Walter Sickert was one of the most influential artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An apprentice of Whistler and close associate of Degas, he engaged with the work of French artists of the time. Sickert in turn influenced many British painters up to the present day. This book will show how Sickert transformed the representation of everyday life, with his innovative approach to subject matter, radical compositions and the evocation of the materiality of existence in paint. It will explore the changing nature of his work - from an impressionistic approach in the 1880s to a pioneering use of photography in the 1930s - and how he returned over and over to locations and subjects, including his penetrating self-portraits. Sickert's imagination was fuelled by news and current events such as the Camden Town Murders and newspaper photography, but also by popular culture - music halls, the stage, the rise of cinema and celebrity. Featuring over 200 images from the exhibition and a wide range of essays by scholars, as well as reflections on Sickert's relevance and influence by a selection of contemporary painters including Kaye Donachie and Somaya Critchlow.

William Nicholson (1872-1949) is among the most admired and elusive painters in the history of British art. Neither academic nor overtly modernist, his ravishing paintings are a singular achievement of the early twentieth century. Nicholson made his name as a graphic artist in the 1890s before turning to painting full-time. Over the next four decades he explored the genres of portraiture, landscape and still life with exceptional inventiveness, wit and technical skill. Yet his aversion to art groups and his reluctance to make public pronouncements about art have made it difficult to place his work within the main narratives of twentieth-century art history. The breadth of Nicholson's painting is revealed in this sumptuous book, the first fully illustrated catalogue raisonne of the oils. Many of Nicholson's pictures have not been recorded before and most are reproduced here for the first time. This is the catalogue, which represents more than twenty years of scholarship Nicholson's oil paintings and the most comprehensive chronology of his life to date. The art historian Wendy Baron gives a context for Nicholson in British art at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the painter and critic Merlin James celebrates the virtuosity of Nicholson's painting technique and the cerebral subtlety of this most individual of painters

Providing a comprehensive assessment of Jeremy Gardiner's career to date, this monograph, the first of its kind, explains how this distinctive artist has taken the exploratory landscape vision of mid-century St Ives modernists like Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon and John Tunnard into a new post-millennial era. Gardiner's unique geological interpretation of landscape not only describes the current lie of the land but portrays it as a complex outcome of natural processes over vast periods of time. While indebted to British and American modernism, Gardiner's new conceptual rigour and technical repertoire is informed by science, geomorphology, new technologies and direct physical engagement with ancient landscapes. Following a distinguished international teaching career, based in Britain and the United States, Gardiner's landscape subjects have included geographically varied locations from the Jurassic Coast in his native Dorset and the rugged Atlantic seaboard of Cornwall, to the jagged volcanic topographies of the Brazilian oceanic islands and the Lake District. Including essays from leading art writers, this book provides an insight into the career of one of Britain's most innovative contemporary landscape artists.