Joan Eardley was one of the best-loved Scottish artists of the twentieth century. Her observations of children in the back streets of Glasgow as well as her expressionistic drawings and oils of the elements on the north-east coast of Scotland have caught the imagination of the Scottish public. Eardley is cherished as a painter of the Scottish identity in both town and country, who had a unique ability to sum up a community and the timeless drama of the natural world. This book examines Eardley's ouevre and its place in the international and British context and her reputation. It includes paintings and drawings from private collections, which have not been seen for many years, and works from the collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which also holds the Joan Eardley Archive.

In the middle of the nineteenth century a sympathetic relationship between art, science and technology laid the groundwork for photography to flourish, including camera obscura and the panorama. This is a lavishly produced book on the eventful first thirty years of photography in Scotland - around 1840 - 70. The photographers whose work is discussed include David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, James Valentine, Thomas Annan and George Washington Wilson plus practitioners not previously mentioned in any publication. Julia Margaret Cameron's encounter with Scotland is also described as is the work of Scottish photographers abroad.

Thomas Annan (1829-1887) was the preeminent photographer of Glasgow in the mid-nineteenth century, a period when the rise in industry and population dramatically altered the landscape of the "second city" of the British Empire. Often working in conjunction with civic projects, Annan produced numerous series that underscore the transformation of the city and its environs, though he remains best known for one series in particular: a group of enigmatic photographs of central Glasgow alleys, or "closes," on the verge of demolition. These haunting images, made between 1868 and 1871, and sometimes regarded as precursors of the documentary tradition in photography, represent the notion of progress that underpins much of Annan's oeuvre. Annan's publication history serves as the organizing principle for this book, which considers both the breadth of his body of work as well as the multiple formats in which his photographs appeared and circulated. Featured here are seven examplesincluding private albums and commercial booksthat focus on subjects as varied as the city's streets and closes, the Loch Katrine aqueduct, Glasgow College, the cathedral, and the country estates of the landed gentry, and highlight Annan's extensive engagement with the city of Glasgow. Plates from each of these works are faithfully reproduced in full color, and an introductory essay by the leading authority on Annan surveys the life and career of this little-known but influential photographer.