes. The 19th century gave us a wealth of artistic riches so memorable in their genius that we can picture many of them in an instant. At the time, however, their avant-garde nature was the cause of much controversy. Professor Laurie Schneider Adams vividly brings to life the paintings, sculpture, photography and architecture, of the period with her infectious enthusiasm for art and detailed explorations of individual works. Offered fascinating biographical details and the relevant social, political, and cultural context, the reader is left with a deep appreciation for the works and an understanding of how revolutionary they were at the time, as well as the reasons for their enduring appeal.

Assembling the Architect explores the origins and history of architectural practice. It unravels the competing interests that historically have structured the field and cultivates a deeper understanding of the contemporary profession. Focusing on the period 1870 to 1920 when the foundations were being laid for the U.S. architectural profession that we recognize today, this study traces the formation and standardization of the fundamental relationships among architects, owners, and builders, as codified in the American Institute of Architects' very first Handbook of Architectural Practice. It reveals how these archetypal roles have always been fluid, each successfully redefining their own agency with respect to the others in the constantly-shifting political economy of building. Far from being a purely historical study, the book also sheds light on today's digitally-enabled profession. Contemporary architectural tools and disciplinary ideals continue to be shaped by the same fundamental tensions, and emergent modes of practice such as BIM (Building Information Modelling) and IPD (Integrated Project Delivery) represent the realization of programs and agendas that have been over a century in play. Essential reading for professional practice courses as a contextual and historical companion to the Handbook, Assembling the Architect provides a critical perspective of the profession that is fundamental to understanding current architectural practice.

J.M.W. Turner's elegant pencil sketches and watercolours of Venice are so poignant and evocative that the gentle sound of water lapping against gondolas can almost be heard when looking at them. In this beautiful selection, Ian Warrell employs the very finest examples of Turner's Venetian studies to either guide your next visit or awaken your memories of trips past. Join Turner as he progresses through the city, beginning at St. Mark's Basilica with the Campanile towering above and the coral-coloured exterior of the Doge's Palace. Drift onward toward the Bridge of Sighs and take a detour past the Hotel Europa where Turner preferred to stay. Travel onwards past the Giardini Reali, the Punta della Dogana and Santa Maria della Salute on your way to San Giorgio Maggiore and the Accademia. Drift away from the bustling markets around the Rialto on the Grand Canal heading toward the Frari and the Scuola di San Rocco, demonstrating the inspiration taken from Venetian masters such as Tintoretto and Veronese.

The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, holds stunning examples of jewellery and metalwork from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This exceptional period of design covers the neo-Gothic and historicist designs of the mid- to late nineteenth century, the groundbreaking work of British Arts & Crafts designers, sinuous curves influenced by the European Art Nouveau movement and the structural modernity of the 1930s. The collection contains jewellery by some of the finest historicist designers, including the Castellani and Giuliano families and John Brogden, as well as a spectacular decanter by William Burges. There are important pieces of jewellery and silver by the most famous of Arts & Crafts designers, including C.R. Ashbee, Henry Wilson, Gilbert Marks and John Paul Cooper. Unique pieces designed by the artist Charles Ricketts hold a special place in the history of queer art in Britain, having been designed for his friends Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, a couple known collectively as Michael Field. Modernist silver is represented by leaders of the field Omar Ramsden and H.G. Murphy. This beautifully illustrated volume reproduces 70 of the Museum's most important pieces from this period, many previously unpublished, with comparative illustrations of some of the original designs. Importantly, the book is arranged chronologically by designer and includes biographies, a description of their work and how it changed over time, as well as commentary about the specific works in the Museum's collection. The resulting book therefore brings together for the first time the Fitzwilliam's exceptionally fine holdings of jewellery and metalwork from this highly popular and fruitful period of design.

