Evelyn Waugh's first book: a portrait of one of the greatest artists of the nienteenth century, from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth 'Biography, as books about the dead are capriciously catalogued, is still very much in the mode' This is a sparkling account of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's tragic and mysterious life, telling the story behind some of the greatest poetry and painting of the nineteenth century. Shot through with charm and dry wit, and illuminated by his sense of kinship with the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Rossetti is at once a brilliant reevaluation of Rosetti's work and legacy, as well as a blast of defiance against the art establishment of Waugh's day. 'The youthful high spirits of the writing make this a true cultural delight' New Statesman 'To be celebrated with fireworks, bunting and marching bands' Country Life

A wide-ranging collection of essays written for the William Morris Society exploring the various intersections between the life, work and achievements of William Morris (1834-1896) and that of John Ruskin (1819-1900). Subjects covered include Ruskin's connection with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the promotion of craft skills and meaningful work, Morris and the division of labour, Ruskin's engagement with education and the environment, Ruskin and the art and architecture of Red House, the parallels between Ruskin's support for Laxey Mill and Morris's Merton Abbey Works, the illustrated manuscript and the contrasts between Ruskin's Tory paternalism and Morris's revolutionary socialism. The book includes articles first published in The Journal of William Morris Studies between 1977 and 2012 and new pieces written especially for this volume. Ruskin's beliefs had a profound and lasting impact on Morris who wrote, upon first reading Ruskin whilst at Oxford University, that his views offered a "new road on which the world should travel" - a road that led Morris to social and political change.

This is an essential volume for anyone wanting to learn more about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their ethos, and offers the opportunity to study their greatest works in one beautiful collection. This impressive new book opens by looking at key Pre-Raphaelite artists in turn, documenting the artists' lives and the development of their talents. Includes a stunning gallery of more than 290 Pre-Raphaelite works.

First exhibited at the Stuyvesant Hall in New York in 1851, Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware captured the imagination of many Americans searching for national symbols in a time of sectionalism and disunity. Despite Leutze’s aspirations, the exhibition became an opportunity for critics of history painting to stake their positions. As suggested by the book’s title, Leutze’s epic painting is a touchstone in the evolution of American history painting. It represents a triumphant climax of the American adoption of the Grand Manner, inherited from eighteenth-century English painting, and portends its seemingly inevitable demise. From the painting’s gargantuan size, which fitted it only for a grand, public setting, to its focus on an already deified public hero, Leutze’s painting presumed a cultural as well as a political consensus—a consensus that proved illusory at best. Emanuel Leutze was arguably the most prominent American history painter of his time, and Jochen Wierich argues that Leutze’s work became the locus of contemporary debates surrounding the nature of history painting and its future.

An illuminating look at how the Pre-Raphaelite movement was embraced by a group of vanguard American artists Bringing together insights from a distinguished group of scholars, this beautiful book analyzes the history and historiography of the American Pre-Raphaelites, and how the movement made its way from England to America. Led by Thomas Charles Farrer-an English expatriate and acolyte of the hugely influential English critic John Ruskin-the American Pre-Raphaelite artists followed Ruskin's dictum to depict nature close up and with great fidelity. Many members of the group (including Farrer, who served in the Union army during the American Civil War) were also abolitionists, and several created works with a rich political subtext. Featuring the work of artists such as Fidelia Bridges, Henry and Thomas Charles Farrer, Charles Herbert Moore, Henry Roderick Newman, and William Trost Richards, this generously illustrated volume is filled with insightful essays that explore the influence of Ruskin on the American artists, the role of watercolor and photography in their work, symbolism and veiled references to the Civil War, and much more.

