An insightful new look at Balthus's ongoing fascination with cats and girls, including his controversial paintings of young adolescents Balthus's lifelong curiosity with the ambiguities and dark side of childhood resulted in his best-known and most iconic works. In these pictures, Balthus (1908-2001) mingles intuition into his young sitters' psyches with overt erotic desire and forbidding austerity, making them among the most powerful depictions of childhood and adolescence ever committed to canvas. Often included in these scenes are enigmatic cats, possible stand-ins for the artist himself. Balthus: Cats and Girls is the first book devoted to this subject, focusing on the early decades of the artist's career from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. Drawing on extensive knowledge of the artist's life and work, as well as on interviews with Balthus and the models themselves, Sabine Rewald explores the origins and permutations of Balthus's obsessions with adolescents and felines. She addresses the crucial influence of such key figures as poet Rainer Maria Rilke, his mother's lover, who acted as Balthus's surrogate father, but also includes the previously unknown voices of the girl models: their recollections and comments provide a unique perspective on some of the best known and most controversial paintings of the 20th century.

Insects have captivated artists for centuries, as shown in their re-creations of them in gold, canvas, fabric, marble, wood, and other media. This book displays 39 contemporary artists' insect-centric works, showing the extent to which insects fascinate twenty-first century artists and scientists. These American and international artists have many magical and discerning ways to approach their buggy subjects, which each artist explains in their own words. Nearly one million different described species of insects are known today. Now those colorful butterflies, iridescent beetles, little ladybugs, and lacy dragonflies can be with us permanently in many graceful arrangements and a variety of media!

ROUGH TRADE AND CAUGHT BY THE RIVER BOOK OF THE MONTH

The Lark Ascending, Ralph Vaughan Williams' 'pastoral romance for orchestra' was premiered on 14 June, 1921. Over the course of the twentieth century this piece of music, perhaps more than any other, worked its way into the collective consciousness to seemingly define a mythical concept of the English countryside: babbling brooks, skylarks, hayricks. But the birth and legacy of the composition are much more complex than this simplified pastoral vision suggests. The landscape we celebrate as unsullied and ripe with mystique is a living, working, and occasionally rancorous environment - not an unaffected idyll - that forged a nation's musical personality, and its dissenting traditions.

On a chronological journey that takes him from postwar poets and artists to the late twentieth century and the free party scene which emerged from acid house and travelling communities, Richard King explores how Britain's history and identity has been shaped by the mysterious relationship between music and nature. From the far west of Wales to the Thames Estuary and the Suffolk shoreline, taking in Brian Eno, Kate Bush, Boards of Canada, Dylan Thomas, Gavin Bryars, Greenham Common and The Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, The Lark Ascending listens to the land and the music that emerged from it, to chart a new and surprising course through a familiar landscape.

The idea of nature as a cultural construction has been discussed extensively in postmodern theory. Less attention, however, has been paid to the underlying motivations shaping the ideologies of nature, in particular the desire to submit to some larger order outside of oneself. Aspiring to the Landscape examines this persistent desire and how it is made manifest in contemporary landscape art. Four installations of large-scale paintings by Canadian artists Eleanor Bond, Susan Feindel, Stephen Hutchings, and Wanda Koop are the focus of Petra Halkes's study. The works vary widely in style and iconography but are drawn together by the way they invite a reflection on the troubled relationship between culture and nature and our contradictory and simultaneous longing to conquer and to succumb to nature. It is the tension between modern and postmodern interpretations of the subject of nature that makes the theory and the artwork discussed in Aspiring to the Landscape so important to contemporary Canadian culture.

