These delightful Halloween decorations are eye-popping examples of the best made, including pristine pieces from the Beistle Company archives, shown in over 395 color photographs. The text presents comprehensive information for collectors, including detailed descriptions and little-known-facts, release and production dates, materials, makers' marks, and values. Party games, hats, and masks appear as well as lanterns, shades, and die-cuts. They seem to jump off the pages to excite you. Lots of wonderful suggestions are made throughtout the book for interesting uses for displaying the decorations today. Their artistic beauty will make you smile, remembering youthful Halloween stories, and want to add to your own collection.

Award-winning artist Angela Gaughan shares with you a life time's worth of experience in art. This book provides an insight into the distinctive techniques Angela Gaughan uses to achieve her amazingly detailed, life-like wildlife paintings. It is an inspirational guide to painting in acrylics; both for experienced artists who are interested in Angela's methods, and those wishing to improve their skills. Sumptuous colour is at the heart of Angela's vivid, beautiful art work. Her unique techniques combine the advantages of acrylics and oils. In this inspirational book, Angela shares with you a lifetime's worth of experience in art. Learn her unique approach to using acrylics to produce depth and character in your own wildlife artwork, and follow the step-by-step demonstrations as you build up your skills. The book begins with detailed coverage of the materials, tools and media Angela uses. Chapters on colour and light, gathering reference, and composition build upon Angela's working method guiding you through her stages of working, from using photographic references, through completing a tonal drawing, to using transparent washes and opaque colours to create a full painting. The instructional techniques then connect into substantial chapters on colour, composition and finish off with masterwork techniques to help more advanced artists push their artwork further.

First published in 1984. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represent not only era of rapidly changing artistic methods but a crucial evolution in art criticism. This book gathers together a wide-range of the criticism that greeted the work of the Impressionists artists in the English Press. The selected examples of praise and antagonism reflect the sentiments expressed in the comments of prominent newspaper and periodical critics. The selection shows the importance of Impressionist art to English art criticism and wide comprehension of the formal qualities in painting. It also demonstrates how forward-looking critics created new criteria for the discussion of modern painting.

"The wide variety of selections from Frederic Edwin Church's collection of his own paintings shows the master in all phases of his career, in sketches and finished paintings, depicting the breadth of his subjects and the high technical skills that established him as an eminent and influential artist in his own time. As works he held on to or reacquired and kept in his house during his lifetime, they embody the heart of his artistic vision and convey a deeply personal slant. As pictures he hung and lived with at Olana, they tell the larger story of that extraordinary place and are as illuminating when seen in context as on their own." from the IntroductionFrederic Edwin Church (1826 1900) traveled the world, captured its beauty in countless paintings, and brought it home to live at Olana, his castle on the Hudson. The name was inspired by a reference Church found to a fortress or a treasury-storehouse in ancient Persia. This extraordinary selection of Church's paintings from his collection at Olana puts the most cherished of his treasures on full display in a volume that includes eighty color plates.Church's paintings, among the most acclaimed examples of art of the Hudson River School, are found in museums and private collections around the globe. However, Church kept some of his art close by during his lifetime. The rich collection that remains at Olana includes about seven hundred pieces, including notebooks, drawings, and oils, both sketches and completed canvases. They cover the full range of Church's career chronologically and thematically. The highlights from his personal collection are found in the touring exhibition that accompanies this book. The introduction by John Wilmerding and a substantial essay by Kevin J. Avery place the work into the context of Church's life and travels and examine Church's influences and the public reception of his art. Throughout Treasures from Olana, they discuss how profoundly Church's hilltop home and the surrounding landscape inspired and informed his work. His paintings, in turn, illuminate Olana more than a century after his death. The Olana Partnership, Hudson, N.Y., and New York State's Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, Albany, N.Y., organized Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church."

The rise of critical realism in nineteenth-century Russia culminated in 1870 with the formation of the Wanderers, Russia's first independent artistic society. Through depictions of the harsh lives of the peasantry, the fate of political activists, Russian history, landscapes, and portraits of the nation's cultural elite, such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the society became synonymous with dissident sentiments. Yet its members were far from being purveyors of anti-Tsarist propaganda and their canvases reflect also a warm humanity and a fierce pride for such nationalistic themes as Russian myth and legend. Through close readings of single canvases, investigations of major themes and a multi-disciplinary integration of the Wanderers within Russian society, this book gives the first comprehensive analysis of the crucial cultural role played by one of the most successful and genuinely popular schools of art, the legacy of which comprises a fascinating panorama of life and thought in pre-revolutionary Russia. -- .

