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

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 Much of this visual material is previously unpublished and is outside the canon of Victorian art and design.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

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

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

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 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.

Drawing on primary and secondary materials, this is a sociological interpretation of the rise of metropolitan art institutions and their role in modernism and the modernization of art in England. It explores the complex relationships between the artist as creator, notions of class and taste, and the power of institutions (academies, museums, workshops, exhibitions, art dealers and publishing houses) to enable or constrain creativity, and to reflect and shape artistic expression. In particular, it looks at the experiences of submerged artists (for example, reproductive engravers and the Chantrey artists) and their interpretations of the changing art world. The radicalism of engravers and their claim to be artists is an important and neglected aspect of the 19th-century art world; and the aesthetic dispute over the Chantrey Bequest epitomized conflicts of taste, cultural dependence and interdependence between opposed art institutions and the Treasury.

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

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.

Written between 1913 and 1929, revolutionary years in art history, Dix Portraits conveys the deep human engagement between an artist and her subject. The artist's book unites Stein's ten portraits in prose with sketches by five artists: Pablo Picasso, Christian Berard, Eugene Berman, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Kristians Tonny. Utilizing the interplay between word and image, Stein's writing and the artists' images provide nuance and depth, balancing humor and sincerity. With a new introduction by Lynne Tillman, Dix Portraits is an unforgettable artistic collaboration. The subjects represented include Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Erik Satie, Pavel Tchelitchew, Virgil Thomson, Christian Berard, Bernard Fay, Kristians Tonny, Georges Hugnet, and Eugene Berman. Originally printed in an edition of 100 copies with the lithography, and now widely accessible for the first time, Dix Portraits captures Stein's legacy as a champion of artists and a pioneer of creativity.

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. In this volume, the third of five, which spans the years 1846 to 1848, Pugin's two most important churches are completed and the first part of the House of Lords is opened. He makes his only trip to Italy, and he marries for the third time. His correspondence sheds light too on the religious life of the time, especially ecclesiastical politics.

A landmark compendium - the first authoritative publication to cover in its entirety one of the most significant holdings of Matisse in the world. Here is a vibrant celebration - slipcased and beautifully produced - of the Barnes's extraordinary Matisse collection. Composed of fifty-nine works from every stage of the artist's career, it is among the most important in the world. At its heart are Matisse's most historically significant paintings, Le Bonheur de vivre, also called The Joy of Life, and The Dance, the monumental mural that Albert C. Barnes commissioned to fill the lunettes of the Foundation's main gallery, transforming both the space and the artist's career. An essay by Yve-Alain Bois addresses the evolution of The Dance and its role in Matisse's career; Karen Butler looks at what Barnes thought of Matisse; and Claudine Grammont's considers how and why he collected his work. The artworks themselves, sumptuously reproduced, are the subjects of interpretive analyses that tell the stories of their acquisition and address their critical reception. The book includes major contributions by Barbara Buckley and Jennifer Mass on the artist’s technique and a report on the latest findings on the pigments used in Le Bonheur de vivre.

Starry Night is a fascinating, fully illustrated account of Van Gogh's time at the asylum in Saint-Remy, during which he created some of his most iconic pieces of art. Despite the challenges of ill health and asylum life, Van Gogh continued to produce a series of masterpieces - cypresses, wheatfields, olive groves and sunsets during his time there. This fascinating and insightful work from arts journalist and Van Gogh specialist Martin Bailey examines his time there, from the struggles that sent him to the asylum, to the brilliant creative inspiration that he found during his time here. He wrote very little about the asylum in letters to his brother Theo, so this book sets out to give an impression of daily life behind the walls of the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole and looks at Van Gogh through fresh eyes, with newly discovered material. An essential insight into the mind of a flawed genius, Starry Night is indispensable for those who wish to understand the life of one of the most talented and brilliant artists to have put paintbrush to canvas.

This book demonstrates that numerous prominent artists in every period of the modern era were expressing spiritual interests when they created celebrated works of art. This magisterial overview insightfully reveals the centrality of an often denied and misunderstood element in the cultural history of modern art.