The Camelopard, The Monstrous Pig, The Famous Porcupine, Durer's Rhinoceros: these are but a few of the beautiful and bizarre creatures that feature in this delightful book. In the visual arts of the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries in Europe, animals were understood in relation to the human world, whether as animals of the farm, estate or household, beasts of burden or as diversions in menageries and travelling shows. At the same time, rapidly increasing investigation of the natural world engaged artists in the problems of accurate representation: prints were particularly important in distributing natural historical information (or misinformation) across a wide, international audience. This beautifully illustrated book explores perceptions of the natural world as seen through the eyes of imaginative artists: works by Goya, Stubbs and Bewick stand alongside prints by lesser-known artists, each selected for its graphic strength, charm and narrative interest. Featured are natural history studies, masterpieces from the British Museum's exceptional collection of classical old master prints, book illustrations, satires and popular prints to beautifully capture the diversity and appeal of early modern print culture. Visually stunning, entertaining and intriguing, this book explores humankind's enduring curiosity about the animal world.

This is the first major critical study of the art of Cornish painter Kurt Jackson. Jackson's landscapes have been exhibited widely, and are becoming more popular.

The collected works of Julius Csotonyi, one of the world's most high profile and talented contemporary paleoartists. Csotonyi has considerable academic expertise that contributes to his stunning dynamic art.
Csotonyi represents the natural world photorealistically and has been influenced by natural history illustrators such as Peter Zallinger, Doug Henderson and Greg Paul. He uses bold patterns and colors to paint the prehistoric world both with traditional media as well as modern digital techniques.

Over 360 spectacular art pieces are accompanied by personal statements from 74 artists in this curated selection of contemporary works. The artists, who come from across the United States, and from places such as New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom, all convey their respect, enthusiasm, and personal connections to wildlife. A wide range of styles and media is covered including photography, glass, relief woodcarving, mosaics, pastels, oil, watercolor and acrylic painting, bronzes, stoneware, terracotta and porcelains, ink, graphite and colored pencil, digital illustration, felted sculpture and fabric collage, and more. Examples of wildlife presented are bears, birds, elephants, monkeys, pandas, tigers, foxes, wolves, owls, seals, and even insects. This book is a great gift for wildlife and nature enthusiasts, interior designers, museums, art collectors, art educators, and artists.

Kew's Global Kitchen Cookbook is a visual celebration of the amazing variety of edible plants and how we can use them. The range of edible plants is far broader than we may suppose, with huge variety, from all corners of the world, and continually changing in how they are used and perceived. Some now regarded as familiar were once exotic, such as tea, grapes and chillies, and the source of fortunes for those who `discovered' and transported them, such as the staples of the Dutch East Indies spice trade - nutmeg, cinnamon and black peppercorns. A narrative main introduction gives context to the plants that provide the ingredients for the book's 101 recipes featuring plants from around the world, including parsnip tart, truffle crepes, Cincinnati chilli, orange vacherin, Kashmiri curry, plantation smoothie, sweetcorn and crab fritters and pineapple cheesecake with chilli. A further section features the herbs of Europe and the Mediterranean and spices from the East, with details on how they grow, tips for growing windowsill box herbs, and how to use and combine different flavours to the best effect. Each plant has its own story of travel and adventure, and historical, botanical and economic themes are brought to life through the text and beautiful botanical illustrations from Kew's archives. Relishing edible plants today needs to go hand in hand with acknowledging how lucky we are to have access to so much diversity, and how we need to preserve that for the future. The book is published in conjunction with the Kew festival IncrEdibles, from 25 May - 3 November 2013.

