Taking its lead from W.H. Hunt's watercolour The Head Gardener, c. 1825, that is part of The Courtauld Gallery's permanent collection, this focused display will be first to investigate Hunt's depiction of rural figures in his work of the 1820s and 1830s. Consisting of twenty drawings borrowed from collections across the United Kingdom, William Henry Hunt: Country People will bring together watercolours depicting country people in their working or living environments, from farmer and gamekeeper to stonebreaker and gleaner. The representation of these country men, women and children, closely observed, raises questions about their status and way of life at a time of rapid agricultural and social change. These profound changes are also reflected in the literature of the period. William Henry Hunt was one of the most admired watercolourists of the 19th century. Better known as `Bird's Nest Hunt' for his intricate still lives of flowers, fruit and birds' eggs, he exhibited prolifically at the Old Water Colour Society. His works were sought after by collectors, notably John Ruskin, a serious champion of his work.' William Henry Hunt: Country People is the latest in a series of books accompanying critically acclaimed Courtauld displays, which showcase aspects of the gallery's outstanding permanent collection.

A FLAME TREE 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. Angela Harding is a fine art painter and illustrator based in Rutland, UK. She specialises in lino prints and her work is inspired by British birds and the countryside. 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."

Angela Lord invites readers to develop their own colour insights with materials and techniques, exploring colours, painting rainbows, colour clashes, complementary colours, after-images, painting the colour circle and complementary colours, enhancing colours, a new colour circle, the interplay of light and dark, sunrise and sunset, colour dynamics and composition, an overview of colour through history, watercolour painting and the Steiner Waldorf curriculum, resources, glossary and references.

Millions of paintings were produced in the Dutch Republic. The works that we know and see in museums today constitute only the tip of the iceberg - the top-quality part. But what else was painted? This book explores the low-quality end of the seventeenth-century art market and outlines the significance of that production in the genre of history paintings, which in traditional art historical studies, is usually linked to high prices, famous painters, and elite buyers. Angela Jager analyses the producers, suppliers, and consumers active in this segment to gain insight into this enormous market for cheap history paintings. What did the supply consist of in terms of quantity, quality, price, and subject? Who produced all these works and which production methods did these painters employ? Who distributed these paintings, to whom, and which strategies were used to market them? Who bought these paintings, and why?

Turner's work is famous throughout the world. He transformed British landscape painting from a minor art to a highly respected one with huge power and range.. This beautifully illustrated guide looks at the man and his influences, and takes a route though Europe and Britain as his artistic life flowers and matures. Look out for more Pitkin Guides on the very best of British art, history, heritage and travel.

Diana Armfield RA Hon RWS NEAC has a highly personal attachment to subject and a subtly distinctive affinity with the rhythms of form and tone. These qualities make her an important, influential figure in modern British art - and a very popular one. Flower paintings have brought her wide acclaim, but this book - created to mark her 100th birthday - also richly represents Diana's feeling for landscape and place. Including an inspiring number of more recent works, it brings her fascinating artistic and life story up to date. 'I think I was born making things', Diana comments to Andrew Lambirth, whose absorbing interview with her forms the narrative thread of Diana Armfi eld: A Lyrical Eye. Diana's was a creative childhood steeped in experiments with drawing, pottery and embroidery, played out against the backdrop of a picture-fi lled house, a lovely garden and an artistic family. She studied at Bournemouth, Slade and Central art schools, starting out as a talented textile designer - a legacy that lent her a unique approach to the geometry, cadences and colour qualities of a painting. After organising cultural activities for workers and troops in World War II, Diana became one half of a successful partnership designing textiles and wallpaper, whose work featured in the Festival of Britain in 1951. The 1960s brought a turn to painting and from 1966 Diana has been a regular exhibitor at the prestigious Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. She has continued to paint and draw throughout her life and, as this book clearly demonstrates, always thinks afresh about each subject she tackles in order to respond to it with a close, warm sincerity. Diana Armfi eld: A Lyrical Eye charts Diana's personal and artistic journey with over 200 beautiful reproductions of her work, tracing favourite subjects and events - from a Welsh landscape to an informal fl ower display or the much-loved location of a painting trip in Italy or France. Andrew Lambirth's interview also explores the unique bond with her husband, painter Bernard Dunstan, who died in 2017, looking at how two leading artists interwove their personal and creative lives over a marriage of almost 70 years. As well as this interview, Andrew has contributed an essay on Diana's work to the book. Diana's standing and popularity have led to regular exhibitions, especially at prominent London gallery Browse& Darby. Her work is held in private and public collections worldwide, from London's V&Ato the Yale Center for British Art.