There has never been a book about Blake's last period, from his meeting with John Linnell in 1818 to his death in 1827, although it includes some of his greatest works. In The Traveller in the Evening, Morton Paley argues that this late phase involves attitudes, themes, and ideas that are either distinctively new or different in emphasis from what preceded them. After an introduction on Blake and his milieu during this period, Paley begins with a chapter on Blake's illustrations to Thornton's edition of Virgil. Paley relates these to Blake's complex view of pastoral, before proceeding to a history of the project, its near-abortion, and its fulfillment as one of Blake's greatest accomplishments as an illustrator. In Yah and His Two Sons the presentation of the divine, except where it is associated with art, is ambiguous where it is not negative. Paley takes up this separate plate in the context of artists's representations of the Laocoon that would have been known to Blake, and also of what Blake would have known of its history from classical antiquity to his own time. Blake's Dante water colours and engravings are the most ambitious accomplishment of the last years of his life, and Paley shows that the problematic nature of some of these pictures, with Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car as a main example, arises from Blake's own divided and sharply polarized attitude toward Dante's Comedy. The closing chapter, called 'Blake's Bible', is on the Bible-related designs and writings of Blake's last years. Paley discusses The Death of Abel (addressed to Lord Byron 'in the Wilderness') as a response to its literary forerunners, especially Gessner's Death of Abel and Byron's Cain. For the Job engravings Paley shows how the border designs and the marginal texts set up a dialogue with the main illustrations unlike anything in Blake's Job water colours on the same subjects. Also included here are Blake's last pictorial work on a Biblical subject, The Genesis manuscript, and Blake's last writing on a Biblical text, his vitriolic comments on Thornton's translations of the Lord's Prayer.

Republics and empires provides transnational perspectives on the significance of Italy to American art and visual culture and the impact of the United States on Italian art and popular culture. Covering the period from the Risorgimento to the Cold War, it reveals the complexity of the visual discourses that bound two relatively new nations together. It also gives substantial attention to literary and critical texts that addressed the evolving cultural relationship between Italy and the United States. While American art history has tended to privilege French, British and German ties, these chapters highlight a rich body of contemporary research by Italian and American scholars that moves beyond a discussion of influence as a one-way directive towards a deeper understanding of cultural transactions that profoundly affected the artistic expression of both nations. -- .

The John Rylands Library houses one of the finest collections of rare books, manuscripts and archives in the world. The collections span five millennia and cover a wide range of subjects, including art and archaeology; economic, social, political, religious and military history; literature, drama and music; science and medicine; theology and philosophy; travel and exploration. For over a century, the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library has published research that complements the Library's special collections. The editors invite the submission of articles in these fields and welcome discussion of in-progress projects. -- .

W. D. Richmond's The Grammar of Lithography (1878) is a comprehensive and instructive work on the many varieties of lithography - with all their attendant materials and instruments - described and explained in practical terms for the active participant and the amateur enthusiast alike. Richmond's Grammar should also be understood as part of a wider movement of nineteenth-century industrial disclosure, where pockets of masterly knowledge previously available to apprentices and company employees alone were being made much more widely available through impartial manuals and guides. This noble cause was intended to bring down the walls of ignorance and trade secrecy and to foster an open atmosphere of mutual understanding. In the realm of lithography, Richmond's Grammar was the first treatise to achieve this. While the work forgoes any historical or overly theoretical discussion, it does provide an excellent example of practically oriented expertise in the graphic arts.

The work of Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) received mixed critical success during his lifetime, and his later life was overshadowed by the death of his elder son. Largely forgotten after his own death in 1881, Palmer began to attract renewed interest in the mid-twentieth century and he is now recognised as a key figure in English Romanticism. First published in 1892, this combination of a biography and a collection of Samuel Palmer's letters was written and compiled by his surviving son, A. H. Palmer, who later, in 1909, burned large quantities of his father's sketchbooks and notebooks. The letters published here, which date from 1829 to 1881, include correspondence with other members of 'the Ancients', such as John Linnell, George Richmond and Edward Calvert. The book also includes a range of sketches and etchings, as well as a catalogue of exhibited works.