Black Milk is the first in-depth analysis of the visual archives that effloresced around slavery in Brazil and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In its latter stages the book also explores the ways in which the museum cultures of North America and Brazil have constructed slavery over the last hundred years. These institutional legacies emerge as startlingly different from each other at almost every level.
Working through comparative close readings of a myriad art objects - including prints, photographs, oil paintings, watercolours, sculptures, ceramics, and a host of ephemera -- Black Milk celebrates just how radically alternative Brazilian artistic responses to Atlantic slavery were. Despite its longevity and vastness, Brazilian slavery as a cultural phenomenon has remained hugely neglected, in both academic and popular studies, particularly when compared to North American slavery. Consequently much of Black Milk is devoted to uncovering, celebrating, and explaining the hidden treasury of visual material generated by artists working in Brazil when they came to record and imaginatively reconstruct their slave inheritance. There are painters of genius (most significantly Jean Baptiste Debret), printmakers (discussion is focused on Angelo Agostini the "Brazilian Daumier") and some of the greatest photographers of the nineteenth century, led by Augusto Stahl. The radical alterity of the Brazilian materials is revealed by comparing them at every stage with a series of related but fascinatingly and often shockingly dissimilar North American works of art. Black Milk is a mold-breaking study, a bold comparative analysis of the visual arts and archives generated by slavery within the two biggest and most important slave holding nations of the Atlantic Diaspora.

Biography of three artists closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelites whose letters give a vivid insight into the dramas of their personal life. Joanna, George and Henry tells the story of the intertwined lives of three young artists in the 1850s. When the transcript of the material on which this group portrait is based came to light ten years ago, no one could haveimagined the drama within. They were family letters: letters from a young woman to her brother and later to her suitor - of interest chiefly because all three were painters, and all were active participants in the youthful Pre-Raphaelite revolution that swept England in the 1850s. They turned out to be a revelation - giving not only a comprehensive picture of what it was like to be an artist in the mid-19th century, but containing within them a powerful family drama and a most unusual love story. It is a love story, moreover, told largely from a woman's point of view. Joanna Boyce's dedication to her art was absolute: she studied in Paris under Thomas Couture and had her first painting exhibited at the Academy when she was only 24. She was headstrong, self-critical, opinionated and teasing - "an artist with her pen as well as her brush". She died tragically young. Between them, Joanna, her brother George and suitor Henry Wells knew all the artistic luminaries of the day, among them Ruskin, Millais and Rossetti (with whom George shared a great deal, including mistresses). They wrote to each other not just about art, butabout their friends, their favourite books, their travels, their illnesses, their passions and their quarrels. In this book, they tell their story in their own vivid words - a story which portrays the age in which they lived andthe powerful drama of their emotional and professional lives.

The importance of A. W. N. Pugin (1812-52) in the history of the Gothic Revival, in the development of ecclesiology, in the origins of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and in architectural theory is incontestable. A leading British architect who was also a designer of furniture, textiles, stained glass, metalwork, and ceramics, he is one of the most significant figures of the mid-nineteenth century and one of the greatest designers. His correspondence is important because it provides more insight into the man and more information about his work than any other source. This volume, the fourth of five, contains letters from 1849 and 1850. Happily married, Pugin was more settled in his home at The Grange in Ramsgate in these years than he had ever been before. He completed his long-contemplated book on Floriated Ornament. At first he appears principally as a designer of stained glass, often working for other architects: pre-eminent, he supplies Charles Barry, William Butterfield, R. C. Carpenter, G. G. Scott, for instance. The letters display his knowledge of surviving medieval glass, biblical and historical sources, hagiography, heraldry, iconography, besides revealing his attention to details of composition, texture, colour, the representation of figures, the effects of lighting. Next door to his house, he continued to build the church of St Augustine, which was ready for opening in August 1850. Later that year, two public events quickened the pace of Pugin's life: the Roman Catholic hierarchy was restored in England, and the Great Exhibition was announced for 1851. Personally insulted because of his religion, Pugin defended his embattled faith in the ensuing uproar; at the same time he began to make a multitude of designs for his colleagues to execute: together they produced what came to be called the Medieval Court, the outstanding display in the exhibition and a masterpiece of lasting influence.

