Business leader and arts patron Sir Edwin A. G. Manton (1909-2005) and his wife Florence, Lady Manton, assembled an outstanding collection of 18th- and 19th-century British art. A gift to the Clark Art Institute from the Manton Foundation in 2007, their collection features more than three hundred oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, including works by John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Gainsborough, and William Blake. In a series of wide-ranging essays, prominent scholars consider the major works and themes in the collection, relating them to larger issues within the field of British studies. Individual essays are devoted to Constable's oil sketches, cloud studies, and magisterial painting The Wheat Field; the growth of the watercolor tradition; print portfolios and narrative series; Thomas Rowlandson's satiric drawings; and Gainsborough's use of experimental materials as revealed through recent scientific analysis. The volume concludes with an illustrated checklist of the works in the collection. Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Only twenty-five at the time of his death in 1828, young Richard Parkes Bonington nevertheless was a seminal figure in the development of modernism in nineteenth-century French painting. This catalogue raisonne of his oil and watercolor paintings represents the first attempt to establish and present the artist's complete known oeuvre. Drawing on 25 years of research, Patrick Noon catalogues, analyzes, and reproduces 400 artworks now indisputably attributed to Bonington. Many of these paintings have never before been published. The book sets Bonington's achievement in the context of the intellectual, social, and artistic ferment of high romanticism in Paris and London, and it shows the profound effect of his style on his friend and contemporary, Eugene Delacroix, and many others. Noon's detailed and accurate study will inform all future discourse on Bonington and his remarkable legacy. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art