The self as a subject is one of the most fascinating and fruitful of artistic enterprises. From the 15th century to today, this collection brings together some of the best examples of self-portraiture to explore the genre's evolution over the centuries as well as the enduring questions of selfhood and self-representation that have besieged human experience for centuries before social media and the selfie. Is a self-portrait of an artist a medium of reflection? Or is it merely a black void, the "false mirror," as the Surrealist Rene Magritte entitled his 1928 painting of an eye? How much does it impart about contemporary notions of beauty, power, and status? From Albrecht Durer to Egon Schiele, Fra Filippo Lippi to Frida Kahlo, this far-reaching collection explores the numerous ways in which artists have taken themselves as subjects, the variety of ingenious methods and perspectives they have used, and the intriguing questions they raise. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art History series features: approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions a detailed, illustrated introduction a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a two-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist

Daughters of Darkness is a collection of fine art portraits of women in corpse paint. A nod to black metal and doom album cover art, Daughters of Darkness was photographed over 10+ years, with more than 400 models from all over the world, almost all of which did their own corpse paint and are fans of black metal. Daughters of Darkness features many celebrities, actresses, musicians, and models (some under the cover of corpse painted anonymity) all of whom donned only corpse paint for this book. Photographed by internationally renowned music and fine art photographer Jeremy Saffer, this project combines both his music photography and fine art photography worlds into a single project, which was conceived to capture the memory of flipping though albums in a music store and buying albums based entirely on the albums cover art (which often featured a nude portrait, someone in corpse paint, or both) prior to knowing the music or the band. Like the music that inspired it, Daughters of Darkness shows the duality of finding beauty in dark imagery, and finding darkness within beauty.

Anatomy for Artists is an extensive compendium of high quality, detailed photography and drawings, showing the human figure in a variety of shapes, sizes and poses that can be used as a solid foundation for all character art.This thorough and detailed library of visual resources will consist of stunning photography and comprehensive drawings showing the muscular structure of figures of varying body types. These male and female references will act as an invaluable starting point for artists trying to create art based on the human figure. Whether you're a traditional sculptor, oil painter or 3D digital artist, the resources within this book will prove to be useful and informative and will help you improve the quality and accuracy of your own art.

Turn the pages of this lavishly-produced book to discover a collection of monsters, creatures, and characters created by self-taught concept artist Francisco Garces, AKA Dibujante Nocturno. The artist and illustrator shares his journey, revealing how his self-taught skills have evolved over the years, resulting in the demonic yet exquisite style that has earned him over 400,000 followers on Instagram. In addition to a specially curated gallery of his past work, there are new pieces created exclusively for this book, including step-by-step tutorials that break down not only the artist's workflow and routine, but also his intricate pen linework techniques, cleverly chosen color palettes, and detailed rendering. Being self-taught, the artist has honed his skills in a completely unique way, allowing readers to glean not only unique tips and techniques, but also inspiration and insight into how they can practise, improve, and develop their own style. His experience of teaching art ensures he knows how to effectively communicate ideas, concepts and practical techniques. From his elegantly drawn linework to the darkest character creation, this is a unique opportunity for fans of fantasy art and creature design to see what goes into the epic art of Dibujante Nocturno.

Analysis of a group of images of kingship and queenship from Anglo-Saxon England explores the implications of their focus on books, authorship and learning. Between the reign of Alfred in the late ninth century and the arrival of the Normans in 1066, a unique set of images of kingship and queenship was developed in Anglo-Saxon England, images of leadership that centred on books, authorship and learning rather than thrones, sword and sceptres. Focusing on the cultural and historical contexts in which these images were produced, this book explores the reasons for their development, and their meaning and functionwithin both England and early medieval Europe. It explains how and why they differ from their Byzantine and Continental counterparts, and what they reveal about Anglo-Saxon attitudes towards history and gender, as well as the qualities that were thought to constitute a good ruler. It is argued that this series of portraits, never before studied as a corpus, creates a visual genealogy equivalent to the textual genealogies and regnal lists that are so mucha feature of late Anglo-Saxon culture. As such they are an important part of the way in which the kings and queens of early medieval England created both their history and their kingdom. CATHERINE E. KARKOV is Professorof Art History at the University of Leeds.