"An invaluable resource a delightful and compendious opus." - The Pre-Raphaelite Society Review The Death of Chatterton hangs from the wall of the Tate Britain, a resplendent depiction of tragedy. This is the canvas that earned Henry Wallis his lasting legacy. It embodies the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, from its morbid subject (Thomas Chatterton, a precocious 18th-century poet who poisoned himself to escape poverty, aged only seventeen), to its vibrant colourwork and detailed naturalism, characteristic of the first phase of Pre-Raphaelitism. Despite this, no significant study has been dedicated to Wallis - until now. Henry Wallis: From Pre-Raphaelite to Collector/Connoisseur - delivers the first comprehensive appraisal of this often-overlooked Pre-Raphaelite. Composed of three parts - a biography, a catalogue raisonne and a series of important appendices - this book demonstrates the full range of Wallis's contributions to the world of Victorian art. The biography acknowledges Wallis's expertise as a colourist and draughtsman, while paying respect to his lesser-known accomplishments as both collector and connoisseur. The Illustrated Catalogue gathers every identifiable work in the painter's name - of which there are many, including The Stonebreaker: Wallis's other great masterpiece. Finally, the appendices present a selection of correspondence between Wallis and various members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle - William Holman Hunt, Frederic George Stephens, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Bell Scott, Arthur Hughes, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. A pioneering exploration of the artist and the man, Henry Wallis will be at home on the bookshelf of any Pre-Raphaelite enthusiast.

Following the death of Elizabeth Siddal in 1862 and his settling in Chelsea, Rossetti entered on a period of his life -- charted in volume 3 -- that was marked by renewed activity as a painter and increased financial prosperity. The years 1868-1870 covered by volume 4 culminate in his return to writing poetry and the publication in June 1870 of his long-anticipated and widely-read Poems. However, despite the satisfaction that he could take from his standing as a painter and from the fact that he was about to establish himself as a poet, 1868-1870 were troubled years for Rossetti. Problems with his eyesight led him to give up painting for long periods, and to fear that, like his father before him, he would end his days blind. He consulted Sir William Bowman and other leading ophthalmologists, who eased his mind sufficiently for him to return to his easel. This was also the time when he declared his love for Jane Morris, the wife of his long-time friend and admirer William Morris. In his long, moving letters to Janey we come face to face with the satisfactions and frustrations of their relationship. The letters to Janey provide a context for understanding the many paintings and drawings from this period for which she was the model, and for gauging the biographical origins of the sonnets, written at this time for the sequence, The House of Life, an early version of which was included in Poems.Probably the most rewarding letters in the volume concern the preparation of Poems. The letters deal at length with Rossetti's decision to have his poems typeset for distribution to friends, the exhumation of Elizabeth Siddal's coffin to recover the manuscript of his poems, his obsessive care over the physical appearance of the volume, especially the binding, and his efforts at "working the oracle," William Bell Scott's description of his methodically lining up sympathetic reviewers.As with all of Rossetti's correspondence, the letters in volume 4 are replete with pointed and sometimes humorous commentary on an array of people and events, ranging from Edward Burne-Jones's affair with "the Greek damzel," Mary Zambaco, and Frederick Sandys's appropriation of subjects from his pictures, to his unease over Swinburne's uncontrollable drunkenness, and his ominous hatred of Robert Buchanan, the author of the "Fleshly School" attack on his poetry in the Contemporary Review of October 1871, which became a major cause of the disastrous events of the years 1871-1872.

The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism' redefines the task of interpreting the East in the late nineteenth century. It takes as a starting point Edward Said's 'Orientalism' (1978) in order to investigate the latent and manifest traces of the East in Pre-Raphaelite literature and culture. As Eleonora Sasso demonstrates, the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates appeared to be the most eligible representatives of a profoundly conservative manifestation of the Orient, of its mystic aura, criminal underworld, and feminine sensuality, or to put it into Arabic terms, of its aja'ib (marvels), mutalibun (treasure-hunters) and hur al-ayn (femmes fatales). By combining together Western and Oriental modes of art, this study fills a gap in Pre-Raphaelite and Oriental studies.

