Most known for her bold and darkly painted portraits, Brooks was revolutionary in her feminist renderings of women in resistance. Openly queer, she challenged conceptions of gender and sexuality in her art, which also served as her refuge. While many of her male counterparts were disfiguring and cubing their subjects-often women-Brooks gave personhood and power to the figures she painted. Her frank approach to her complicated relationship with her mother, faith, wealth, sexuality, and gender is complemented by a keen wit that echoes the gray tones of her work. Though her paintings are held in major collections, Brooks's influence in modernist circles of the early twentieth century is largely underexplored. This new publication, guided by Brooks's own impressionistic musings, bridges an important gap between the art and the artist. An introduction by Lauren O'Neill-Butler explores Brooks's role as an artist in the early twentieth century through the lens of gender and sexuality.

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Sketch Books Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. The thick paper stock makes them perfect for sketching and drawing. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features Claude Monet: Bridge over a Pond for 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.

A FLAME TREE POCKET NOTEBOOK. Beautiful and luxurious the journals combine high-quality production with magnificent art. Perfect as a gift, and an essential personal choice for writers, notetakers, travellers, students, poets and diarists. Features a wide range of well-known and modern artists, with new artworks published throughout the year. BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED. The highly crafted covers are printed on foil paper, embossed then foil stamped, complemented by the luxury binding and rose red end-papers. The covers are created by our artists and designers who spend many hours transforming original artwork into gorgeous 3d masterpieces that feel good in the hand and look wonderful on a desk or table. PRACTICAL, EASY TO USE. Flame Tree Notebooks come with practical features too: a pocket at the back for scraps and receipts; two ribbon markers to help keep track of more than just a to-do list; robust ivory text paper, printed with lines; and when you need to collect other notes or scraps of paper the magnetic side flap keeps everything neat and tidy. THE ARTIST. '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. THE FINAL WORD. As William Morris said, "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

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 Vincent Van Gogh's Wheat Field with Cypresses. Vincent Van Gogh composed this painting while he was in the Saint-Remy mental asylum, near Arles. The bold use of impasto and the beauty of the towering trees have made this one of his most recognisable works. There are various other versions of the painting, one of which features a closer view of the cypresses painted vertically, as well as a replica of this version that Van Gogh painted for his mother and sister.

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 is based on 'Wheat Field with Cypresses' by Vincent van Gogh. Vincent Van Gogh composed this painting while he was in the Saint-Remy mental asylum, near Arles. The bold use of impasto and the beauty of the towering trees have made this one of his most recognisable works. There are various other versions of the painting, one of which features a closer view of the cypresses painted vertically, as well as a replica of this version that Van Gogh painted for his mother and sister.

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Sketch Books. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. The thick paper stock makes them perfect for sketching and drawing. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features Van Gogh's Sunflowers. Van Gogh painted a series of pictures depicting sunflowers, having first been inspired by the yellow flowers in Paris when he saw them growing in the gardens of Montmartre. Sunflowers were symbolic of life and hope to the artist, and could also be associated with his concept of the sun - glowing, yellow and hopeful.

A singular thinker and an uncompromising seeker after artistic truth, Cezanne channelled a large part of his wide-ranging intellect and ferocious wit into his letters. This translation by Alex Danchev is based on a thorough re-examination of Cezanne's correspondence with family, friends and major figures from the literary and art worlds. Danchev's great achievement is to allow readers in English to hear Cezanne's voice for the first time in his own idiomatic, idiosyncratic style. And he sounds rather different from the Cezanne we thought we knew - richer, wittier, wiser, more philosophical, more irascible, above all more fully human. The letters offer fresh perspectives on his artistic vision, politics, friendships, psychology, philosophy, literary tastes and classical frame of reference. They provide an intimate insight into the preoccupations and personality of a legend.

Cliff Edwards, a well-known Vincent van Gogh author and scholar, explores Van Gogh's second gift--the surprising written works of Van Gogh in letters to his brother, fellow artists, and friends. Edwards illuminates Van Gogh's vision and creative process for readers as a way of living and creating more deeply. Van Gogh's Second Gift gives us another side of Van Gogh, whose poetic, creative, and original mind opened up startling insights on the creative process. A perfect book for creatives and those who want to understand more about one of the world's most beloved artists, the genius creator of works like Starry Night. Focusing on more than 40 letter excerpts, Edwards offers clear background and insights into Van Gogh's life and creative ideas, as well as suggestions for reflection and personal engagement. Van Gogh sketches are scattered throughout the book.

