The island of Ireland is home to one of the world's great literary and artistic traditions. This book reads Irish literature and art in context of the island's coastal and maritime cultures, beginning with the late imperial experiences of Jack and William Butler Yeats and ending with the contemporary work of Anne Enright and Sinead Morrissey. It includes chapters on key historical texts such as Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands, and on contemporary writers including Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Kevin Barry. It sets a diverse range of writing and visual art in a fluid panorama of liquid associations that connect Irish literature to an archipelago of other times and places. Situated within contemporary conversations about the blue and the environmental humanities, this book builds on the upsurge of interest in seas and coasts in literary studies, presenting James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, John Banville, and many others in new coastal and maritime contexts. In doing so, it creates a literary and visual narrative of Irish coastal cultures across a seaboard that extends to a planetary configuration of imagined islands.

Why do we not know more of Susie Barstow? A prolific artist, Susie M. Barstow (1836-1923) was committed to expressing the majesty she found in the national landscape. She captured on canvas and paper the larger American landscape experience as it evolved across the nineteenth century. A notable figure in the field of American landscape painting, now is the time to bring forward her narrative. In Susie M. Barstow: Redefining the Hudson River School, the life and career of this fascinating artist are explored and extensively researched utilizing vast, and previously unknown, archival materials. This rare occasion to mine the depths of an artist's life through letters, dairies, photographs, and sketchbooks provides a unique opportunity to present a comprehensive study that is both art-historically significant and visually stunning. Susie M. Barstow: Redefining the Hudson River School unpacks and positions Susie 'as a prominent landscape artist, whose paintings won her wide renown,' as her obituary would confirm, and explores the manner in which she struggled, flourished, and ultimately earned her living in the arts. This is her moment.

A beautifully illustrated hardback anthology of 26 of Australia's most fascinating animals from CBCA Honour Book author/illustrator Jennifer Cossins. From the award-winning creator of A-Z OF ENDANGERED ANIMALS comes a stunning non-fiction picture book for boys and girls with a love of animals and a thirst for all things encyclopaedic. This exquisite full-colour picture book is packed with interesting facts and is perfect for young conservationists and students with a keen interest in the world around us. On this expedition through the alphabet, you will encounter some of the Australia's rare and enchanting animals, from the gorgeous azure kingfisher and the sleepy koala, to the shy numbat and the friendly zebra finch. Come on an illustrated journey through Australia's unique wildlife with Tasmanian artist Jennifer Cossins.

Water belongs to our most profound dreams: it evokes motherhood, cleanliness, purity, sensuality, and death. Naturally, this is true for every civilisation, but in Islam this series of ideas found its most profound meaning, turning water into one of the cornerstones of human existence: a cornerstone that is both spiritual as well as social and aesthetic. Statements in the Koran and subsequent literature illustrate the historic development of the many roles and meanings of water and the incarnation of its significance in Islamic art and craftsmanship. This volume tells a story through images, artefacts, books, and miniatures: technology, everyday life, and art, which for centuries mirrored one another in the many ways of enjoying and using water.

Blue Ridge Dreaming celebrates the magic and drama of one of the most breathtaking landscapes in the United States. When New York native Mike Poggioli moved to Asheville, North Carolina, he traded in cityscapes for the towering peaks, lush forests, and sparkling rivers of the Blue Ridge Mountains. His moody, dreamy landscapes follow golden light and delicate fog through the changing seasons with his distinctive color palette of oranges and blues. Home to the country's two most popular national parks - the Blue Ridge Parkway and Great Smoky Mountains National Park - the Blue Ridge area has fascinated nature lovers for centuries with its beauty. Let Mike Poggioli and Blue Ridge Dreaming transport you to this gorgeous terrain.

Hudson River School artists shared an awe of the magnificence of nature as well as a belief that the untamed American scenery reflected the national character. In this new work, color reproductions of more than 115 paintings capture the beauty and illuminate the aesthetic and philosophical principles of the Hudson River School painters. The pieces included in this volume reflect a period (1825-1875) when American landscape painting was most thoroughly explored and formalized with personal, artistic, cultural, and national identifications. Judith Hansen O'Toole reveals the subtleties and quiet majesty of the works and discusses their shared iconography, the ways in which artists responded to one another's paintings, and how the paintings reflected nineteenth-century American cultural, intellectual, and social milieus. Different Views is also the first major study to examine closely the Hudson River School artists' practice of creating thematically related pairs and series of paintings. O'Toole considers painters' use of this method to express different moods and philosophical concepts. She observes artists' representations of landscape and their nuanced depictions of weather, light, and season. By comparing and contrasting Hudson River School paintings, O'Toole reveals differences in meaning, emotion, and cultural connotation. Different Views in Hudson River School Painting contains reproductions of works from a range of prominent and lesser-known artists, including Jasper Francis Cropsey, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, John Frederic Kensett, and John William Casilear. The works come from a leading private collection and were recently exhibited at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art.