"Fascinating reading about a little-known, independent woman."--""Science""
Today, an entomologist in a laboratory can gaze at a butterfly pupa with a microscope so powerful that the swirling cells on the pupa's skin look like a galaxy. She can activate a single gene or knock it out. What she can't do is discover how the insect behaves in its natural habitat--which means she doesn't know what steps to take to preserve it from extinction, nor how any particular gene may interact with the environment.
Three hundred years ago, a fifty-two year-old German woman set sail on a solo scientific expedition to study insect metamorphosis. She could not have imagined the routine magic that scientists perform today--but her absolute insistence on studying insects in their natural habitats was so far ahead of its time that it is only now coming back into favor. ""Chrysalis"" restores Maria Sibylla Merian to her rightful place in the history of science, taking us from golden-age Amsterdam to the Surinam tropics to modern laboratories where Merian's insights fuel new approaches to both ecology and genetics.
"What makes "Chrysalis" such a pleasure is that our awe is guided by Merian's discoveries. Her life was dedicated to understanding and depicting the science of transformation, yet she never lost her enchantment with what few of us could deny is also miraculous."--""Orion """
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"This lovely and thoughtful book sets Maria Merian's work in its natural context, restoring its true meaning and the reputation she deserves."--Andrea Barrett, author of ""The Voyage of the Narwhal """
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Kim Todd's previous book, ""Tinkering with Eden, "" received the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and theSigurd F. Olsen Nature Writing Award. Her essays and articles have appeared in ""Sierra, Orion, Backpacker, "" and ""Grist, "" among other places. She lives in Missoula, Montana.

For over 40 years Judy Cuppaidge travelled the Pacific to paint rare, beautiful and exotic flowers before the oblivion of civilisation. In this book, 32 of her exquisitely painted flowers are lovingly depicted together with their stories of discovery, chance and mischance from her travel diaries, delightfully told in her own inimitable style. Each painting is the productive of intensive work and painstaking effort, sometimes uniquely layering five applications of water colouring to obtain just the right nuance and shade.

The artist Mark Hearld finds his inspiration in the flora and fauna of the British countryside: a blue-eyed jay perched on an oak branch; two hares enjoying the spoils of an allotment; a mute swan standing at the frozen water's edge; and a sleek red fox prowling the fields. Hearld admires such twentieth-century artists as Edward Bawden, John Piper, Eric Ravilious and Enid Marx, and, like them, he chooses to work in a range of media - paint, print, collage, textiles and ceramics. Workbook is the first collection of Hearld's beguiling art. The works are grouped into nature-related themes introduced by Hearld, who narrates the story behind some of his creations and discusses his influences. He explains his particular love of collage, which he favours for its graphic quality and potential for strong composition. Art historian Simon Martin contributes an essay on Hearld's place in the English popular-art tradition, and also meets Hearld in his museum-like home to explore the artist's passion for collecting objects, his working methods and his startling ability to view the wonders of the natural world as if through a child's eyes.

From celebrated gardens in private villas to the paintings and sculptures that adorned palace interiors, Venetians in the sixteenth century conceived of their marine city as dotted with actual and imaginary green spaces. This volume examines how and why this pastoral vision of Venice developed. Drawing on a variety of primary sources ranging from visual art to literary texts, performances, and urban plans, Jodi Cranston shows how Venetians lived the pastoral in urban Venice. She describes how they created green spaces and enacted pastoral situations through poetic conversations and theatrical performances in lagoon gardens; discusses the island utopias found, invented, and mapped in distant seas; and explores the visual art that facilitated the experience of inhabiting verdant landscapes. Though the greening of Venice was relatively short lived, Cranston shows how the phenomenon had a lasting impact on how other cities, including Paris and London, developed their self-images and how later writers and artists understood and adapted the pastoral mode. Incorporating approaches from eco-criticism and anthropology, Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice greatly informs our understanding of the origins and development of the pastoral in art history and literature as well as the culture of sixteenth-century Venice. It will appeal to scholars and enthusiasts of sixteenth-century history and culture, the history of urban landscapes, and Italian art.

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!

"The intersection of fact and feeling is very important in my work. It drives my work in general, and in particular for Lennox Woods," explains Deborah Paris. Having spent the past year physically and psychologically immersed in Texas's northeast Lennox Woods, the state's only remaining old-growth forest, Paris has forged a deeply intimate relationship with her subject matter.

A veteran landscape painter and self-described artist-naturalist, Paris translates how Lennox Woods looks and how it feels, re-creating its live, three-dimensional environment on the two-dimensional picture plane. Through a convergence of literal observation and soulfulness, the artist-naturalist conveys the true essence of her subject matter to evoke the sublime. Thick with virgin timber and rare and endangered plant and animal species, Lennox Woods exists as tangible history, an example of how the land looked before the settlers arrived. This book represents the culmination of Deborah Paris's eighteen-month "residency" in the 375-acre Lennox Woods Preserve.

