Presented in a beautiful gift format and filled with a wealth of new photography, this engaging book aims to introduce to a general audience the National Trust's vast collections - a treasure chest of history. Arranged chronologically, starting with Roman sculpture and ending with 20th-century design, it focuses on museum-quality objects as well as important examples of decorative arts, furniture, textiles, books and items with fascinating stories behind them. Selected by the National Trust's curators from more than 1.5 million objects in its collections, the featured highlights include an ancient-Egyptian obelisk; Cardinal Wolsey's purse; the first English globe; one of the earliest surviving sofas; an incredible 18th-century dolls' house; an elephant automaton; a tent made for a sultan; a dress made of beetle-wing cases; hand-written manuscripts by Beatrix Potter and Virginia Woolf; Rodin's bust of George Bernard Shaw; rare, early colour photographs of the Sutton Hoo discovery; a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth and paintings by Holbein, Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Reynolds, Stubbs, Burne-Jones, Monet and Sargent. Each featured object is accompanied by an illuminating, easy-to-read caption, a timeline of key moments in the Trust's history and a list of properties housing important collections items appear at the end.

For much of early modern history, the opportunity to be immortalized in a portrait was explicitly tied to social class: only landed elite and royalty had the money and power to commission such an endeavor. But in the second half of the 16th century, access began to widen to the urban middle class, including merchants, lawyers, physicians, clergy, writers, and musicians. As portraiture proliferated in English cities and towns, the middle class gained social visibility-not just for themselves as individuals, but for their entire class or industry. In Citizen Portrait, Tarnya Cooper examines the patronage and production of portraits in Tudor and Jacobean England, focusing on the motivations of those who chose to be painted and the impact of the resulting images. Highlighting the opposing, yet common, themes of piety and self-promotion, Cooper has revealed a fresh area of interest for scholars of early modern British art. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art