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.

Through his intense vision Van Gogh was able to create paintings that speak directly to us all, and today this disturbed and rejected misfit is the most universally loved of all artists. The story of his thirty seven years of poverty, loneliness and failure is in fact a triumphant saga of absolute dedication and the final realization of genius. This extravagantly illustrated volume in the hugely popular New Horizons series, includes the story of his life; his relationships with his brother Theo and contemporaries such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro and Gauguin; his descent into madness and his eventual suicide. As well as the many reproductions of paintings and drawings by Van Gogh and his contemporaries, extensive documentary evidence includes extracts from his letters, critical writings and documentary photographs.

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.

"Post-Impressionism to World War II" is an exciting anthology of the best art history writings of the Post-Impressionist period. Several key essays by critics including Benjamin, Greenberg and Burger knit together primary sources and classic, "canonical" criticism.
Collects the most important writings on art history from Post-Impressionism to the mid-20th century, covering both canonical and contemporary perspectives
Offers a chronicle of avant-garde practice during an especially creative, if volatile, period of history
Features several key essays by critics including Benjamin, Greenberg and Burger
Includes recent critical interventions from a range of methodological perspectives - both well-known and less familiar
Organizes material thematically, and features introductory essays to each of the five sections
Provides a valuable, stimulating resource for students and teachers alike and offers new ways to think about and teach this important period in art history.

"Post-Impressionism to World War II" is an exciting anthology of the best art history writings of the Post-Impressionist period. Several key essays by critics including Benjamin, Greenberg and Burger knit together primary sources and classic, "canonical" criticism.
Collects the most important writings on art history from Post-Impressionism to the mid-20th century, covering both canonical and contemporary perspectives
Offers a chronicle of avant-garde practice during an especially creative, if volatile, period of history
Features several key essays by critics including Benjamin, Greenberg and Burger
Includes recent critical interventions from a range of methodological perspectives - both well-known and less familiar
Organizes material thematically, and features introductory essays to each of the five sections
Provides a valuable, stimulating resource for students and teachers alike and offers new ways to think about and teach this important period in art history.

This book contains an extraordinary collection of paintings and drawings of Pretoria since its founding. It is a fascinating record of Pretoria from a little hamlet on the banks of the Apies River to its development into one of the capitals of the world. The stories behind the paintings and the painters are a laudable contribution to the recording of the history of art in Pretoria. With this work, Eric Bolsmann has made a valuable contribution to Pretoriana and to Africana in general.

The Impressionists are world renowned for their vibrant depictions of the atmospheric effects and shimmering beauty of the French countryside. These paintings, often produced in Paris, found an enthusiastic market in the city. The inhabitants of that hub of modernity had an apparently paradoxical interest in the mythologies of rural living. As the city became more and more the motive force of social change so the country was understood as the anchor of changelessness and nostalgia. The essayists in this volume examine the complex relationship between country and city. Their work draws widely on the contemporary culture exploring folklore and children's literature, anarchism and urbanism, and offers significant new insights into the work of major artists and writers including Courbet, Millet, Monet, Van Gogh and Zola.

'Arnold Hausers Social History of Art - a very important and under-appreciated text.' - Whitney Davis, John Evans Professor of Art History, Northwestern University

'It is no exaggeration to say that more than any other work Hauser's four volumes inspired my interest in art history.' - Alan Wallach, Ralph H Wark Professor of Art History, College of William and Mary

'This work has great value in a contemporary context. I look forward to seeing what Jonathan has done with the introduction, but I cannot think of anyone better suited to the task.' - Johanna Drucker, Professor of Art History, Yale University

Hausers extraordinary energy and subtlety wave a brilliant synthesis of the interaction between the aesthetic and societal, giving us at one and the same time a wealth of artistic detail and a consistent and fully elaborated exposition of the social process. - Albert Boime, UCLA, author of The Social History of Modern Art, 1750-1989

The incomparable play of light and color in Paul Cezanne's work was the foundation of his reputation as a forerunner of modernism. From the start he went his own way, and his paintings initially evoked a lack of understanding in art critics of the time, as well as ridicule. Despite his romantic, baroque, impressionist, and finally classical influences, it is still difficult to ascribe Cezanne to any particular art movement. Still, which specific places left lasting impressions on the scion of a provincial banker's family? What and who were major influences supporting and advancing his innovative oeuvre? James H. Rubin traces Cezanne's life and work from A to Z in this brief volume, creating an image of a painter who wanted to transform painting itself. The author-and established connoisseur-succeeds in closely approaching the artist while at the same time maintaining the necessary distance to his inimitable paintings.

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: Cafe Terrace.

