This book traces some key developments in British 18th- and 19th-century painting, focusing in particular on the outstanding portraits and landscapes in the National Gallery's collection. Compare what rival portrait painters Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds offered their sitters: the choice between shimmering colours and expressive brushwork, or ennobling classical references. Their techniques and philosophical ideals would be challenged and developed even further by the next generation. The ground-breaking landscapes that Constable and Turner produced inspired the French Impressionists, and are still among the world's favourite paintings today.

An introduction to the theatrical art of comic storytelling that originated in the Edo period, Rakugo sheds light on Japanese culture as a whole: its aesthetics, social relations, and learning styles. Enriched with personal anecdotes, Rakugo explicates the art's contemporary performance culture: the image, training and techniques of the storytellers, the venues where they perform, and the role of the audience in sustaining the art. Laurie Brau inquires into how this comic art form participates in the discourse of heritage, serving as a symbol of the Edo culture, while continuing to appeal to Japanese today. Written in an accessible manner, this book is appropriate for all levels of student or researcher.

Healthy spirit in a healthy body was the foundational slogan of the physical culture campaign. By the beginning of the 1930s, sports had become one of the most frequently pictured subjects of art. Images of beautiful sportswomen and muscular athletes were widely used by the Soviet mass media. Sportsmen were found on every « collective portrait of Soviet people; they appeared on almost every significant officially commissioned work, be it a large-scale oil painting for the Soviet exhibition pavilion or decoration in a theater, club, place of culture, or metro station. They were featured on posters, covers of Soviet magazines, on television news, and even in movies. Soviet textile and porcelain designers widely used sport motifs. In fact, the amount of the sport-related visual material suggests that the images of sports constituted a genre on its own in official Stalinist art. The primary focus of this research is the representation of the sporting body, and the social and ideological forces to which the athlete's body was exposed. This is also an attempt to position the body of the Soviet athlete in the context of Soviet mythology and reconnect it with the greater context of body representation in pre-Bolshevik and late Stalinist traditions.