This collection of essays by an international group of scholars offers an account of Dante's reception in a wide range of media: visual art, literature, theatre, cinema, and music, from the late eighteenth century through to the early twentieth. It thus explores various appropriations and interpretations of his works and persona during the era of modernization in Europe, the United States, and beyond. It includes work by internationally recognized experts and a new generation of scholars in the field, and the eighteen essays are grouped in sections which relate both to themes and regions. The volume begins and ends by addressing Italy's reception of the national poet, and its other main sections show how a worldwide dialogue with Dante developed in France, Britain, Germany, the United States, Ireland, India, and Turkey. The whole collection demonstrates how this dialogue explicitly or implicitly informed the construction, recovery or re-definition of cultural identity among various nations, regions and ethnic groups during the 'long nineteenth century'. It not only aims at wide coverage of the period's voices and concerns, and includes discussion of well-known writers such as Ugo Foscolo, Giosue Carducci, Mary Shelley, John Ruskin, George Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton and Ralph Waldo Emerson - along with a large number of significant but less familiar figures. It also emphasizes the importance of a multidisciplinary and multilingual approach to the subject of Dante and nineteenth-century nationalism, and it will thus be of interest to scholars and students in comparative literary and nineteenth-century studies, as well as to those with a general interest in cultural studies and the history of ideas.

"Beginning with the arts produced in the Colonial period, Dr. Lewis documents and interprets the flow of creative productions of an important segment of the American population. Her book shows that the range of art produced by African American artists covers the entire spectrum of craft productions through painting, sculpture, and printmaking. There is a progressive development of style that not only reflects the trends in particular periods, but reveals an evolving pattern of indigenous qualities that are distinct. The art community in general and the African American community in particular are fortunate to have Dr. Samella Lewis, for she has developed unusual authority in the area of African American art. I know that "African American Art and Artists "will be of great value educationally and that it will offer a stimulating and rewarding experience to all who have the opportunity to share in its contents."--Jacob Lawrence

This lavishly illustrated book explores the aesthetic and cultural impact of New Mexico art from the 1880s to the present, and highlights a refreshing range of works representing European, native, ethnic, tourist, regional and commercial art. For the past 125 years, art in New Mexico has told a complex story of aesthetic interaction and cultural fusion. Southwest art began with 19th-century documentarians confronting a disappearing Native America and an exotic landscape. Artists who arrived in New Mexico beginning in the 1880s wrestled with the commercialisation of the region and the clash of cultural identities. Native peoples and expedition photographers, tourism and the railroad, artist colonies, the arrival of modernism, Trinity and the end of romanticism, a new generation of native artists challenging ethnic identity -- all have played a part in what we now call New Mexican art. "The Art of New Mexico" provides new perspectives on the evolution of art in the state, and highlights the outstanding collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, which is the repository for some of the finest works by renowned artists such as Adam Clark Vroman, Marsden Hartley, Robert Henri, John Sloan, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Luis Elijo Tapia. Curator and author Joseph Traugott discusses how Native American and Hispanic artists of the Southwest not only influenced the non-native artists who came to call New Mexico home, but how in turn their work was influenced by these newcomers. By organising key objects from the museum's collection with an intercultural history of New Mexico art, the book makes cogent connections between specific works, aesthetic movements, and cultural traditions. As a result, this book will engage readers who are well versed in the artistic traditions of New Mexico, as well as those new to its aesthetic heritage. The book is published to coincide with a reinstallation of the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe.