Grab your practice book, paint brushes, and discover the beautiful art of watercolor - no experience required! The ultimate beginner's guide, Watercolor Success in Four Steps will teach you how to perfectly paint 150 objects, from fruits and flowers to animals, household items, and more! Understand the basics of watercolor with tried-and-true techniques and create beautiful watercolor paintings in just four simple steps. Each project offers a sample selection of colors to get you started, followed by approachable, step-by-step painting instructions to complete each design. Once you've accomplished each project, you'll be equipped with all the skills and techniques you need to design and create your own watercolor works of art!

Michelangelo in the New Millennium presents six paired studies in dialogue with each other that offer new ways of looking at Michelangelo's art as a series of social, creative, and emotional exchanges where artistic intention remains flexible; probe deeper into the artist's formal borrowing and how it affects meaning regarding his early religious works; and consider the making and significance of his late papal painting projects commissioned by Paul III and Paul IV for chapels at the Vatican Palace. Contributors are: William E. Wallace, Joost Keizer, Eric R. Hupe, Emily Fenichel, Jonathan Kline, Erin Sutherland Minter, Margaret Kuntz, Tamara Smithers and Marcia B. Hall

Titian (c. 1488-1576) was recognised very early on as the leading painter of his generation in Venice. Starting in the studio of the aged Giovanni Bellini, Titian, with his contemporary Giorgione, almost immediately started to expand the range of what was possible in painting, converting Bellini's statuesque style into something far more impressionistic and romantic. This restless spirit of innovation and improvisation never left him, and during his long life he experimented with a number of different styles, the brushwork of his last great paintings showing a mysterious poetry that has never been equalled. This volume in the series Lives of the Artists collects the major writings about Titian by his contemporaries and near contemporaries. The centrepiece is the biography by Vasari, who as a Florentine found Titian's very Venetian sense of colour and transient forms a challenge to his concept of art as design. The poet Ariosto and sparkling letter writer Aretino had a more nuanced view of their friend's work, and Priscianese's account of a dinner party with Titian, and the contributions by Speroni and Dolce, and the slightly later Tuscan critic Borghini, round out the picture of this hugely thoughtful, intellectual artist, whose paintings remain some of the most sensual and affecting in all of Western art. Mostly unavailable in any form for many years, these writings have been newly edited for this edition. They are introduced by the scholar Carlo Corsato, who places each in its artistic and literary context. Approximately 50 pages of colour illustrations cover the full range of Titian's great oeuvre.

Renowned artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011) is commemorated in an exhibition of fifty portraits spanning his working life, held at "The National Portrait Gallery London" from February to May 2012. The review explores the development of his art from the potent and hyper-sensed studies of the 1940s to major paintings in the later phase, where the artist engaged in a complex and sometimes brutal meditation on the human being, drawn from an intimate engagement with the sitter. Freud's unsparing eye maps his subjects, sustaining single handed an almost unique commitment to the ambitions of high art, grounded in the canons of classic Western tradition. The monograph also includes a review of Freud's figure drawings, exhibited at Blain|Southern Gallery.