All royalties, a minimum of GBP2.50 from the sale of each book, will be paid to NHS Charities Together (registered charity no. 1186569) to fund vital projects. When the UK went into lockdown in March 2020 to contain the spread of the Covid-19 virus, artist Tom Croft offered to paint an NHS key worker's portrait for free. Unsure how to help and offer his support, he wanted to capture and record the bravery and heroism of frontline workers who were risking their physical and mental health for our wellbeing. Tom suggested that other artists might want to do the same. He made his offer via video message on Instagram and was immediately contacted by Harriet Durkin, a nurse at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, who had contracted Covid-19 and, now recovered, was about to return to the frontline. Tom's portrait of Harriet, wearing PPE, was the first in what became a global art project. The response to the initiative was staggering and Tom personally paired up 500 artists and NHS workers in the first two weeks. When numbers reached the thousands, Tom set up a traffic light system so that artists and frontline workers could match themselves. Portraits in all mediums followed, from oils to pencil, sculpture to ceramic, mosaic to mural. This book presents a selection of these remarkable images. Some are by leading artists such as Alastair Adams and Mary Jane Ansell, and they are showcased here as both a celebration and a remembrance, in physical form, of the dedication of our NHS key workers. 'I just couldn't imagine what it must be like to have to put on your PPE and head into the frontline of the pandemic, so I wanted to try and thank NHS workers in some small way. We are indebted to them, so to be able to commemorate, celebrate and record their experiences through portraiture felt fitting. This collection will stand as a permanent record of their bravery in a time of national crisis.' Tom Croft

Newly revised and expanded, this second edition of Timon Screech's definitive "Sex and the Floating World" offers a real assessment of the genre of Japanese paintings and prints today known as shunga. Changes in Japanese law in the 1990s enabled erotic images to be published without fear of prosecution, and many shunga picture-books have since appeared. There has, however, been very little attempt to situate the imagery within the contexts of sexuality, gender or power. Questions of aesthetics, and of whether shunga deserve a place in the official history of Japanese art, have dominated, and the question of the use of these images has been avoided. Timon Screech seeks to re-establish shunga in a proper historical frame of culture and creativity. Shunga prints are not like any other form of picture for the simple fact that they are overtly about sex. And once we begin to examine them first and foremost as sexual apparatus, then we must be prepared for some surprises. The author opens up for us the strange world of sexual fantasy in the Edo culture of eighteenth-century Japan, and investigates the tensions in class and gender of those that made and made use of shunga.

The Norwegian painter, novelist, and social critic Christian Krohg (1852-1925) is best known for creating highly political paintings of workers, prostitutes, and Skagen fishermen of the 1880s and for serving as a mentor to Edvard Munch. One of the Nordic countries' most avant-garde naturalist artists, Krohg was influenced by French thinkers such as Emile Zola, Claude Bernard, and Hippolyte Taine, and he shocked the provincial sensibilities of his time. His work reached beyond the art world when his book Albertine and its related paintings were banned upon publication. Telling the story of a young seamstress who turns to a life of prostitution, it galvanized support for outlawing prostitution in Norway-but Krohg was also punished for the work's sexual content. Examining the theories of Krohg and his fellow naturalists and their reception in Scandinavian intellectual circles, Oystein Sjastad places Krohg in an international perspective and reveals his striking contribution to European naturalism. In the process, Christian Krohg's Naturalism provides an unparalleled account of Krohg's art.

The collection of pictures at Wilton has been celebrated since the seventeenth century; and its historic arrangement is uniquely well documented in a series of catalogues of which the first, issued in 1731, was the earliest such publication about any private collection in England. Of successive owners of the house, three made significant contributions: William, 4th Earl of Pembroke, who commissioned van Dyck's monumental portrait of his family that dominates the Double Cube Room he had created; his grandson, Thomas, 8th Earl of Pembroke who assembled what was in some respects a pioneering collection of old master pictures for the house; and his grandson, Henry, 10th Earl of Pembroke, patron of Reynolds and Wilson, among others. Such masterpieces as Lucas van Leyden's Card Players, Cesare da Sesto's Leda - long attributed to Leonardo - and Ribera's Democritus are matched by remarkable portrait drawings by Raphael and Holbein. These are complemented by a substantial deposit of family portraits and other pictures that attest to the tastes and interests of successive generations of the Herbert family.

Even in the Western world, which seems completely accustomed to a widespread appearance of risque images, an erotic painting from five hundred years ago can still manage to create a sensation. This book, the fifteenth title in the popular Guide to Imagery series, is a delightful romp through the portrayal of love and sexuality in art--age-old subjects depicted in all cultures. The volume surveys Western artworks illustrating more or less explicitly delicate or amorous subjects. The gamut of possibilities is vast, ranging from chaste tenderness to overwhelming frenzies of the senses, from Classical allusion to sexual fantasy.
A series of general themes is presented, with a detailed reading of the significance and symbolic content of the individual works illustrating each theme. In the paintings of the past, the reader will encounter gestures, objects, places, and situations that seem familiar and that offer the traditional setting of "love scenes" from every epoch. The volume closes with a chapter highlighting some of the most famous couples of all time."

Praised by critics and teachers alike for more than 40 years, Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Anatomy is recognized worldwide as the classic, indispensable text on artistic anatomy. Now revised, expanded, and completely redesigned with 75 never-before-published drawings from the Hogarth archives and 24 pages of new material, this award-winning reference explores the expressive structure of the human form from the artist's point of view. The 400 remarkable illustrations explain the anatomical details of male and female figures in motion and at rest, always stressing the human form in space. Meticulous diagrams and fascinating action studies examine the rhythmic relationship of muscles and their effect upon surface forms. The captivating text is further enhanced by the magnificent figure drawings of such masters as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Rodin, Picasso, and other great artists. Dynamic Anatomy presents a comprehensive, detailed study of the human figure as artistic anatomy. This time-honored book goes far beyond the factual elements of anatomy, providing generations of new artists with the tools they need to make the human figure come alive on paper.

