'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.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) felt a profound empathy with the natural environment, and considered the spiritual essence of trees to be comparable with that of human figures. Vincent's Trees traces Van Gogh's development as a painter of trees in the natural landscape - from his home province of North Brabant, through Paris to Provence. Ralph Skea's elegant prose is accompanied by Van Gogh's vibrant illustrations of trees, which range from pencil and ink sketches to watercolours and oil. Stylistic experiments encompassing Pointillism and compositions inspired by Japanese prints give way to the expressive, painterly depictions of his later work. The book also includes quotes from Van Gogh's letters, which convey the depth of his feeling for the natural landscape, and the force with which it affected him.

Vincent van Gogh never owned a garden, but throughout his career he painted and drew outdoor spaces and natural objects frequently, both fascinated and stimulated by each location s unique character. In this book Ralph Skea surveys the gardens that were most dear to Van Gogh from the domestic havens of parsonage gardens in the Netherlands to the romance of Parisian city parks, from the blazing flower beds of Provence to the asylum gardens that provided the artist with seclusion and calm in his final months. Whether joyous paintings of plants in bloom or the intensely beautiful studies of lilacs, roses, irises, and pine trees that he produced in the asylum at Saint-Remy, all the oils and sketches included here are monuments to the artist s originality and poetic sensibility.

It is often forgotten just how provocative Impressionist canvases seemed when they were first exhibited in 1874. The advocates of the new style rejected the established principles of art prevalent at that time in France.

This book traces Impressionism’s origins to its spread to America and Australia. Ralph Skea shows how Impressionist artists transformed everyday subject matter. Daringly using colour and rapid brushstrokes, the Impressionists worked out of doors, creating paintings that captured the transient effects of light and feeling. Impressionism’s initial shock factor gradually gave way to widespread acceptance, but only now can we appreciate how profound its influence has been on modern art.

Despite his posthumous fame as a painter of flowers, still-lifes, gardens, landscapes and city scenes, during his lifetime Vincent van Gogh believed that his portraits constituted his most important works. Although as an artist he was `touched by so many different things', he was nevertheless committed to the art of portraiture - a quality that distinguished him from his contemporaries. Van Gogh was passionate in his avoidance of bland, photographic resemblances, in the hope of capturing the essential character of his models by means of expressive colour and brushwork. Showcasing a dramatic set of portraits created during Van Gogh's ten-year career, this book reflects the strong visual impact with which the artist captured the diversity of contemporary life. In his many portraits, we can discern the artist's desire to record expressively a number of themes, from the plight of the agricultural workers in his native Brabant and the destitution of prostitutes and their children in urban Europe, to the lives of his cosmopolitan acquaintances in Paris, including cafe owners and art dealers. It was here that he began his remarkable sequence of self-portraits. With reference to Van Gogh's extensive correspondence, Skea elaborates how the artist perceived his chosen subjects as would a writer, and how he felt that his portraits should somehow evoke what he considered to be the spiritual underpinning of human existence