Claude Monet's classic artwork is depicted in the Monet FlipTop Note Cards Box by teNeues. Our FlipTop Note Cards box notecards are full colour and large enough to convey personal greetings, thank-yous and invitations. 20 notecards, 4 each of 5 images. 20 envelopes. Magnetic closure. Sturdy, reuseable box, ideal for keepsakes.

Vincent van Gogh used art to express his intensely emotional response to the world around him. Enraptured by the beauty of nature and tormented by the sorrows of human existence, he produced in his tragically short life some of the most powerfully expressive paintings ever seen. Many have made the mistake of thinking him mad, and he did suffer throughout his life periods of mental anguish. But Van Gogh's paintings are not the works of a madman. Van Gogh famously sold only one painting during his life, but within a few years of his death he was recognized as one of the greatest modern painters.

Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany is the first English-language examination of this German impressionist painter whose long life and career spanned nine decades. Through a close reading of key paintings and by a discussion of his many cultural networks across Germany and throughout Europe, this study by Marion Deshmukh illuminates Liebermann's importance as a pioneer of German modernism. Critics and admirers alike saw his art as representing aesthetic European modernism at its best. His subjects included dispassionate depictions of the rural Dutch countryside, his colorful garden at the Wannsee, and his many portraits of Germany's cultural, political, and military elites. Liebermann was the largest collector of French Impressionism in Germany - and his cosmopolitan outlook and his art created strong antipathies towards both by political and cultural conservatives throughout his life.

Were late nineteenth-century gender boundaries as restrictive as is generally held? In Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Paintings: Work Place/Domestic Space, Kirstin Ringelberg argues that it is time to bring the current re-evaluation of the notion of separate spheres to these images. Focusing on studio paintings by American artists William Merritt Chase and Mary Fairchild MacMonnies Low, she explores how the home-based painting studio existed outside of entrenched gendered divisions of public and private space and argues that representations of these studios are at odds with standard perceptions of the images, their creators, and the concept of gender in the nineteenth century. Unlike most of their bourgeois contemporaries, Gilded Age artists, whether male or female, often melded the worlds of work and home. Through analysis of both paintings and literature of the time, Ringelberg reveals how art history continues to support a false dichotomy; that, in fact, paintings that show women negotiating a complex combination of professionalism and domesticity are still overlooked in favor of those that emphasize women as decorative objects. Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Paintings challenges the dominant interpretation of American (and European) Impressionism, and considers both men and women artists as active performers of multivalent identities.

Inspired by the works of French Post-Impressionist and Fauvist artists, the Scottish Colourists (Samuel Peploe, J.D. Fergusson, Leslie Hunter and F.C.B. Cadell) introduced 1920s Britain to a whole new style of painting. While they did not regard themselves as a collective, they are known for their bold use of colour, vigorous brushwork and affinity for painting en plein air. Though each had a distinct style and focus, they were united by pioneering efforts to buck the prevailing artistic conventions of their time, creating works of art that burst with life and beauty. With over 80 images and a broad introduction, this is a fine addition to Flame Tree's ever-increasing series on painting and illustration, Masterpieces of Art.

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.

How did the tumult caused by German composer Richard Wagner result in the first modernist painting? In the first full-length book dedicated to the study of Edouard Manet and music, art historian Therese Dolan demonstrates that the 1862 painting Music in the Tuileries represents the progressive musical culture of his time, heretofore read by scholars predominantly through the words of Charles Baudelaire. Dolan sees in this painting's radical style the conceptual shift to modernism in both painting and music, a transition that, she convincingly argues, received a strong impetus from Manet's Music in the Tuileries and Wagner's controversial Tannhauser, which premiered the previous year. Supplemental to analysis of the painting, Dolan incorporates discussion of texts by Theophile Gautier, Champfleury, and Baudelaire who are represented in the painting. This book incorporates studies of the major artistic, literary, and musical figures of nineteenth-century France. It represents an important contribution to an understanding of French culture in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, a period of intense literary, artistic, and musical activity that formed the crucible for modernism.

Paul Gauguin achieved a high public profile during his lifetime, and was one of the first artists of his generation to achieve international recognition. But his prominence has always had as much to do with the dramatic events of his life - his self-imposed exile on a remote South Sea island, his turbulent relationships with his peers - as with the appeal of his art. Belinda Thomson gives a comprehensive and accessible account of the life and work of one of the most original artists of the late nineteenth century. Gauguin's work - painting, sculpture, prints and ceramics - is discussed in the light of his public persona, his relations with his contemporaries, his exhibitions and their critical reception. His private world, beliefs and aspirations are revealed through his extensive cache of journals, letters and other writings. Fully updated throughout, drawing on the insights of thirty years of scholarship since its first edition, Thomson's text remains the best introduction to this controversial and often contradictory artist.