This book addresses the unique and profound indeterminacy of “Creole,� a label applied to white, black, and mixed-race persons born in French colonies during the nineteenth century. "Creole� implies that the geography of one’s birth determines identity in ways that supersede race, language, nation, and social status. Paradoxically, the very capaciousness of the term engendered a perpetual search for visual signs of racial difference as well as a pretense to blindness about the intermingling of races in Creole society. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby reconstructs the search for visual signs of racial difference among people whose genealogies were often repressed. She explores French representations of Creole subjects and representations by Creole artists in France, the Caribbean, and the Americas. To do justice to the complexity of Creole identity, Grigsby interrogates the myriad ways in which people defined themselves in relation to others. With close attention to the differences between Afro-Creole and Euro-Creole cultures and persons, Grigsby examines figures such as Théodore Chassériau, Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, Alexandre Dumas père, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, the models Joseph and Laure, Josephine Bonaparte, Jeanne Duval, and Adah Isaacs Menken. Based on extensive archival research, Creole is an original and important examination of colonial identity. This essential study will be welcomed by specialists in nineteenth-century art history, French cultural history, the history of race, and transatlantic history more generally.

In the 1890s, French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry founded pataphysics, the absurdist "science of imaginary solutions," a concept that has been nominally recognized as the precursor to Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd, among other movements. Over a century after Jarry "made the gesture of dying," Katie L. Price and Michael R. Taylor argue that it is time to take the comedic intervention of pataphysics seriously. 'Pataphysics Unrolled collects critical and creative essays to create an unauthorized account of pataphysical experimentation from its origins in the late nineteenth century through the contemporary moment. Reaching beyond the geographic and cultural boundaries normally associated with pataphysics, this volume presents rich readings of pataphysical syzygy, traces the influence of pataphysics across disciplines and outside of coteries such as the College de 'Pataphysique, and asks fundamental questions about the field of modern and contemporary studies that challenge distinctions between the modern and the postmodern, high and low culture, the serious and the comic. Touching on disciplines such as literature, art, architecture, education, music, and technology, this book reveals how pataphysics has been a platform and medium for persistent intellectual, poetic, conceptual, and artistic experimentation for over a century. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Charles Bernstein, Marc Decimo, Adam Dickinson, Johanna Drucker, Craig Dworkin, Catherine Hansen, James Hendler, John Heon, Ted Hiebert, Andrew Hugill, Steve McCaffery, Seth McDowell, Jerome McGann, Anne M. Mulhall, Marcus O'Dair, Jean-Michel Rabate, Orchid Tierney, and Brandon Walsh.

This book examines the involvement of African American artists in the New Deal art programs of the 1930s. Emphasizing broader issues informed by the uniqueness of Black experience rather than individual artists’ works, Mary Ann Calo makes the case that the revolutionary vision of these federal art projects is best understood in the context of access to opportunity, mediated by the reality of racial segregation. Focusing primarily on the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Calo documents African American artists’ participation in community art centers in Harlem, in St. Louis, and throughout the South. She examines the internal workings of the Harlem Artists’ Guild, the Guild’s activities during the 1930s, and its alliances with other groups, such as the Artists’ Union and the National Negro Congress. Calo also explores African American artists’ representation in the exhibitions sponsored by WPA administrators and the critical reception of their work. In doing so, she elucidates the evolving meanings of the terms race, culture, and community in the interwar era. The book concludes with an essay by Jacqueline Francis on Black artists in the early 1940s, after the end of the FAP program. Presenting essential new archival information and important insights into the experiences of Black New Deal artists, this study expands the factual record and positions the cumulative evidence within the landscape of critical race studies. It will be welcomed by art historians and American studies scholars specializing in early twentieth-century race relations.

Follow in the footsteps of Vincent Van Gogh, from his birthplace in Zundert, Netherlands, to his last days in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, and explore the hidden inspirations behind the world-renowned artist's most famous paintings in this beautiful art book and travelogue, illustrated with more than 250 black-and-white and full-color images throughout. In 1990, two photographers and art enthusiasts, Danilo De Marco and Mario Dondero, set out to explore the details of Vincent Van Gogh's life, retracing his journey across Europe by foot and by train. Armed with the love and knowledge of Van Gogh's work, they traveled from the Netherlands to England, Belgium, and France to take in the sights as Van Gogh might have seen them a century earlier. They also turned to art historian Gloria Fossi to better understand, experience, and contextualize Van Gogh's brilliant mind, drawing insights from his personal letters and other historical documents. Van Gogh's well-documented travels come alive in this gorgeous book which brings together the landscapes, architecture, portraits, and cultural references that inspired his art. The authors juxtapose vintage and contemporary photographs with Van Gogh's renditions, demonstrating not only the passage of time, but Van Gogh's unique artistic vision, brilliantly revealed brushstroke by brushstroke. From the Netherlands, where the artist was born, to his last days in France, no place he visited in his 37 years is left unexplored, and all have become timeless landmarks through his art. In Search of Van Gogh brings into focus the places and objects that inspired and fueled Van Gogh's artistic genius and offers fresh insights into his prolific work and process. In searching for the artist's mind and soul, the authors create a pointillistic portrait of a human being whose life was remarkable, and whose story must be shared for generations to come.