John Peters investigates the impact of Impressionism on Conrad and links this to his literary techniques as well as his philosophical and political views. Impressionism, Peters argues, enabled Conrad to encompass both surface and depth not only in visually perceived phenomena but also in his narratives and objects of consciousness, be they physical objects, human subjects, events or ideas. Conrad and Impressionism investigates the sources and implications of Conrad's impressionism in order to argue for a consistent link among his literary technique, philosophical presuppositions and socio-political views.

Paul Cezanne challenged convention and pioneered new possibilities in painting. He was remarkable for his ability to perceive and paint aspects of everyday life in ways that revealed dynamic yet deeply harmonious visions of the world. But the intellectual and emotional difficulties of his achievements were considerable. Mainly self-taught, most of his career was plagued by rejection. The critics, and the public, disliked his paintings, and in 1884 Cezanne declared that Paris, the centre of the nineteenth-century art world, had defeated him. Repeatedly, he retreated into self-doubt and bad temper. This book follows Cezanne on his extraordinary artistic journey, focusing on his formative discoveries, made not in the flashy, fashionable metropolis of Paris but in provincial and rural France, often in isolation.

Claude Monet spent most of his life painting his own spontaneous impressions of nature and the world that was closest to him. His works provoked the description 'Impressionist', the name given to the style of art that he created together with Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley.

Vincent van Gogh's short, passionate life was driven by an almost unimaginable creative energy that eventually overwhelmed him. The outlines of his story - the early strivings in Holland and Paris, the revelatory impact of the move to Provence, the attacks of madness that led ineluctably to his suicide - are almost as familiar as the paintings. Yet it is more than possible that neither the paintings nor Van Gogh's story would have survived at all if it had not been for his remarkable sister-in-law, Jo van Gogh-Bonger. After Vincent's death and that of her husband, his brother Theo, Jo devoted her life to preserving and exhibiting the paintings, and editing the letters. It is in her short and unaccountably neglected biography that we can come closest to Vincent the man.

Part of a series of handy, luxurious Flame Tree Pocket Books. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed then foil stamped. And they're delightfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use, handbags and make a dazzling gift. This example features Vincent Van Gogh's dazzling Starry Night over the Rhone painting. In a letter to his sister Wilhemina, Van Gogh wrote: 'Often it seems to me night is even more richly coloured than day.' In this night painting, the sky is Prussian blue, ultramarine and cobalt, with sparkling yellow gaslights and stars. The spot depicted is in Arles, close to the Yellow House he famously rented.

This volume is dedicated to 100 of the artist's most beautiful and unforgettable canvases, as well as a rich selection of lesserknown works. It explores the paintings in the context of Van Gogh's short but brilliant career, allying the works to his correspondence, which provides the narrative thread around which this study develops.

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.

Today we view Cezanne as a monumental figure, but during his lifetime (1839-1906), many did not understand him or his work. With brilliant insight, drawing on a vast range of primary sources, Alex Danchev tells the story of an artist who was never accepted into the official Salon: he was considered a revolutionary at best and a barbarian at worst, whose paintings were unfinished, distorted and strange. His work sold to no one outside his immediate circle until his late thirties, and he maintained that 'to paint from nature is not to copy an object; it is to represent its sensations' - a belief way ahead of his time, with stunning implications that became the obsession of many other artists and writers, from Matisse and Braque to Rilke and Gertrude Stein. Beginning with the restless teenager from Aix who was best friends with Emile Zola at school, Danchev carries us through the trials of a painter tormented by self-doubt, who always remained an outsider, both of society and the bustle of the art world. Cezanne: A life delivers not only the fascinating days and years of the visionary who would 'astonish Paris with an apple', with interludes analysing his self-portraits, but also a complete assessment of Cezanne's ongoing influence through artistic imaginations in our own time. He is, as this life shows, a cultural icon comparable to Monet or Toulouse.