Systems theory emerged in the mid-20th century along with related theories such as Cybernetics and Information Theory. Recently it has included Complexity Theory, Chaos Theory and Social Systems Theory. Systems theory understands phenomena in terms of the systems of which they are part. This book is about a systems theoretical approach to thinking about art. It examines what it means to look to systems theory both for its implications for artistic practice and as a theory of art. This publication provides a sustained discussion on the application of systems theory to an account of art.

Traditional postcolonial scholarship on art and imperialism emphasises tensions between colonising cores and subjugated peripheries. The ties between London and British white settler colonies have been comparatively neglected. Artworks not only reveal the controlling intentions of imperialist artists in their creation but also the uses to which they were put by others in their afterlives. In many cases they were used to fuel contests over cultural identity which expose a mixture of rifts and consensuses within the British ranks which were frequently assumed to be homogeneous. British Art for Australia, 1860-1953: The Acquisition of Artworks from the United Kingdom by Australian National Galleries represents the first systematic and comparative study of collecting British art in Australia between 1860 and 1953 using the archives of the Australian national galleries and other key Australian and UK institutions. Multiple audiences in the disciplines of art history, cultural history, and museology are addressed by analysing how Australians used British art to carve a distinct identity, which artworks were desirable, economically attainable, and why, and how the acquisition of British art fits into a broader cultural context of the British world. It considers the often competing roles of the British Old Masters (e.g. Romney and Constable), Victorian (e.g. Madox Brown and Millais), and modern artists (e.g. Nash and Spencer) alongside political and economic factors, including the developing global art market, imperial commerce, Australian Federation, the First World War, and the coming of age of the Commonwealth.

Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture is the first book-length study of the original illustrator of Dickens's Pickwick Papers. Discussion of the range and importance of Seymour's work as a jobbing illustrator in the 1820s and 1830s is at the centre of the book. A bibliographical study of his prolific output of illustrations in many different print genres is combined with a wide-ranging account of his major publications. Seymour's extended work for The Comic Magazine, New Readings of Old Authors and Humorous Sketches, all described in detail, are of particular importance in locating the dialogue between image and text at the moment when the Victorian illustrated novel was coming into being.

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.

When all that was solid melted into air... For decades, intellectuals from Benjamin to Bourdieu, Berman to Foucault, have been in thrall to this vision of the mid-nineteenth century. It shaped and underpinned their most influential thoughts, its legacy insinuated into institutionalized theories of culture. In this new book, that vision implodes, as if in a cultural supernova, its exceptionalism and limitations exposed. The story of modernity fades before a spectacle of linkages, stretching from and into the depths of history, the breadths of place. And, in a parallel substitution, the vast territories of the former Spanish Empire's thread through the narrative, rather than lurking on the peripheries, no longer just the fallen founders of modernity. Instead of modernity goes to the very heart of comparative cultural study: the question of what happens when intimate, dynamic connections are made over place and time, what it is to feel at home amid the lavish diversity of culture. This ambitious interdisciplinary book reconsiders foundational figures of the modern western canon, from Darwin to Cameron, Baudelaire to Whistler. It weaves together brain images from France, preserved insects from the Americas, glass in London, poetry from Argentina, paintings from Spain. Flaubert, Whitman, and Nietzsche find themselves with Hostos from Puerto Rico and Gorriti from Argentina. The flotsam and jetsam of history - optical toys from Madrid - sit with Melville and Marx. The book ranges over theoretical fields: trauma and sexuality studies, theories of visuality, the philosophy of sacrifice and intimacy, the thought of Wittgenstein. Instead of modernity is an adventure in the practice of comparative writing: resonances join suggestively over place and time, the textures of words, phrases and images combine to form moods. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the question of modernity and with the fate of cultural theory and comparison. -- .