Emilie Charmy (1878-1974) charted a remarkable course in the world of French modern art in the first half of the twentieth century. Her earliest works, executed around 1900, explored the legacy of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. An engagement with the avant-garde circle of Fauve painters defined her art in the years leading up to the First World War. In the ensuing interwar period, Charmy found her mature style, characterized by optical realism, an adherence to the traditional genres of portraiture, the nude, landscape, and still life, and a modernist notion of direct, vigorous paint application as a mark of artistic sincerity. This attitude found its ultimate expression in numerous renderings of the female nude, which, by virtue of Charmy's melding of ostensibly feminine and masculine qualities, charm and seductiveness on the one hand and power and firmness on the other, confounded prevailing expectations about the nature of women's art. These images retain their provocative force today.
This publication accompanies the first U.S. retrospective of the painting of Emilie Charmy, which is organized by the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia. Exhibition curator Matthew Affron surveys key phases of Charmy's artistic career in relation to major issues in modern French painting of her era. Sarah Betzer examines two principal subjects of Charmy's early work, the nude and the bourgeois interior, as evidence of an ambitious dialogue with avant-garde precedent. Rita Felski considers Charmy in light of recent feminist approaches to the study of the role women creators played in defining modernism."

Major edition revealing key ideas and events in the lives and work of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and Victorian literary circles: 5,800 letters (including 2,000 previously unpublished letters) to 330 recipients. The best of these letters, flowing rapidly from his pen, radiate charisma and enthusiasm, warmth and care for his friends, and a total engagement with art and literature. BURLINGTON MAGAZINE [Julian Treuherz] 1835-1854: This nine-volume edition will represent the definitive collection of extant Rossetti correspondence, an outstanding primary witness to the range of ideas and opinions that shaped Rossetti's art and poetry. The largest collection ofRossetti's letters ever to be published, it features all known surviving letters, a total of almost 5,800 to over 330 recipients, and includes 2,000 previously unpublished letters by Rossetti and selected letters to him. In addition to this, about 100 drawings taken from within letter texts are also reproduced. In its entirety the collection will give an invaluable and unparalleled insight into Rossetti's character and art, and will form a rich resource for students and scholars studying all aspects of his life and work. The correspondence has been transcribed from collections in sixty-four manuscript repositories, containing Rossetti's letters to his companions in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt and Stephens; friends such as Boyce and Bell Scott; his early patrons, Ellen Heaton and James Leathart; and his publisher friend, Alexander Macmillan. An additional twenty-two printed sources have also been accessed. Index; extensive annotations.WILLIAM E. FREDEMAN (1928-1999) was professor of English at the University of British Columbia from 1956-1991. His many books, articles and reviews on the Pre-Raphaelites and their followersinclude his important Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study. He died in 1999 with this edition almost completed. An editorial committee chaired by Betty Fredeman has been formed to see it through the press.

This well illustrated book celebrates every aspect of the wide-ranging achievements of William Morris - writer, designer, cultural critic, revolutionary socialist - with particular emphasis on their relevance to our own times. The book makes available up-to-date Morris scholarship in accessible form. Written by a group of international scholars who took part in a conference marking the centenary of the death of Morris in 1896, the book has sections devoted to Morris and Literature (covering texts from The Earthly Paradise to the late romances); Morris, the Arts & Crafts and the New World (including discussions of his influence in Rhode Island, Boston, Ontario and New Zealand); and Morris, Gender and Politics (with fresh consideration of his relation to Victorian ideas of manliness and of the particular qualities of his anti-statist politics). The latter section also draws attention to a hitherto unknown play by Morris's daughter May and concludes with an account of his biographer, the late E.P. Thompson.