Alone of his contemporaries, J.M.W. Turner is commonly held to have prefigured modern painting, as signalled in the existence of The Turner Prize for contemporary art. Our celebration of his achievement is very different to what Victorian critics made of his art. This book shows how Turner was reinvented to become the artist we recognise today. On Turner's death in 1851 he was already known as an adventurous, even baffling, painter. But when the Court of Chancery decreed that the contents of his studio should be given to the nation, another side of his art was revealed that effected a wholescale change in his reputation. This book acts as a guide to the reactions of art writers and curators from the 1850s to the 1960s as they attempted to come to terms with his work. It documents how Turner was interpreted and how his work was displayed in Britain, in Europe and in North America, concentrating on the ways in which his artistic identity was manipulated by art writers, by curators at the Tate and by designers of exhibitions for the British Council and other bodies. -- .

No other artist, apart from J. M. W. Turner, tried as hard as Claude Monet (1840-1926) to capture light itself on canvas. Of all the Impressionists, it was the man Cezanne called "only an eye, but my God what an eye!" who stayed true to the principle of absolute fidelity to the visual sensation, painting directly from the object. It could be said that Monet reinvented the possibilities of color. Whether it was through his early interest in Japanese prints, his time as a conscript in the dazzling light of Algeria, or his personal acquaintance with the major painters of the late 19th century, the work Monet produced throughout his long life would change forever the way we perceive both the natural world and its attendant phenomena. The high point of his explorations was the late series of water lilies, painted in his own garden at Giverny, which, in their approach towards almost total formlessness, are really the origin of abstract art. This biography does full justice to this most remarkable and profoundly influential artist, and offers numerous reproductions and archive photos alongside a detailed and insightful commentary.

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.

This book offers microhistories related to the transnational circulations of impressionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The contributors rethink the role of "French" impressionism in shaping these iterations by placing France within its global and imperialist context and arguing that impressionisms might be framed through the mobility studies' concept of "constellations of mobility." Artists engaging with impressionism in France, as in other global contexts, relied on, responded to, appropriated, and resisted elements of form and content based on fluid and interconnected political realities and market structures. Written by scholars and curators, the chapters demand reconsideration of impressionism as a historical construct and the meanings assigned to that term. This project frames future discussion in art history, cultural studies, and global studies on the politics of appropriating impressionism.

This fascinating new book looks in detail at Renoir's influences, life and works. The first part begins examines his style; it covers Renoir's techniques and training: painting copies at the Louvre; his time at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; meeting his muse, Lise Trehot; working with fellow impressionist artists and his struggles for recognition. The volume then investigates Renoir's move away from Impressionism, his stay in Guernsey and also the changes to his personal life and the way in which these informed his work. It also documents his eventual success in the art world and considers the devastating series of illnesses and losses that blighted the end of Renoir's long painting career. The second part of the book is a gallery of Renoir's work in 300 glorious pictures, each accompanied by an in-depth analysis of its context within his life, his technique and his body of work as a whole.

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 is based on 'Wheat Field with a Lark', 1887 by Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), and printed on silver.

Bringing forth fresh perspectives on Manet's art by established scholars, this volume places this compelling and elusive artist's painted A"uvre within a broader cultural context, and links his artistic preoccupations with literary and musical currents. Rather than seeking consensus on his art through one methodology, or focusing on one crucial work or period, this collection investigates the range of Manet's art in the context of his time and considers how his vision has shaped subsequent interpretations. Specific essays explore the relationship between Manet and Whistler; Emile Zola's attitude toward the artist; Manet's engagement with moral and ethical questions in his paintings; and the heritage of Charles Baudelaire and Clement Greenberg in critical responses to Manet. Through these and other analyses, this volume illuminates the scope of Manet's career, and indicates the crucial position the artist held in generating a modernist avant-garde aesthetic.

In 1874 Claude Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise caused uproar among the critics and a revolution in painting. His inventiveness was inexhaustible: with paintings of haystacks, poplars and, finally, the enchanting water-lilies of Giverny, Monet captured light in all its fleeting qualities. At last, almost blind - 'I fear the dark more than death' - he feverishly produced near-abstract landscapes of water and reflection, a vision of nature that paved the way for the art of our own times. Including hundreds of beautiful reproductions and contemporary illustrations, comprehensive text, documentary witness accounts and letters, this pocket-sized book is perfect both for the lover of Monet and of the history of Impressionism.