The first comprehensive, scholarly sourcebook/research guide/bibliography on the major French Symbolists painters, this work includes nearly 3,000 entries covering a variety of materials. Each artist receives a primary and secondary bibliography with many annotated entries. Art works, personal names, and subject indexes facilitate easy access. The volume is designed for art historians, art students, museum and gallery curators, and others interested in this major art style of the last half of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century. Art museums and art libraries in both the United States and abroad were gleaned for sources. This is a unique and substantial research tool. Symbolism is one of the most difficult art movements to define. Its primary meaning is the representation of things by symbols, by the imaginative suggestion of dreams and the subconscious through symbolic allusion and luxuriant decoration. The writings of Charles Baudelaire on the arts powerfully influenced the aesthetic theories of Symbolist artists and critics from 1860-1900, much as Baudelaire's poetics were the root of Symbolist literature. The Symbolist work, be it painting or poem, is above all personal and revelatory, precious not commonplace, reflecting and evoking a journey of the imagination. French Symbolist artists explored this style, attitude, and atmosphere from the 1880s to the early twentieth century. This sourcebook organizes biographical, historical, and critical information on four major French Symbolist artists: Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), Gustave Moreau (1826-98), Odilon Redon (1840-1916), and Maurice Denis (1870-1943). The first three artists are recognized asoriginators of the movement. Denis is regarded as Symbolist's foremost theorist and profoundly religious practitioner. Although all four artists have been the focus of major retrospective exhibitions since 1990, no comprehensive sourcebook/bibliography exists.

This catalogue will be published to accompany the fi rst ever exhibition of Golden Age Dutch pictures in the collection of the National Trust, which will be shown at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the Holburne Museum in Bath and at Petworth House in West Sussex (2018-19). Celebrating the enduring British taste for collecting Dutch paintings from the long seventeenth century, the publication will explore why and how this particular type of art was desired, commissioned and displayed through the consideration of masterpieces from a number of National Trust houses. It will feature portraits, still lifes, religious pictures, maritime paintings, landscapes, genre paintings and history pictures, painted by celebrated artists such as Rembrandt, Lievens, Hobbema, Cuyp, Hondecoeter, De Heem, Ter Borch and Metsu, as well as less well-known artists such as De Baen and Van Diest. With over 350 heritage properties in the UK, the National Trust cares for one of the world's largest and most signifi cant holdings of art and its collection of Dutch Old Masters is particularly impressive. The catalogue will include essays by Quentin Buvelot (chief curator at the Mauritshuis) and David Taylor (curator of pictures and s culpture at the National Trust). The authors will also discuss other aspects of the infl uence of Dutch culture in British country houses (using National Trust examples) - on furniture, garden design and print and ceramics collecting.

Patron Saints: Collecting Stanley Spencer is a revealing new exhibition at the renowned Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham - Spencer's spiritual home and major source of inspiration. The exhibition draws together a spectacular collection of loans, including The Centurion's Servant (Tate); Love on the Moor (Fitzwilliam); John Donne Arriving in Heaven, (Fitzwilliam) and one work not seen in the public domain in over 50 years. The exhibition and catalogue examine the often complex relationships between Spencer and his patrons and what drove them to collect his work. Spencer was a single-minded genius, but the influence of his patrons on his painting is far greater than has hitherto been realised. At the turn of the century, collecting art was no longer the preserve of the aristocracy and the upper classes, but Spencer's art appealed to a broad spectrum of art lovers, fellow artists, businessmen and politicians. Many of his patrons lived in Cookham, where he lived and found artistic inspiration, and many of his paintings were influenced by his spiritual feelings for that place. His idiosyncratic and deeply personal approach gave him a wide and enduring appeal, and he was patronised by some of the most important cultural figures and taste-makers of that time. Curator Amanda Bradley comments, "Behind Stanley Spencer, one of the greatest Modern British artists, were a group of individuals who enabled his very existence - both artistically and emotionally. They were not wildly rich, but they were powerful, cultivated, intellectual and artistic. Some bought on spec, others were true patrons, giving him the freedom to fulfil his artistic genius. Most fostered long-lived relationships with the artist, influencing his life and work more than has hitherto been realised. These were the patron saints." Patron Saints: Collecting Stanley Spencer explores the emergence of Spencer as an artistic personality, looking at those who helped him and why he - and his popularity - was a product of the zeitgeist (first half of the twentieth century) characterised by social and economic anxiety.

Secret Knowledge created an international sensation when it was published in 2001. Now, Hockney takes his controversial thesis - that some of the masterpieces of Western art were created using optical devices - even further in light of new and exciting discoveries. In 32 new pages, he demonstrates how Renaissance artists used mirrors and lenses to help them develop chiaroscuro, perspective, and the arts of depicting three-dimensional space and forms. Stunning in its presentation and wide-ranging in its implications, Secret Knowledge remains the art book sensation of the new century.