"The Landscape Series" of 2002 to 2006 was made in quantities of thirty to one hundred 1' square panels, each of the thirty sets generally taking three weeks to complete. The panels were worked on flat, painting eighteen at a time in fifteen minute bursts. They were laid out on an old framed 6' x 3' piece which also served as a container for the pools of colour washed over the textured surface. Two inch square wooden cubes were used to stack the paintings in small towers to dry out. Various factors steered the series development: there was reference to an initial colour plan, thoughts about the load-bearing pressures on a place, tracks and crossing points, airflow, water, spaces and intervals, the nature of settlement in the land. For a city: light and shadows on buildings, streets, side alleys and hidden courtyards, people, stores, traffic, noise, incidents and interruptions. Titles were assigned later to photographs of the line of production. The identity of a place was achieved not by literal description but as an equivalent found by coincidence in the passage of an abstract process.

This essay takes as its focus two paintings by Johannes Vermeer (1632-75), The Milkmaid c.1661-62 and Woman Holding a Balance c.1662-65, and considers critical approaches to the artist by four historians: Edward A.Snow, Lawrence Gowing, John Michael Montias, and Martin Pops. Its aim is not solely to describe Vermeer's art, but by a process of comparative analysis to discern the various standpoints of his biographers, and to clarify their methodologies in research.

In 1752 Charles-Joseph Natoire, then a highly successful painter, assumed the directorship of the prestigious Academie de France in Rome. Twenty-three years later he was removed from office, criticised as being singularly inept. What was the basis for this condemnation that has been perpetuated by historians ever since? Reed Benhamou's re-evaluation of Natoire's life and work at the Academie is the first to weigh the prevailing opinion against the historical record. The accusations made against Charles-Joseph Natoire were many and varied: that his artistic work was increasingly unworthy of serious study; that he demeaned his students; that he was a religious bigot; that he was a fraudulent book-keeper. Benhamou evaluates these and other charges in the light of contemporary correspondences, critics' assessment of his work, legal briefs, royal accounts and the parallel experiences of his precursors and successors at the Academie. The director's role is shown to be multifaceted and no director succeeded in every area. What is arresting is why Natoire was singled out as being uniquely weak, uniquely bigoted, uniquely incompetent. The Charles-Joseph Natoire who emerges from this book differs in nearly every respect from the unflattering portrait promulgated by historians and popular media. His increasingly iconoclastic students rebelled against the traditional qualities valued by the French artistic elite; the Academie went underfunded because of the effects of war and a profligate king, and he was caught between two competing institutional regimes. In this book Reed Benhamou not only unravels the myth and reality surrounding Natoire, but also also sheds light on the workings of the institution he served for nearly a quarter of a century.

Explores the development of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the mid 19th century; and works which figure amongst the most lasting and generally propular in British art. Renowned writer and art critic Edward Lucie-Smith contributes a study of the individual artists, their interconnection and previously unpublished material of their intricate links with the social establishment of the time. James Cahill has a special interest in the movement, having studied Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Holman Hunt. He reviews the major exhibition of 150 works at Tate Britain launched in September 2012. 'I think what I want to do is to follow a trail that leads, through many twists and turns, from the religious revival of the early 19th century to Blue Period Picasso, then to Surrealism. It may take in the Children of the Raj and the discovery of Japan along the way. It leads from rather rigid moralism, to conscious immoralism, and then at last to Freud/Dali.' Edward Lucie-Smith 05/2012