During the nineteenth century, Albrecht Durer's art, piety, and personal character were held up as models to inspire contemporary artists and-it was hoped-to return Germany to international artistic eminence. In this book, Jeffrey Chipps Smith explores Durer's complex posthumous reception during the great century of museum building in Europe, with a particular focus on the artist's role as a creative and moral exemplar for German artists and museum visitors. In an era when museums were emerging as symbols of civic, regional, and national identity, dozens of new national, princely, and civic museums began to feature portraits of Durer in their elaborate decorative programs embellishing the facades, grand staircases, galleries, and ceremonial spaces. Most of these arose in Germany and Austria, though examples can be seen as far away as St. Petersburg, Stockholm, London, and New York City. Probing the cultural, political, and educational aspirations and rivalries of these museums and their patrons, Smith traces how Durer was painted, sculpted, and prominently placed to accommodate the era's diverse needs and aspirations. He investigates what these portraits can tell us about the rise of a distinct canon of famous Renaissance and Baroque artists-addressing the question of why Durer was so often paired with Raphael, who was considered to embody the greatness of Italian art-and why, with the rise of German nationalism, Hans Holbein the Younger often replaced Raphael as Durer's partner. Accessibly written and comprehensive in scope, this book sheds new light on museum building in the nineteenth century and the rise of art history as a discipline. It will appeal to specialists in nineteenth-century and early modern art, the history of museums and collecting, and art historiography.

The writers and artists of the Spanish avant-garde, enthralled with the streamlined, mass-produced commodities of the Machine Age, incorporated these objects into their literary and visual works. In doing so, they launched a broad inquiry into the relations between mind and matter, people and things, words and world. In Modernism and Its Merchandise, Juli Highfill traces that dissonant but productive line of inquiry by focusing on the objects of obsession for the Spanish vanguardists—starting with the fruit bowls of cubist still life; continuing with the merchandise, machines, and fashions of the 1920s; and concluding with objects of ruin and decay. The trajectory moves from the natural to the technological domains, from the newfangled to the outmoded. Throughout this study, objects appear ever in motion, engaging and altering their human subjects—whether as objects of exchange, as prosthetic organs, or as triggers for powerful affective responses, such as appetite, taste, and disgust. The insights that arise from these encounters with material things anticipate the knowledge emerging today in the fields of material culture, technology studies, and network theory.

In Consuming Painting, Allison Deutsch challenges the pervasive view that Impressionism was above all about visual experience. Focusing on the language of food and consumption as they were used by such prominent critics as Baudelaire and Zola, she writes new histories for familiar works by Manet, Monet, Caillebotte, and Pissarro and creates fresh possibilities for experiencing and interpreting them. Examining the culinary metaphors that the most influential critics used to express their attraction or disgust toward painting, Deutsch rethinks French modern-life painting in relation to the visceral reactions that these works evoked in their earliest publics. Writers posed viewing as analogous to ingestion and used comparisons to food to describe the appearance of paint and the painter’s process. The food metaphors they chose were aligned with specific female types, such as red meat for sexualized female flesh, confections for fashionably made-up women, and hearty vegetables for agricultural laborers. These culinary figures of speech, Deutsch argues, provide important insights into both the fabrication of the feminine and the construction of masculinity in nineteenth-century France. Consuming Painting exposes the social politics at stake in the deeply gendered metaphors of sense and sensation. Original and convincing, Consuming Painting upends traditional narratives of the sensory reception of modern painting. This trailblazing book is essential reading for specialists in nineteenth-century art and criticism, gender studies, and modernism.