For all time, artists have maintained a close relationship with the animal world, which has proved an inexhaustible source of inspiration. The animal and its wild beauty are comprehended here through works of art from Albrecht Durer, Pieter Brueghel, Leonardo da Vinci, Eugene Delacroix, Henri Rousseau, and Paul Klee."

Visual artists as well as writers have long extolled the presence of the tree. From the origins of photography to the present day, photographers have considered the tree, with its strong graphic form and evocative power, to be a popular subject. Through the works of artists such as Robert Adams, Eugene Atget, Anne Brigman, William Eggleston, P. H. Emerson, Gustave Le Gray, Eliot Porter, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Carleton Watkins, this book spans the history of photography from the mid-nineteenth to early-twenty-first century to address the image of the tree in its many connotations - as graphic form, symbolic icon, and role model for the beauty of nature. The selection of eighty-one images carefully culled from the J. Paul Getty Museum's permanent collection of photographs and reproduced in colour presents the tree in various contexts; the single tree; trees in the urban landscape; uses of trees; tree reflections and shadows; and, details, abstractions, and conceptual views of trees as conceived by contemporary artists.

A visually stunning, photographically driven celebration of bird migration-one of the great marvels of the natural world The vast transcontinental journeys made every year by millions of feathered migrants were not known to naturalists before the late nineteenth century. Even today, while cutting-edge technology such as geolocators and isotope analysis helps us map these journeys in detail, much of the science remains poorly understood. In this luxuriously illustrated volume, celebrated nature writer Mike Unwin and award-winning photographer David Tipling highlight sixty-seven different species of birds from around the world and explore how each has adapted to its migratory cycle. As they bring to life the drama of the Bar-headed Goose's journey over the Himalayas and the amazing sixty-thousand-mile annual round trip taken by the Arctic Tern between the United Kingdom and Antarctica, Unwin and Tipling offer deep insights into the science, mysteries, and wonders of migration.

This dazzling collection showcases the very best of the British Wildlife Photography Awards, presenting over 150 of the winning, commended and shortlisted images from the 2017 competition. Featuring a range of photography from world-leading professionals as well as inspired amateurs, it is a book that captures the magnificent diversity of the British Isles. British Wildiife Photography Awards is divided into the competition's fifteen categories, from Animal Portraits through to the Young People's Awards. Every photograph is beautifully reproduced in a large format, with detailed technical information alongside the photographer's personal account, to appeal to both photographers and natural historians.

Very little is known about The Green Florilegium. Neither signed nor dated, it is generally attributed to the German painter Hans Simon Holtzbecker and originates from the library at Gottorp Castle in Schleswig, on the border of Germany and Denmark. The album now resides at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. Recently the book was painstakingly restored, allowing the delicate illustrations to come to new life in their original colors. This beautiful and affordable volume reproduces the original work of 400 botanical illustrations in its entirety. It also includes an introductory essay and captions with basic information on each flower. This lovely book is a must-have for lovers of botanical illustration and a sublime example of the art of conservation.

The Jockey Club and its remarkable collection are part of racing's heritage. Assembled over three centuries, the collection contains some of the best racing art in existence including paintings by George Stubbs, J.F. Herring, and Sir Alfred Munnings among many works by lesser artists. Taken as a whole the contents of the Club's premises in Newmarket are enough to fascinate anyone with even a passing interest in sporting pictures or racing. This catalogue much extends the previous one privately published in 2006; in this new publication all works are illustrated and arranged alphabetically by artist with short biographies. There are some 50 additions of which the most important are a particularly fine painting by John Ferneley and a portrait of The Queen with her Ascot Gold Cup winner, Estimate. The accompanying text by David Oldrey, the pre-eminent authority on racing art, provides detailed information about the works themselves and about the horses, owners, trainers and jockeys depicted.