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, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features Kew Gardens' Marianne North: Foliage and Flowers of a Chorisia and Double-Crested Humming Birds, Brazil. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a world-famous centre for botanical and mycological knowledge. Kew has a gallery dedicated to the paintings of the remarkable Victorian artist Marianne North, who had a great eye for botanical detail. She set out in 1871 on a painterly progress through world flora. She arrived in Brazil in 1872 and stayed until September 1873.

Get Up & Gouache shows you how to bring the vibrant and versatile medium of gouache to life. Get stuck in to 20 step-by-step projects that show you how to layer, blend and bloom in order to create beautiful and lively paintings ideal for prints, cards, gifts or simply the pleasure of painting. Packed with tips, tricks and techniques, Get Up & Gouache is ideal for beginners as well as providing inspiration for intermediate-level artists. Learn how to paint people and places and discover your own visual language. Find inspiration through projects on painting friends and family, flowers and nature and even your favourite furry friends.

The aim of this book is to provide an account of modernist painting that follows on from the aesthetic theory of Theodor W.Adorno. It offers a materialist account of modernism with detailed discussions of modern aesthetics from Lessing, Kant, Schiller, and Schlegel to Adorno and Stanley Cavell. It discusses in detail competing accounts of modernism: Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Yves-Alain Bois, Theirry de Duve, and Arthur Danto; and it discusses several painters and artists in detail: Pieter de Hooch, Jackson Pollack, Robert Ryman, Cindy Sherman, and Chaim Soutine. Its central thesis is that modernist painting exemplifies a form of rationality that is an alternative to the instrumental rationality of enlightened modernity. Modernist paintings exemplify how nature and the sociality of meaning can be reconciled.

This ground-breaking book offers the first sustained examination of Dutch seventeenth-century genre painting from a theoretically informed feminist perspective. Other recent works that deal with images of women in this field maintain the paradoxical combination of seeing the images as positivist reflections of "life as it was" and as emblems of virtue and vice. These reductionist practices deprive the works of their complex nature and of their place in visual culture, important frameworks that the book attempts to restore to them. Salomon expands the possibilities for understanding both familiar and unfamiliar paintings from this period by submitting them to a wide range of new and provocative questions. Paintings and prints from the first half of the century through to the second are analyzed to understand the changing social roles and values attributed to the sexes as they were introduced and reflected in the visual arts.

Featuring over 100 images, including step-by-step examples illustrating how to improve costume renderings. This is an invaluable resource for students in Costume Rendering and Costume Design courses, along with professional costume designers looking to improve their rendering skills. Written to complement any rendering style.

Beginning with a dissertation on Raphael's drawings, Oskar Fischel made it his endeavor, with an ever growing knowledge of Raphael, to arrive at a comprehensive representation, and this he has left behind this book. The illustrations gathered together by him over a period of many years are intended, in the selection here provided, to induce the reader to seek out the works of the artist. The book speaks of Raphael's influential manner on society.

Still Life is an accessible instruction course for complete beginners to learn how to draw and paint contemporary still-life subjects. Following a concise guide to the tools, materials and basic techniques that every beginner needs to know (including line, tone, colour, composition and perspective), there are ten tutorials showing how to draw and paint a variety of still life subjects using beginner-friendly materials, including pencil, charcoal, coloured pencils, pen and ink, watercolour paints and watercolour pencils. Each tutorial has a list of the materials and tools required, step-by-step photographs of the work, informative text and tips and strategies for getting the best results. By working through the tutorials, you will gradually develop your skills and build confidence until you feel equipped to attempt any still life. In addition to the tutorials, you'll find three 'focus on' feature spreads. These pages offer more in-depth/advanced techniques appropriate to the projects.