French photographer Jean-Luc Mylayne (born 1946) scouts out specific birds in locations across Europe and the US, then frames a scene, waiting for the bird to enter his camera's view. This volume documents a three-part project with The Art Institute of Chicago, including a chapel built in Millennium Park.

A book that debunks the popular myth that William Wordsworth was, first and foremost, a poet of daffodils, Wordsworth's Gardens and Flowers: The Spirit of Paradise provides a vivid account of Wordsworth as a gardening poet who not only wrote about gardens and flowers but also designed - and physically worked in - his gardens. Wordsworth's Gardens and Flowers: The Spirit of Paradise is a book of two halves. The first section focuses on the gardens that Wordsworth made at Grasmere and Rydal in the English Lake District, and also in Leicestershire, at Coleorton. The gardens are explored via his poetry and prose and the journals of his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth. In the second half of the book, the reader learns more of Wordsworth's use of flowers in his poetry, exploring the vital importance of British flowers and other 'unassuming things' to his work, as well as their wider cultural, religious and political meaning. Throughout, the engaging, accessible text is woven around illustrations that bring Wordsworth's gardens and flowers to life, including rare botanical prints, many reproduced here for the first time in several decades.

Rich in symbolism and metaphor, and blessed with its own varied and dramatic palette, the garden has proved to be an extremely fertile source of artistic inspiration. In The Garden in Art, acclaimed art historian Debra N. Mancoff reveals the many different ways in which artists from all periods of history - from ancient Egypt to the present day - have employed the motif of the garden. Featuring more than 200 illustrations of both renowned and lesser-known works, the book approaches its subject thematically, exploring such topics as working gardens, the garden through the seasons and artists' gardens. Complete with a detailed timeline and a suggested list of gardens to visit, The Garden in Art is an absorbing and highly rewarding examination of the meaning and significance of the depiction of the garden.

A celebration of the American painter's life and work in the region he loved best In 1883 American artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910) moved his studio from New York City to Prouts Neck, a slip of coastline just south of Portland, Maine. Here, over the course of twenty-five years, Homer produced his most celebrated and emotionally powerful paintings, which often depicted the dramatic views and storm-strewn skies around his home. Homer's influence and the Prouts Neck area would have a profound effect on the rise of a new American modernism, inspiring the artists who followed him. This beautifully illustrated catalogue celebrates Homer's legacy at Prouts Neck, and documents the Portland Museum of Art's six-year conservation project to preserve the Winslow Homer Studio, the former carriage house in which Homer lived and worked. Photographs of the studio and site, never before open to the public, highlight views that are recognizable as the subject of so many of Homer's paintings. Essays by leading scholars examine his iconic masterpieces; his artistic development in Prouts Neck; the architecture of his studio; his relationship to French painting; and the full range of his marine paintings. Published in association with the Portland Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Portland Museum of Art(09/22/12-12/30/12)

First published to accompany major retrospective exhibitions at West Cork Arts Centre and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), this full-colour illustrated monograph explores William Crozier's whole career, taking in the second half of the twentieth century - a key period in the development of British and Irish art. The catalogue is furnished with essays presenting brand new research by renown art historians and curators, Illuminated by unpublished sources and personal memoirs. What emerges is a picture of the continuum that runs through all of Crozier's work, revealing a fascinating narrative that, far from a story of transformation from darker, earlier imagery into the apparent hedonism of later landscapes, is one of continuity of purpose in Crozier's mind-set that connects 1950s Britain and Ireland with the concerns of the new millennium. Profoundly affected by post-war existential philosophy, Crozier consciously allied himself and his work with contemporary European art throughout the 1950s and 1960s, towards painters such as Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Nicolas de Stael. The landscape became the source of visceral paintings: For Crozier, ravaged landscapes symbolised the torment and fear of the post-war condition at the heart of existentialism. Only ten years separate these images of traumatized humanity from the luxuriantly colourful works inspired by the landscape of West Cork. His early skill as a colourist reaches its zenith in paintings that capture the essence and appearance of the West Cork landscape in ways immediately recognisable to the viewer, but they are also concerned to capture a landscape during a period of great physical and social change. Crozier believed that when painting the Irish landscape he must, "Tell the truth. Say it simply."