"Heroic" is perhaps the only word to describe the Meissen porcelain animals made for the Elector of Saxony, Frederick-Augustus. They were commissioned in 1728 and modeled and executed by 1735. The great size of the figures presented many technical difficulties in creation and firing. Their mere completion in so many cases was itself a tour de force, making it arguably the most significant commission for porcelain executed in Europe.
Presented here are the large figures of animals from the collection of Frederick-Augustus, currently on exhibition at the Getty Museum until January 2002. Frederick-Augustus had long been a collector of Japanese and Chinese porcelain. He created the most ambitious interior for porcelain planned anywhere in Europe, the famous Japanese Palace in Dresden. On the upper floor was a gallery devoted to Meissen porcelain, filled with vases, great dishes, and the animal figures displayed in this beautifully illustrated book.

In Dusk to Dawn: A Guide to Landscape Photography at Night, photographer Glenn Randall teaches you how to plan, shoot, and process professional-quality images of the night sky and more. In the past, landscape photography largely ended when the last light of dusk faded from the sky. Today it's only beginning. The latest digital cameras have made it easy to create images of the landscape at night that film and early digital photographers could only dream of. Equipped with off-the-shelf cameras, more and more photographers are venturing into the night, far beyond the comforting glow of city lights, and returning with spectacular images of places both familiar and unknown that are unlike anything seen before. Dusk to Dawn: A Guide to Landscape Photography at Night is your guide to this new photographic world. In it, photographer Glenn Randall--author of the bestselling The Art, Science, and Craft of Great Landscape Photography--teaches you how to plan, shoot, and process professional-quality images of the Milky Way, the aurora, lunar eclipses, meteor showers, star trails, and landscapes lit solely by moonlight. Throughout the book, Randall emphasizes ways to integrate beautiful depictions of the night sky with equally compelling renditions of the land below to create complete landscape images that evoke a sense of place--and a sense of wonder. Equipped with the knowledge in this book, readers will be prepared to create their own nocturnal masterpieces.

This new book offers a single, encompassing view of the development of landscape painting, photography, and land art in Britain from the eighteenth through to the late twentieth century. It reveals the strong continuity between British landscape art of today and that of over 250 years ago, with works by J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, John Piper, David Nash, and Richard Long, amongst many others.

Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University.

Oliver Fairclough is Keeper of Art, National Museum of Wales.

America's favorite flora are the homey ray flowers, a tribe featuring daisies, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, dahlias, coneflowers, and black-eyed Susans, combined with the elegant, multifaceted rose. Children pick ray flowers for their prepubescent crush or for their mom; when they get older, they graduate to the rose, a more sophisticated choice. Both high culture and pop culture embrace floral imagery; think of Annie Liebovitz's famous nude photograph of Bette Midler blanketed in long-stemmed American Beauties on the cover of Rolling Stone, or zombies featured in a Wars of the Roses comic book. Thousands of postcards and greeting cards are covered in a sea of roses and ray flowers. Meet Daisy Mae, see Daisy the dog, and view the presidential Rose Garden, as well as influential American and European works of art. These images are combined with the history and romance of our favorite flowers. A nonallergenic floral extravaganza!