Rose Wylie RA (b.1934) trained as an artist in the 1950s, but it was her re-engagement with painting in the early 1980s, after a period spent raising a family, that marked the beginning of a remarkable career that continues to evolve and impress. This monograph, the first of its kind, follows Wylie's fascinating artistic journey celebrating her achievements while also examining her current practice. Rose Wylie's large-scale paintings are inspired by a wide range of visual culture. Her subject matter ranges from contemporary Egyptian Hajj wall paintings and Persian miniatures to films, news stories, celebrity gossip and her observation of daily life. Often working from memory, she distills her subjects into succinct observations, using text to give additional emphasis to her recollections. In weaving together imagery from different sources with personal elements, Wylie's paintings offer a direct and wry commentary on contemporary culture. Her pictures refuse judgment but reveal a concern with the everyday that makes visible its enigmatic core. Drawing on a series of extended interviews with the artist, Clarrie Wallis unpicks the complexities of Wylie's visual language so providing an important contribution to our understanding, and appreciation of, a significant, and increasingly celebrated, figure in contemporary British art.

'Ashley Jackson The Yorkshire Artist' contains a collection of paintings that have been personally chosen by the artist to bring together his personal memories and intimate reflections of the emotions and atmosphere that he has captured in each watercolour painting. As he explains, 'All artists paint what inspires them, what allows them to capture what they see with their eyes with their hands and heart. We all have differing inspirations, mediums and connections with our subject mine is the Yorkshire Moors.' From the open moorland of Marsden Moor to the inhabited landscape of Whitby, this book brims with what Ashley does best; capturing the atmospheric skies and drama of the landscape. As Ashley explains, 'I have strived throughout my life to witness and portray every mood swing of nature as she takes a stand against all that the elements throw at her, whether that be rain, wind, snow or fire.' You will truly find Ashley Jackson and his 'Yorkshire Mistress', as he calls the Yorkshire landscape, laid bare in these stunning paintings.

Since his death in 1942, St Ives has become marinated in the spirit of the naive painter, Alfred Wallis. Naum Gabo, the Russian Constructivist, felt that Wallis's gift as an artist was that he never knew he was one. His unconventional approach and the innocence of his personal method of making art marked Alfred Wallis, even after his death, as a crucial figure in the modernist movement. The art scene in St Ives during World War II is depicted vividly in The Alfred Wallis Factor which illustrates the birth of modernism in the small fishing port in the far south-west of England. With dominant personalities like Sven Berlin, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Adrian Stokes, Bernard Leach, Terry Frost, Peter Lanyon, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Patrick Heron, it was inevitable that personal relationships would both form and fracture. Though causes would range from the banal to the bizarre, David Wilkinson never loses focus on the high stakes for which these characters were playing: the creation of their work, and reputations, of lasting significance. Their passion was strong and their ambition even stronger. The Alfred Wallis Factor tells the story of this extraordinary painter's long-lasting influence on - and beyond - modernism: David Wilkinson expounds the events around and following the artist's death, assessing the roles of friends and rivals in making Alfred Wallis a benchmark of modern British art. The Alfred Wallis Factor is a comprehensive examination of a troubled era, in which life met war and changed the destiny of the art world.

According to Nico Muhly, the Coronation of the Virgin is "a panel of pure theatre and music". Painted in 1358 by the Venetian artist Paolo Veneziano (ca. 1295-1362), the apocryphal story of the Virgin's death is depicted in one of the artist's most thrilling and important works. Paolo Veneziano presents the Virgin and Christ in sumptuous garments and surrounded by a choir of angels playing portable organs, lutes, trumpets, tambourines, and other instruments. The angels symbolize the harmony of the universe; their instruments are the authentic components of a medieval orchestra, accurately depicted and correctly held and played. The decorative sparkle of the surface - with its brilliant, expensive colours, patterned textiles, and lavish gold leaf - reflects the Venetians' love of luxury, a taste that enriches much of 14th- and 15th-century architecture in Venice.

Now available in a paperback edition, this comprehensive volume on the great Danish painter Hammershoi places him within the context of his European contemporaries. This generously illustrated volume examines Hammershoi's work as a whole and in relation to the artists of his generation. Hammershoi's enigmatic paintings, with their rich and muted palettes, have always enjoyed enormous popularity in Scandinavia, and recently his work has received renewed attention across the globe. Thematically arranged, this volume includes beautiful reproductions and essays that focus on Hammershoi's isolated private life and travels; his time in London and Germany; and comparisons between him and such notable painters as Seurat, Gauguin, and Whistler. Fans of this remarkable painter, and anyone interested in modern art, will enjoy this celebration of Hammershoi as a part of the pantheon of great European painters."

