The Ashmolean collection of miniatures was begun in the 17th century by the Tradescants, father and son, gardeners to Charles I and Henrietta Maria. Among its most generous benefactors was the Reverend Bentinck Hawkins, chaplain to the Dukes of Cambridge and an insatiable 19th-century collector. The miniatures, mostly of very high quality, range from the Tudor and Stuart era to Victorian times, and include specially distinguished works by Isaac Oliver, Cooper, Zincke, Smart, Cosway and Engleheart.

Vincent van Gogh's paintings and drawings are fabulously expensive. Millions of people admire his work, but are those masterpieces all genuine? To this day, the international art world struggles to separate the real Van Goghs from the fake ones, and the key question addressed in this book is what may happen to art experts when they publicly voice their opinions on a particular Van Gogh (or not). The story starts with art expert J.B. de la Faille who discovered to his own bewilderment that he had included dozens of fake Van Goghs in his 1928 catalogue raisonne. He wanted to set the record straight, but met with strong resistance from art dealers, collectors, critics, politicians and others, marking the beginning of a fierce clash of interests that had seized the art world for many decades of the twentieth century. In his fascinating account of the struggle for the genuine Vincent van Gogh, Tromp shows the less attractive side of the art world. His reconstruction of many such confrontations yields a host of intriguing and sometimes bewildering insights into the fates of art experts when they bring unwelcome news.

This text contributes significantly to the selection of appropriate and controllable cleaning methods for varnished and unvarnished paint surfaces. It is a distillation of many years' experience of formulating a cleaning treatment for any given object.

A new direction in art criticism is laid out in this striking program for realigning the relationship between painting and criticism. Putting forth the idea that painting evolves and encounters new territory through a constant tension between art and criticism, this treatise draws on the work of philosophers Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin as well as critics Arthur Danto and Rosalind Krauss. Each argument is accompanied by a detailed analysis of a wide range of classical, modern, and postmodern art pieces.

Abstract landscape painting expresses emotion while still capturing the essence of a landscape. This compelling book explores this suggestive style first developed by Turner. Using the hauntingly-beautiful paintings of Gareth Edwards, it explores the technical, historical and psychological dimensions of abstract landscape painting to help you develop your own skilful and intensely personal approach. Through this new book you can learn about how to begin an abstract landscape painting, using chance application; understand how to 'manage accidents' to create innovative pieces of work; discover the importance of effective composition and how this navigates the viewer's journey; determine the importance of the 'invisible' elements of painting: the unspoken value of the viewer and the influence of 'looking'. It also reveals how to utilize a convergence of linear and atmospheric perspective to help your viewer traverse the picture plane and helps you understand the importance of light, space, colour, and tone in generating evocative paintings. Finally, it encourages you to be more demanding of your surface, using textural techniques and glazing to achieve professional production values. It is a unique and exciting book into this under-documented genre.

FRANK STELLA

A study of the American abstract artist Frank Stella (b. 1936), surveying his career from the famous Black Paintings of the late 1950s up to the present.

Frank Stella has become become among America's premier contemporary artists. Unlike many 20th century artists, Stella has always worked in abstraction. His art is irrepressible, daring, hugely enjoyable, and refreshingly angst-free. This book begins with the celebrated Black Paintings of 1959, moves on through the Minimalist Copper and Aluminium paintings of the early Sixties, to the exuberant Protractor series, the expansion into three dimensions in the 1970s, and closing with the 3-dimensional Polish Village, Exotic Birds and Brazilian 'maximalist' works of the 1980s and 1990s.

Employing the most up-to-date art criticism of Frank Stella, James Pearson also looks at Stella's contemporaries: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Morris Louis, Robert Ryman, Brice Marden, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman among others.

Includes new illustrations. EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER 5

There does not seem to be much going on in some of Frank Stella's 1960s Minimal paintings. But there is, in fact, a lot going on. Stella limits himself to a narrow set of rules. Like Brice Marden, Barnett Newman, Morris Louis and Mark Rothko, Stella sets himself to explore a few configurations of painting. But these things - the shape of the canvas, internal organization of the stripes, colour of the bands - offer up endless permutations.

Frank Stella's paintings are lean, but leanness does not necessarily mean unfeelingness. This is the problem that monochrome painting creates, and Minimal art in general. Certainly Stella is intense: his Black Stripe Paintings, his Protractor series, his copper paintings, his India Birds, are intense works of art.

The Stella exhibitions of the late 1980s and early 1990s were affairs, in which one was impressed by a sense of colour and light, a spaciousness to the works, and a huge scale, so that each work dominated the gallery rooms. Stella is in no way a quiet, unobtrusive artist: his paintings are domineering, self-confident, assured of their own effects. Stella has always been an artist who knows what he's doing. His paintings do not lurk in gallery corners, shyly. His paintings announce themselves instantly and powerfully. Stella's June-July 1985 show at the ICA in London was typical: massive multi-media works were squeezed into the ubiquitous sparse white rooms, completely taking over the sedate spaces.