In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the life and work of Edvard Munch. Setting out to understand the enduring power of Munch's painting, Knausgaard reflects on the essence of creativity, on choosing to be an artist, experiencing the world through art and its influence on his own writing. As co-curator of a major new exhibition of Munch's work in Oslo, Knausgaard visits the landscapes that inspired him, and speaks with contemporary artists, including Vanessa Baird and Anselm Kiefer. Bringing together art history, biography and memoir, and drawing on ideas of truth, originality and memory, So Much Longing in So Little Space is a brilliant and personal examination of the legacy of one of the world's most iconic painters, and a meditation on art itself.

Genre painting flourished in the U.S. during the mid-19th century. These narrative scenes depicting the everyday activities of stock or typed characters captivated American audiences. Delineating distinctly American characters, often through the exploration of racial, regional, or class differences, genre painting, like landscape, was often called upon as a vehicle for expression of cultural nationalism.

Two paintings from the Louvre represent the Dutch and English schools, key sources on which genre painters in the U.S. drew in developing their own idiom. These rich genre paintings, alongside three outstanding American examples, enable the exploration of a variety of interrelated themes including the development of character types, confrontations between them, the spaces of their confrontations, the role of the senses as well as music and narrative, and the graphic reproduction and dissemination of genre paintings in the form of prints.

"Genre Painting and Everyday Life" accompanies the first of a series of focused exhibitions collaboratively organized by the Musee du Louvre, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the High Museum of Art, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Demonstrates, through an investigation of material culture, the complexity of the relationship between rulers and ruled in early nineteenth-century British India. This book explores ambivalence in the domestic building activities of a group of East India Company officials in Delhi in the fifty years following British occupation in 1803. Arguing that houses, their location and their contentsdirectly or subliminally reveal the values and beliefs of the individuals who commissioned and lived in them, it uses houses to examine the changing ways the British manipulated power, both relating to and resisting the pre-existing spatial layout of the city. The re-use of palaces and of monumental religious structures as dwellings, as well as new houses that appeared formally classical but concealed adaptations to local ways of living, show that despitean apparent desire to maintain cultural separation, there was both complexity and contradiction in the interrelationship of the British authority and the failing Mughal polity. The book also shows how room sequencing and functiondemonstrate a lack of rigid distinction between the official and individual roles played by Company officials. Household objects have multiple meanings depending on their use and context. As the taste and choices made in these houses were primarily those of men, the book also contributes to our understanding of competing models of manhood in British India. SYLVIA SHORTO, an independent scholar, was Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut until the end of 2017. She writes on architecture as material culture in colonial contexts, crossing scales from urban environments to individual objects contained in domesticsettings.

The Fonte Gaia from Renaissance to Modern Times examines the history of Siena's famous public fountain, from its fifteenth-century origins to its eventual replacement by a copy in the nineteenth century (and the modern fate of both). The book explores how both the Risorgimento and the Symbolist movements have shaped our perceptions of the Italian Renaissance, as the Quattrocento was filtered through the lens of contemporary art and politics.

Available for the first time in paperback, Robert O’Byrne’s landmark biography of Hugh Lane remains the essential work on this enigmatic art dealer and patron. From his birth in Cork in 1875, to London, South Africa and Dublin, Hugh Lane is primarily remembered for establishing Dublin’s Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, the first known public gallery of modern art in the world. He never married and, though rumoured to have been homosexual, never had a documented relationship with a man. He was also a person of great social energy who befriended and sometimes crossed swords with the leading cultural figures of his day: Yeats, Gregory, Orpen, Augustus John, Rodin, Beerbohm, and many others. Robert O’Byrne writes with clarity and insight about a man who, since his untimely death on R.M.S. Lusitania in 1915, has been something of a mystery.