The Education of the Eye examines the origins of visual culture in eighteenth-century Britain. It claims that at the moment when works of visual art were first displayed and contemplated as aesthetic objects two competing descriptions of the viewer or spectator promoted two very different accounts of culture. The first was constructed on knowledge, on what one already knew, while the second was grounded in the eye itself. Though the first was most likely to lead to a socially and politically elite form for visual culture, the second, it was held, would almost certainly end up in the chaos of the mob. But there was another route through these conflicting accounts of the visual that preserved the education of the eye while at the same time allowing the eye freedom to enter into the realm of culture. This third route, that of the sentimental look, is explored in a series of contexts: the gallery, the pleasure garden, the landscape park, and the country house. The Education of the Eye sets out to reclaim visual culture for the democracy of the eye and to explain how aesthetic contemplation may, once more, be open to all who have eyes to look. The book will interest historians of eighteenth-century British culture and historians of architecture, art, and landscape, as well as readers generally curious about the origins of our current visual culture.

Hawthorne was an American painter who founded the Cape Cod School of Art. This work, collected from notes taken by his actual students, offers hundreds of direct lessons, ideas, suggestions, and more.

Although fewer than eighty of Caravaggio's painted works exist, they represent a critical moment in the development of European painting as the Renaissance style gave way to that of the Baroque. This monograph explores the Italian master's entire life and career by focusing on the most important of his works. Readers will learn about his innovative use of light and shadow, his physical and psychological realism, and his radical technique of omitting initial drawings and creating straight onto the canvas. Along the way readers will learn details of the artist's colourful, and often troubled life, as well as the important role he played in the evolution of Western painting. Overflowing with impeccably reproduced images, this book offers full-page spreads of masterpieces as well as highlights of smaller details - allowing the viewer to appreciate every aspect of the artist's technique and oeuvre. Chronologically arranged, the book covers important biographical and historic events that reflect the latest scholarship. Additional information includes a list of works, timeline, and suggestions for further reading.

A dazzling array of invention, insight and observation from perhaps the greatest genius of Western civilisation. Towering across time as the painter of the Mona Lisa, forever famous as a sculptor and an inventor, Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest minds of both the Italian Renaissance and Western civilisation. His celebrated notebooks display the astonishing range of his genius. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and recent in-depth biographies have stimulated renewed interest in Leonardo and his complex and enquiring intelligence. This brand-new selection of sketches, diagrams and writings from the notebooks is a beautiful and varied record of Leonardo's theories and observations, embracing not only art but also architecture, town planning, engineering, naval warfare, music, medicine, mathematics, science and philosophy. Complete with a short biographical essay describing Leonardo's life and achievements, this is the perfect introduction to a mysterious and endlessly fascinating genius.

In Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siecle France, Robyn Roslak examines for the first time the close relationship between neo-impressionist landscapes and cityscapes and the anarchist sympathies of the movement's artists. She focuses in particular on paintings produced between 1886 and 1905 by Paul Signac and Maximilien Luce, the neo-impressionists whose fidelity to anarchism, to the art of landscape and to a belief in the social potential of art was strongest. Although the neo-impressionists are best known for their rational and scientific technique, they also heeded the era's call for art surpassing the mundane realities of everyday life. By tempering their modern subjects with a decorative style, they hoped to lead their viewers toward moral and social improvement. Roslak's ground-breaking analysis shows how the anarchist theories of Elisee Reclus, Pierre Kropotkin and Jean Grave both inspired and coincided with these ideals. Anarchism attracted the neo-impressionists because its standards for social justice were grounded, like neo-impressionism itself, in scientific exactitude and aesthetic idealism. Anarchists claimed humanity would reach its highest level of social and moral development only in the presence of a decorative variety of nature, and called upon progressive thinkers to help create and maintain such environments. The neo-impressionists, who primarily painted decorative landscapes, therefore discovered in anarchism a political theory consistent with their belief that decorative harmony should be the basis for socially responsible art.

This book illuminates the original meanings of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century mural paintings in Britain. At the time, these were called 'histories'. Throughout the eighteenth century, though, the term became directly associated with easel painting and, as 'history painting' achieved the status of a sublime genre, any link with painted architectural interiors was lost. Whilst both genres contained historical figures and narratives, it was the ways of viewing them that differed. Lydia Hamlett emphasises the way that mural paintings were experienced by spectators within their architectural settings. New iconographical interpretations and theories of effect and affect are considered an important part of their wider historical, cultural and social contexts. This book is intended to be read primarily by specialists, graduate and undergraduate students with an interest in new approaches to British art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.