For many people the greatest artist, and the quintessential Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a painter, architect, theatre designer, engineer, sculptor, anatomist, geometer, naturalist, poet and musician. His Last Supper in Milan has been called the greatest painting in Western art. Illegitimate, left-handed and homosexual, Leonardo never made a straightforward career. But from his earliest apprenticeship with the Florentine painter and sculptor Andrea Verrochio, his astonishing gifts were recognised. His life led him from Florence to militaristic Milan and back, to Rome and eventually to France, where he died in the arms of the King, Francis I. As one of the greatest exponents of painting of his time, Leonardo was celebrated by his fellow Florentine Vasari (who was nevertheless responsible for covering over the great fresco of the Battle of Anghiari with his own painting). Vasari's carefully researched life of Leonardo remains one of the main sources of our knowledge, and is printed here together with the three other early biographies, and the major account by his French editor Du Fresne. Personal reminiscences by the novelist Bandello, and humanist Saba di Castiglione, round out the picture, and for the first time the extremely revealing imagined dialogue between Leonardo and the Greek sculptor Phidias, by the painter and theorist Lomazzo, is published in English. An introduction by the scholar Charles Robertson places these writings and the career of Leonardo in context. Approximately 50 pages of colour illustrations, including the major paintings and many of the astonishing drawings, give a rich overview of Leonardo's work and mind.

This is a wonderful book that enables the reader to understand the sad situation of Tibet through the eyes of the Tibetan school children. Many of these children suffer from the separation and loss of their families in Chinese-occupied Tibet. The book brings to life their childhood memories, the Tibetan spirit and culture and the future aspiration of these unfortunate children who now in exile have the opportunity for education like their counterparts in the free world.

Afterlives sees John Barnie engaging with images once again, as he did in his book A Year of Flowers. Here, Barnie deploys his skills of perception to respond to a group of paintings in Peter Lord's art collection. These are images that have been familiar to Barnie for years, yet he approaches them with characteristic freshness and humanity. There are no mere descriptions here. Rather, Barnie inhabits the images, speaking from within or engaging with their subjects as a persona just outside the frame. And as he does so, we are taken on a narrative journey, gaining insight into not only how poetry and art interrogate one another, but how each image, peered at 'through thick cracking varnish', reveals layers of history and the mores that accrete into hierarchies, prejudices, injustices and the inability to read one another across cultural gaps. The poems in Afterlives reverberate with the ghosts from the pictures, whose roles are still being played out in the divisive echo-chambers of today's insiders and outsiders. Rich with social commentary, delivered with wit, and sometimes a hint of mischief, there is a serious intent at work here: the voice of those who know 'whose tragedy they are in'-'their own'. And who know also that they: 'will defy anything / that gets in their way'.

The question whether or not seventeenthcentury painters such as Rembrandt and Rubens created the paintings which were later sold under their names, has caused many a heated debate. Much is still unknown about the ways in which paintings were produced, assessed, priced, and marketed. For example, did contemporary connoisseurs expect masters such as Rembrandt to paint their works entirely by their own hand? Who was credited with the ability to assess paintings? How did a painting's price relate to its quality? And how did connoisseurship change as the art market became increasingly complex? The contributors to this essential volume trace the evolution of connoisseurship in the booming art market of the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries. Among them are the renowned Golden Age scholars Eric Jan Sluijter, Hans Van Miegroet and Neil De Marchi. It is not to be missed by anyone with an interest in the Old Masters and the early modern art market.

John Winter brings together what is known of the material aspects of the paintings of East Asia (China, Japan and Korea), covering the components used, painting structures, certain aspects of painting techniques, and the mechanisms of deterioration.

Met die bundel beeldgedigte stel Marlene van Niekerk op ’n oorspronklike en toeganklike manier die minder bekende Nederlandse skilder Jan Mankes (1889-1920) bekend. Sy lewer daarmee nogeens ’n bewys van die vernuwende aard van haar werk. Die bundel bevat ’n dosyn of wat skilderye, in kleur afgedruk, telkens vergesel van ’n beeldgedig in Afrikaans met die Nederlandse vertaling daarvan op die volgende bladsy. Beskryf as “’n poetiese kragtoer”.