Patrick Geddes is one of Scotland's most remarkable thinkers of the late-nineteenth century. His environmental and cultural message endures today, yet the distinctively Scottish context to his thinking has not been properly acknowledged. This book situates Geddes within his own intellectual background (described by George Davie as 'the democratic intellect') and explores the relevance of that background to Geddes's substantial national and international achievements across a truly impressive range of disciplines. Key Features: Explores Patrick Geddes Scottish intellectual background in depth for the first time; Highlights Geddes's insistence on the importance of arts to sciences and vice versa, and the distinctively Scottish context of this approach; Considers the interdisciplinary achievements of Geddes in Edinburgh, Dundee, Paris, London and India; Pays particular attention to his leadership of the Celtic Revival both from a Scottish perspective and with respect to international links, in particular with Indian cultural revivalists such as Ananda Coomaraswamy.

Isobel Armstrong's startlingly original and beautifully illustrated book tells the stories that spring from the mass-production of glass in nineteenth-century England. Moving across technology, industry, local history, architecture, literature, print culture, the visual arts, optics, and philosophy, it will transform our understanding of the Victorian period.
The mass production of glass in the nineteenth century transformed an ancient material into a modern one, at the same time transforming the environment and the nineteenth-century imagination. It created a new glass culture hitherto inconceivable. Glass culture constituted Victorian modernity. It was made from infinite variations of the prefabricated glass panel, and the lens. The mirror and the window became its formative elements, both the texts and constituents of glass culture. The glassworlds of the century are heterogeneous. They manifest themselves in the technologies of the factory furnace, in the myths of Cinderella and her glass slipper circulated in print media, in the ideologies of the conservatory as building type, in the fantasia of the shopfront, in the production of chandeliers, in the Crystal Palace, and the lens-made images of the magic lantern and microscope. But they were nevertheless governed by two inescapable conditions.
First, to look through glass was to look through the residues of the breath of an unknown artisan, because glass was mass produced by incorporating glassblowing into the division of labour. Second, literally a new medium, glass brought the ambiguity of transparency and the problems of mediation into the everyday. It intervened between seer and seen, incorporating a modernphilosophical problem into bodily experience. Thus for poets and novelists glass took on material and ontological, political, and aesthetic meanings.
Reading glass forwards into Bauhaus modernism, Walter Benjamin overlooked an early phase of glass culture where the languages of glass are different. The book charts this phase in three parts. Factory archives, trade union records, and periodicals document the individual manufacturers and artisans who founded glass culture, the industrial tourists who described it, and the systematic politics of window-breaking. Part Two, culminating in glass under glass at the Crystal Palace, reads the glassing of the environment, including the mirror, the window, and controversy round the conservatory, and their inscription in poems and novels. Part Three explores the lens, from optical toys to 'philosophical' instruments as the telescope and microscope were known.
A meditation on its history and phenomenology, Victorian Glassworlds is a poetics of glass for nineteenth-century modernity.

Samuel Hirszenberg is an artist who deserves to be more widely known: his work intertwined modernism and Jewish themes, and he influenced later artists of Jewish origin. Born into a traditional Jewish family in Lodz in 1865, Hirszenberg gradually became attached to Polish culture and language as he pursued his artistic calling. Like Maurycy Gottlieb before him, he studied at the School of Art in Krakow, which was then headed by the master of Polish painting, Jan Matejko. His early interests were to persist with varying degrees of intensity throughout his life: his Polish surroundings, traditional east European Jews, historical themes, the Orient, and the nature of relationships between men and women. He also had a lifelong commitment to landscape painting and portraiture. Hirszenberg's personal circumstances, economic considerations, and historical upheavals took him to different countries, strongly influencing his artistic output. He moved to Jerusalem in 1907 and there, as a secular and acculturated Jew who had adopted the world of humanism and universalism, he strove also to express more personal aspirations and concerns. This fully illustrated study presents an intimate and detailed picture of the artist's development.

When Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) painted Vision After the Sermon in the summer of 1888 he was a mature artist who had travelled, exhibited and worked in a variety of media. Today the painting is considered a masterpiece, helping to assure Gauguin's fame the world over. Few paintings have given rise to more art historical analysis and critique, more speculation, admiration or recrimination. Accompanying the innovative painting-in-focus exhibition, 'Gauguin's Vision', this book illuminates one of the most intriguing and famous images in the history of western art. This re-examination of the painting, Vision After the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel brings together works by Gauguin, his mentors such as Paul C,zanne and Edgar Degas, and younger contemporaries including Emile Bernard, Paul S,rusier, Maurice Denis and Henri van de Velde. It explores the biographical, pictorial and cultural circumstances that enabled Gauguin to make such a radical statement in paint in 1888. This beautifully illu

November 1891, the heart of Gilded Age Manhattan. Thousands filled the streets surrounding Madison Square, fingers pointing, mouths agape. After countless struggles, Stanford White-the country's most celebrated architect was about to dedicate America's tallest tower, the final cap set atop his Madison Square Garden, the country's grandest new palace of pleasure. Amid a flood of electric light and fireworks, the gilded figure topping the tower was suddenly revealed-an eighteen-foot nude sculpture of Diana, the Roman Virgin Goddess of the Hunt, created by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the country's finest sculptor and White's dearest pal. The Grandest Madison Square Garden tells the remarkable story behind the construction of the second, 1890, Madison Square Garden and the controversial sculpture that crowned it. Set amid the magnificent achievements of nineteenth-century American art and architecture, the book delves into the fascinating private lives of the era's most prominent architect and sculptor and the nature of their intimate relationship. Hinman shows how both men pushed the boundaries of America's parochial aesthetic, ushering in an era of art that embraced European styles with American vitality. Situating the Garden's seminal place in the history of New York City, as well as the entire country, The Grandest Madison Square Garden brings to life a tale of architecture, art, and spectacle amid the elegant yet scandal-ridden culture of Gotham's decadent era.

In this distinguished work, which Hilton Kramer in The New York Times Book Review called "surely the best book ever written on the subject," Barbara Novak illuminates what is essentially American about American art. She highlights not only those aspects that appear indigenously in our art works, but also those features that consistently reappear over time. Novak examines the paintings of Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Fitz H. Lane, William Sidney Mount, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Albert Pinkham Ryder. She draws provocative and original conclusions about the role in American art of spiritualism and mathematics, conceptualism and the object, and Transcendentalism and the fact. She analyzes not only the paintings but nineteenth-century aesthetics as well, achieving a unique synthesis of art and literature.
Now available with a new preface and an updated bibliography, this lavishly illustrated volume--featuring more than one hundred black-and-white illustrations and sixteen full-color plates--remains one of the seminal works in American art history.

In this richly illustrated volume, featuring more than fifty black-and-white illustrations and a beautiful eight-page color insert, Barbara Novak describes how for fifty extraordinary years, American society drew from the idea of Nature its most cherished ideals. Between 1825 and 1875, all kinds of Americans--artists, writers, scientists, as well as everyday citizens--believed that God in Nature could resolve human contradictions, and that nature itself confirmed the American destiny. Using diaries and letters of the artists as well as quotes from literary texts, journals, and periodicals, Novak illuminates the range of ideas projected onto the American landscape by painters such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B. Durand, Fitz H. Lane, and Martin J. Heade, and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederich Wilhelm von Schelling.
Now with a new preface, this spectacular volume captures a vast cultural panorama. It beautifully demonstrates how the idea of nature served, not only as a vehicle for artistic creation, but as its ideal form.
"An impressive achievement."
--Barbara Rose, The New York Times Book Review
"An admirable blend of ambition, elan, and hard research. Not just an art book, it bears on some of the deepest fantasies of American culture as a whole."
--Robert Hughes, Time Magazine

Kathleen McCarthy here presents the first book-length treatment of the vital role middle- and upper-class women played in the development of American museums in the century after 1830. By promoting undervalued areas of artistic endeavor, from folk art to the avant-garde, such prominent individuals as Isabella Stewart Gardner, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller were able to launch national feminist reform movements, forge extensive nonprofit marketing systems, and "feminize" new occupations.