This book explores the rich but understudied relationship between English country houses and the portraits they contain. It features essays by well-known scholars such as Alison Yarrington, Gill Perry, Kate Retford, Harriet Guest, Emma Barker and Desmond Shawe-Taylor. Works discussed include grand portraits, intimate pastels and imposing sculptures. Moving between residences as diverse as Stowe, Althorp Park, the Vache, Chatsworth, Knole and Windsor Castle, it unpicks the significance of various spaces - the closet, the gallery, the library - and the ways in which portraiture interacted with those environments. It explores questions around gender, investigating narratives of family and kinship in portraits of women as wives and daughters, but also as mistresses and celebrities. It also interrogates representations of military heroes in order to explore the wider, complex ties between these families, their houses, and imperial conflict. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in eighteenth-century studies, especially for those studying portraiture and country houses. -- .

This book explores the persona of the artist in Archaic and Classical Greek art and literature. Guy Hedreen argues that artistic subjectivity, first expressed in Athenian vase-painting of the sixth century BCE and intensively explored by Euphronios, developed alongside a self-consciously constructed persona of the poet. He explains how poets like Archilochos and Hipponax identified with the wily Homeric character of Odysseus as a prototype of the successful narrator, and how the lame yet resourceful artist-god Hephaistos is emulated by Archaic vase-painters such as Kleitias. In lyric poetry and pictorial art, Hedreen traces a widespread conception of the artist or poet as socially marginal, and sometimes physically imperfect, but rhetorically clever, technically peerless, and a master of fiction. Bringing together in a sustained analysis the roots of subjectivity across media, this book offers a new way of studying the relationship between poetry and art in ancient Greece.

Women - as warriors, workers, mothers, sensual women,even absent women - haunt 19th- and 20th-century Western painting: their representation is one of its most common subjects. Representing Women brings together Linda Nochlin's most important writings on the subject, as she considers work by Miller, Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Seurat, Cassatt and Kollwitz, among many others. In her riveting, partly autobiographical, extended introduction, Nochlin documents her own pioneering approach to art history; throughout the seven essays in this book, she argues for the honest virtues of an art history that rejects methodological assumptions, and for art historians who investigate the work before their eyes while focusing on its subject matter, informed by a sensitivity to its feminist spirit.

Elizabeth Sears here combines rich visual material and textual evidence to reveal the sophistication, warmth, and humor of medieval speculations about the ages of man. Medieval artists illustrated this theme, establishing the convention that each of life's phases in turn was to be represented by the figure of a man (or, rarely, a woman) who revealed his age through size, posture, gesture, and attribute. But in selectiing the number of ages to be depicted--three, four, five, six, seven, ten, or twelve--and in determining the contexts in which the cycles should appear, painters and sculptors were heirs to longstanding intellectual tradtions. Ideas promulgated by ancient and medieval natural historians, physicians, and astrologers, and by biblical exegetes and popular moralists, receive detailed treatment in this wide-ranging study. Professor Sears traces the diffusion of well-established schemes of age division from the seclusion of the early medieval schools into wider circles in the later Middle Ages and examines the increasing use of the theme as a structure of edifying discourse, both in art and literature. Elizabeth Sears is Assistant Professor of Art History at Princeton University. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

When considered as an object the photograph exists physically in the world, it belongs to someone; it gets held, it has weight, value. I've been interested in this concept for some time. It was this interest plus the recurrent use of my images online without my permission that motivated the creation of the series Little Romances. I have always made very personal work, my current emotional state and interests get translated directly into my images. Most all these images reflect questions and anxieties about being a woman, navigating what that means; what is expected of me as a mother, daughter, wife or lover versus what I'm capable of. In sharing my work online, sometimes it is treated with respect, but more often not. Not being asked for its use, and/or not being credited; it's upsetting being treated that way especially with such personal images. In Little Romances I photograph prints of my photographs and they become a physical object; my object. I surround them with elements from my garden or other personal items not to evoke nostalgia or sentimentality but to deepen my physical connection/claim to these images and distance them from the viewer. The object-image becomes obscured, repurposed, diverted, so that its original intent remains safe from viewing and at the same time it explores a new narrative.

Throughout his career, Gustav Klimt completed hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings of delicate beauty, many of them featuring the female form. Designed to imitate an artist's sketchbook, this gorgeous volume reproduces Klimt's most beautiful erotic sketches and watercolors. The experience of viewing them will awaken the senses and afford the reader the guilty pleasure of leafing through an artist's most private visions.