The elegant Matisse retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 1992 was the first king-sized retrospective of Matisse's work anywhere in the world for more than twenty years. Appropriately labelled "the most beautiful show in the world," this giant new look at Matisse and his pursuit of pleasure was a consummate success. Henri Matisse: A Bio-Bibliography provides the scholar, student, artist, and layperson with an extended primary and secondary bibliography with which to study and enjoy this great artist. These works cover his life, career, oeuvre, and influence on other artists. Though many of the entries are annotated, this is not meant to be a critical guide; rather, it is a way to get to know a great artist through the literature surrounding him and his art.

The work of Alex Colville, O.C. (1920-2013), one of the great modern realist painters, combines the Flemish detail of Andrew Wyeth, the eerie foreboding of George Tooker and the anguished confrontations of Lucian Freud. Behind the North Americans stands their common master, Edward Hopper. Colville's works are in many museums in Canada and Germany. He has affinities with Max Beckmann and appeals to the German "secondary virtues": cleanliness, punctuality, love of order. In a long life he resolutely opposed the fashionable currents of abstract and expressionistic art. In contrast to Jackson Pollock's wild action painting, Colville created paintings of contemplation and reflection. As Jeffrey Meyers writes: I spent several days with Colville on each of three visits from California to Wolfville. I received seventy letters from him between August 1998 and April 2010, and kept thirty-six of my letters to him. He sent me photographs and slides of his work and, in his eighties, discussed the progress and meaning of the paintings he completed during the last decade of his life. His handwritten letters, precisely explaining his thoughts and feelings, provide a rare and enlightening opportunity to compare my insights and interpretations with his own intentions and ideas. He also discussed his family, health, sexuality, politics, reading, travels, literary interests, our mutual friend Iris Murdoch, response to my writing, his work, exhibitions, sales of his pictures and of course the meaning of his art. His letters reveal the challenges he faced during aging and illness, and his determination to keep painting as health difficulties mounted. He stopped writing to me when he became seriously ill two years before his death. In this context the late paintings, presented in colour in this book, take on a new poignancy.

World-renowned visionary artist John Harris' unique concept paintings capture the Universe on a massive scale, featuring everything from epic landscapes and towering cities to out-of-this-world science fiction vistas.
This collection focuses on his wide variety of futuristic art, as well as his striking covers for a variety of esteemed SF authors, including Arthur C Clarke, John Scalzi, Ben Bova, Hal Clement, Jack McDevitt, Frederik Pohl, Orson Scott Card's Enders books and many more.

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps and two bookmarks. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example is based on Claude Monet's Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies. 'All of a sudden,' Monet would one day recall, 'I had the revelation of the enchantment of my pond. I took up my palette...' And the rest is art-history. Again and again - well over 200 times, and often working on an enormous scale - Claude Monet would return to water lilies as his subject.

This book argues that Ford Madox Brown's murals in the Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall (1878-93) were the most important public art works of their day. Brown's twelve designs on the history of Manchester, remarkable exercises in the making of historical vision, were semi-forgotten by academics until the 1980s, partly because of Brown's unusually muscular conception of what history painting should set out to achieve. This ground-breaking book explains the thinking behind the programme and indicates how each mural contributes to a radical vision of social and cultural life. It shows the important link between Brown and Thomas Carlyle, the most iconoclastic of Victorian intellectuals, and reveals how Brown set about questioning the verities of British liberalism. -- .

Ateliers have produced the greatest artists of all time - and now that educational model is experiencing a renaissance. These studios, a return to classical art training, are based on the nineteenth-century model of teaching artists by pairing them with a master artist over a period of years. Students begin by copying masterworks, then gradually progress to painting as their skills develop. On every page, Aristides uses the works of works of Old Masters and today's most respected realist artists to demonstrate and teach the principles of realist drawing and painting, taking students step by step through the learning curve yet allowing them to work at their own pace. Unique and inspiring, Classical Drawing Atelier is a serious art course for serious art students.

Gilles Deleuze was one of the most influential and revolutionary philosophers of the twentieth century. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation is his long-awaited work on Bacon, widely regarded as one of the most radical painters of the twentieth century.The book presents a deep engagement with Bacon's work and the nature of art. Deleuze analyzes the distinctive innovations that came to mark Bacon's style: the isolation of the figure, the violation deformations of the flesh, the complex use of color, the method of chance, and the use of the triptych form. Along the way, Deleuze introduces a number of his own famous concepts, such as the 'body without organs' and the 'diagram, ' and contrasts his own approach to painting with that of both the phenomenological and the art historical traditions.Deleuze links Bacon's work to CTzanne's notion of a 'logic' of sensation, which reaches its summit in color and the 'coloring sensation.' Investigating this logic, Deleuze explores Bacon's crucial relation to past painters such as Velasquez, CTzanne, and Soutine, as well as Bacon's rejection of expressionism and abstract painting.Long awaited in translation, Francis Bacon is destined to become a classic philosophical reflection on the nature of painting.