This project is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton penned the Declaration of Sentiments for the first women’s rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, she unleashed a powerful force in American society. In A Sisterhood of Sculptors, Melissa Dabakis outlines the conditions under which a group of American women artists adopted this egalitarian view of society and negotiated the gendered terrain of artistic production at home and abroad. Between 1850 and 1876, a community of talented women sought creative refuge in Rome and developed successful professional careers as sculptors. Some of these women have become well known in art-historical circles: Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, Anne Whitney, and Vinnie Ream. The reputations of others have remained, until now, buried in the historical record: Emma Stebbins, Margaret Foley, Sarah Fisher Ames, and Louisa Lander. At midcentury, they were among the first women artists to attain professional stature in the American art world while achieving international fame in Rome, London, and other cosmopolitan European cities. In their invention of modern womanhood, they served as models for a younger generation of women who adopted artistic careers in unprecedented numbers in the years following the Civil War. At its core, A Sisterhood of Sculptors is concerned with the gendered nature of creativity and expatriation. Taking guidance from feminist theory, cultural geography, and expatriate and postcolonial studies, Dabakis provides a detailed investigation of the historical phenomenon of women’s artistic lives in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century. As an interdisciplinary examination of femininity and creativity, it provides models for viewing and interpreting nineteenth-century sculpture and for analyzing the gendered status of the artistic profession.

Penelope Fitzgerald, the Booker Prize-winning author of 'Offshore' and 'The Blue Flower', turns her attention to the remarkable life of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. 'I mean by a picture a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any light that ever shone - in a land no one can define or remember, only desire' Edward Burne-Jones Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) was the prototypical pre-Raphaelite but with a truly individual sensibility. Penelope Fitzgerald's delightful biography charts his life from humble beginnings in Birmingham as the son of an unsuccessful framer, through a transformative period at Oxford, where he met his close friend and collaborator William Morris, and on to the apprenticeship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti that would shape his artistic vision. His work harks back to an Arthurian England - an Arcadia that offered solace against the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and on a deeply personal level provided respite from his ever-present melancholia. This is an illuminating portrait of a fascinating figure - artistic genius, doting father, troubled husband - written with all Penelope Fitzgerald's characteristic sympathy and insight.

Surveying the Avant-Garde examines the art and literature of the Americas in the early twentieth century through the lens of the questionnaire, a genre as central as the manifesto to the history of the avant-garde. Questions such as “How do you imagine Latin America?� and “What should American art be?� issued by avant-garde magazines like Imán, a Latin American periodical based in Paris, and Cuba’s Revista de Avance demonstrate how editors, writers, and readers all grappled with the concept of “America,� particularly in relationship to Europe, and how the questionnaire became a structuring device for reflecting on their national and aesthetic identities in print. Through an analysis of these questionnaires and their responses, Lori Cole reveals how ideas like “American art,� as well as “modernism� and “avant-garde,� were debated at the very moment of their development and consolidation. Unlike a manifesto, whose signatories align with a single polemical text, the questionnaire produces a patchwork of responses, providing a composite and sometimes fractured portrait of a community. Such responses yield a self-reflexive history of the era as told by its protagonists, which include figures such as Gertrude Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, Jean Toomer, F. T. Marinetti, Diego Rivera, and Jorge Luis Borges. The book traces a genealogy of the genre from the Renaissance paragone, or “comparison of the arts,� through the rise of enquêtes in the late nineteenth century, up to the contemporary questionnaire, which proliferates in art magazines today. By analyzing a selection of surveys issued across the Atlantic, Cole indicates how they helped shape artists’ and writers’ understanding of themselves and their place in the world. Based on extensive archival research, this book reorients our understanding of modernism as both hemispheric and transatlantic by narrating how the artists and writers of the period engaged in aesthetic debates that informed and propelled print communities in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Scholars of modernism and the avant-garde will welcome Cole’s original and compellingly crafted work.