What is a 'symbolic revolution'? What happens when a symbolic revolutions occurs, how can it succeed and prevail and why is it so difficult to understand? Using the exemplary case of Edouard Manet, Pierre Bourdieu began to ponder these questions as early as the 1980s, before making it the focus of his lectures in his last years at the College de France. This volume of Bourdieu's previously unpublished lectures provides his most sustained contribution to the sociology of art and the analysis of cultural fields. It is also a major contribution to our understanding of impressionism and the works of Manet. Bourdieu treats the paintings of Manet as so many challenges to the conservative academicism of the pompier painters, the populism of the Realists, the commercial eclecticism of genre painting, and even the 'Impressionists', showing that such a revolution is inseparable from the conditions that allow fields of cultural production to emerge. At a time when the Academy was in crisis and when the increase in the number of painters challenged the role of the state in defining artistic value, the break that Manet inaugurated revolutionised the aesthetic order. The new vision of the world that emerged from this upheaval still shapes our categories of perception and judgement today the very categories that we use every day to understand the representations of the world and the world itself. This major work by one of the greatest sociologists of the last 50 years will be welcomed by students and scholars in sociology, art history and the social sciences and humanities generally. It will also appeal to a wide readership interested in art, in impressionism and in the works of Manet.

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. -- .

"There is scarcely one letter by Van Gogh which I, who am certainly no expert, do not find fascinating." -W. H. Auden In addition to his many remarkable paintings and drawings, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) left behind a fascinating and voluminous body of correspondence. This highly accessible book includes a broad selection of 265 letters, from a total of 820 in existence, that focus on Van Gogh's relentless quest to find his destiny, a search that led him to become an artist; the close bond with his brother Theo; his fraught relationship with his father; his innate yearning for recognition; and his great love of art and literature. The correspondence not only offers detailed insights into Van Gogh's complex inner life, but also re-creates the world in which he lived and the artistic avant-garde that was taking hold in Paris. The letters are accompanied by a general introduction, historic family photographs, and reproductions of 87 actual pages of letters that contain sketches by Van Gogh. Selected from the critically acclaimed 6-volume set of letters published by the Van Gogh Museum in 2009, Ever Yours is the essential book on Van Gogh's letters, which every art and literature lover needs to own. Published in association with the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Were late nineteenth-century gender boundaries as restrictive as is generally held? In Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Paintings: Work Place/Domestic Space, Kirstin Ringelberg argues that it is time to bring the current re-evaluation of the notion of separate spheres to these images. Focusing on studio paintings by American artists William Merritt Chase and Mary Fairchild MacMonnies Low, she explores how the home-based painting studio existed outside of entrenched gendered divisions of public and private space and argues that representations of these studios are at odds with standard perceptions of the images, their creators, and the concept of gender in the nineteenth century. Unlike most of their bourgeois contemporaries, Gilded Age artists, whether male or female, often melded the worlds of work and home. Through analysis of both paintings and literature of the time, Ringelberg reveals how art history continues to support a false dichotomy; that, in fact, paintings that show women negotiating a complex combination of professionalism and domesticity are still overlooked in favor of those that emphasize women as decorative objects. Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Paintings challenges the dominant interpretation of American (and European) Impressionism, and considers both men and women artists as active performers of multivalent identities.

'I perhaps owe it to flowers', wrote Claude Monet (1840-1926), 'that I became a painter.' One of the leading figures of the Impressionist movement and perhaps the most celebrated landscape painter of his age, Monet dedicated his life to capturing the subtleties of the natural world. Trees - willows enveloped in the eerie mists of the Seine, palm trees beneath the bright Mediterranean sun or poplars heavily laden with snow - became a significant motif in his work, and he used them to experiment with an extraordinary variety of tones and colours. Ralph Skea's account is split into five main chapters, each focusing on a different theme: Monet's earliest drawings and paintings of trees; his atmospheric use of rivers and coastlines, from the English Channel to the Italian Riviera; the fields, farmlands and orchards of France; parks and gardens in both the city and the countryside, including his series of paintings featuring trees reflected in his water-lily pond; and his muted depictions of trees in winter. The result is a succint and highly accessible exploration of some of the best-loved landscapes in art.

Towards the end of his life and much inspired by Japanese water gardens, Monet spent a great deal of time in his beloved Giverny. Adorned with poppies, blue sage, dahlias and irises, the waters were disturbed only by bamboos and water lilies. His water garden was originally created to satisfy a need to be near water, and to provide a visual feast that could be enjoyed from his house. The pond was fed by the river Ru, and weeping willow and silver birch hung over its edges, caressing the fronds of the greenery and blossoms below. Its famous green wooden footbridge was built across the water and it became the central focus of many of his works. He said, 'It took me some time to understand my water lilies. I planted them for pleasure.' and so he began to work on what is probably the most famous series of paintings the world has ever seen.

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.