This catalog accompanies the first monographic examination of the art of William Trost Richards in Boston. The exhibition, presented at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, features oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings, including many rarely seen works from the artist's descendants. Richards, a leading figure among nineteenth-century landscape painters, reflects a key moment in the evolution of the genre. Through the illustration of over 150 works, the catalog spans Richards's career from his earliest sketches to his later masterful seascapes and landscapes. A range of styles and themes are also presented, highlighting the artist's hieroglyphic interpretation of nature, an interest of Romantic artists that was particular to their age of flourishing scientific discoveries. This volume features research by scholars from various disciplines, including art history, American studies, literary studies, and geology. The writers delve into the personal and historical background of the artist and illuminate the links between Richards's works and the artistic, scientific, and philosophical currents of his era. The catalog sheds new light on Richards's art and on his position in the development of American art and the rise of environmental issues in American culture.

"My art is rooted in a single reflection: why am I not as others
are?"--Edvard Munch
Published in conjunction with a major exhibit at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, "Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol and Expression" includes nine essays from scholars representing a variety of disciplines. From themes of love, sexuality, gender and anxiety to comparisons with Ibsen and Kierkegaard, the catalog explores the meanings of Munch's imagery, his sources in Symbolist art, and his legacy for German Expressionism within the context of his contemporaries' developments in psychology, literature, and philosophy. The volume of over 200 pages includes more than 60 color plates and 130 black and white illustrations, many from rarely seen private collections and some never exhibited before.

Since the Renaissance, art in Belgium and the Netherlands has been known for its innovations in realistic representation and its fluency in symbolism. New market forces and artistic concerns fueled the development of landscape as an independent genre in Belgium in the sixteenth century, and landscape emerged as a major focus for nineteenth-century realist and symbolist artists. Nature's Mirror, and the exhibition it accompanies, traces these landmark developments with a rich array of seldom-seen works. Nature's Mirror presents its collection of prints and drawings in chronological order, exploring the evolving dialogue between subjective experience and the external world from the Renaissance through the First World War. Essays by American and Belgian specialists examine artists within the regional, political, and industrial contexts that strongly influenced them. Featuring more than one hundred works, many from the leading private collection of Belgian art in America, the Hearn Family Trust, Nature's Mirror explores the evolution of Belgian art in this fruitful period with remarkable lucidity and detail.

The Simon Collection, housed in London and France, is the finest assemblage of modern Belgian art outside Belgium. Accompanying an exhibition held at Boston College's McMullen Museum, " A New Key" presents fifty-three works never before displayed in North America, including important paintings by Rene Magritte, James Ensor, Frits van den Berge, Paul Delvaux, and others.
Full-color reproductions of the paintings are accompanied by seven essays that illuminate their significance and the distinctive contribution of Belgian art to the development of modernism. Addressing themes like the rise of Freudian psychology, the influence of carnival, and the trauma of two world wars, "A New Key "forges a new understanding of Belgium's long-neglected role in the development of modern art.