"Hidden Burne-Jones" is a major new volume which throws new light the draughtsmanship of leading Pre-Raphaelite artist, Edward Burne-Jones. The book studies Burne-Jones' development as an artist and image maker through his commitment to drawing during the course of his career. The volume includes three essays by leading Burne-Jones specialists. The first, by John Christian, presents new research on Burne-Jones' drawing technique and stylistic development, most clearly seen in works like the "Fairy Family" series (1857), "The Annunciation" (1857-61), "Study for an Idyll and An Idyll" (1862), and "Drapery Study of Lucretia for Chaucer's 'Legend of Good Women'" (1863).The second essay, by Elisa Korb, studies Burne-Jones' depiction of the female form, his approach to using models, and the stylistic development of subjects such as the nude over the course of his career. The artist's fascination with the female form is most strongly evoked in works like "Female Nude: Three Studies" (1865-66), "Two Nude Female Studies for 'The Lament'", (1865), "Lucretia" (1867) and "Composition Study for 'Charity'" (1867). The final essay, by Tessa Sidey, looks at Burne-Jones' often uneasy relationship with his native city of Birmingham, and the work of major benefactors, especially local patrons J.R. Holliday and Charles Fairfax Murray, in helping to develop the Museum and Art Gallery's internationally important holdings the artist's work.The volume illustrates 63 selected drawings and works on paper, which appear throughout the essays and the main exhibition presentation, nearly 30 of which are reproduced in colour. Each work is accompanied by an entry, which includes full specifications, provenance, inscriptions and an extended caption. The Burne-Jones collection at Birmingham is in every sense an international public resource. It contains nearly 1,200 works, of which over a thousand are works on paper and related archive material. This volume includes a complete catalogue listing of all 1,137 drawings, watercolours, prints and archive material at Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, which will also form the basis of a new on-line Burne-Jones Resource Site to be launched in 2007.

This volume is part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh's published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation, and a full account of each text's manuscript development and textual variants. The edition's General Editor is Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's grandson and editor of the twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence. This, Waugh's first published book, marked the centenary of the birth of the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). Waugh was fascinated by the bohemian lives of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and by his own family connection with them (William Holman Hunt had married, successively, two cousins of his grandfather). Rossetti is both compassionate towards its subject and critical of his self-destructive nature. The incisive analysis of Rossetti's painterly techniques contributed to the resurgence of public interest in Rossetti's art and poetry. The biography was also an early expression of Waugh's lifelong interest in narrative art, and laid the foundations for his own belief in the importance of the spiritual as well as the aesthetic vision of the artist. Although Rossetti was hastily compiled, it is nevertheless elegant and witty.

Following the death of Elizabeth Siddal in 1862 and his settling in Chelsea, Rossetti entered on a period of his life -- charted in volume 3 -- that was marked by renewed activity as a painter and increased financial prosperity. The years 1868-1870 covered by volume 4 culminate in his return to writing poetry and the publication in June 1870 of his long-anticipated and widely-read Poems. However, despite the satisfaction that he could take from his standing as a painter and from the fact that he was about to establish himself as a poet, 1868-1870 were troubled years for Rossetti. Problems with his eyesight led him to give up painting for long periods, and to fear that, like his father before him, he would end his days blind. He consulted Sir William Bowman and other leading ophthalmologists, who eased his mind sufficiently for him to return to his easel. This was also the time when he declared his love for Jane Morris, the wife of his long-time friend and admirer William Morris. In his long, moving letters to Janey we come face to face with the satisfactions and frustrations of their relationship. The letters to Janey provide a context for understanding the many paintings and drawings from this period for which she was the model, and for gauging the biographical origins of the sonnets, written at this time for the sequence, The House of Life, an early version of which was included in Poems.Probably the most rewarding letters in the volume concern the preparation of Poems. The letters deal at length with Rossetti's decision to have his poems typeset for distribution to friends, the exhumation of Elizabeth Siddal's coffin to recover the manuscript of his poems, his obsessive care over the physical appearance of the volume, especially the binding, and his efforts at "working the oracle," William Bell Scott's description of his methodically lining up sympathetic reviewers.As with all of Rossetti's correspondence, the letters in volume 4 are replete with pointed and sometimes humorous commentary on an array of people and events, ranging from Edward Burne-Jones's affair with "the Greek damzel," Mary Zambaco, and Frederick Sandys's appropriation of subjects from his pictures, to his unease over Swinburne's uncontrollable drunkenness, and his ominous hatred of Robert Buchanan, the author of the "Fleshly School" attack on his poetry in the Contemporary Review of October 1871, which became a major cause of the disastrous events of the years 1871-1872.