Off-mint.

Slightly off-mint

Slightly off-mint

Off-mint

From 18th-century flock wallpapers to modern designs such as Bike Chain by Brixton Print Shed or Newton Paisley’s floral pattern featuring endangered species, Zoë Hendon’s concise and richly illustrated history reveals wallpaper’s often overlooked role in interior design and making houses feel like home.

Showing major paintings such as Allan Ramsay’s portrait of George III (1761–2), Sir David Wilkie’s Self-Portrait (c.1804–5) and David Roberts’s views of Egypt, Scottish Artists 1750–1900 was the first exhibition of Scottish paintings, furniture and sculpture in the Royal Collection. This catalogue has commentaries and reproductions or photographs of the 81 exhibits, plus an essay on royal patrons of Scottish art and a foreword by Prince Charles.

Following the progress of Russian painting in the 18th and 19th centuries and its relationship with other European schools, from the foundation of the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1757 to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, this groundbreaking and richly illustrated study places Russian painters in their own art historical context, ending with Ilia Repin’s powerful Portrait of Modest Mussorgsky, shown at the Peredvizhnik exhibition in 1881.

On both sides of the Atlantic, 19th-century painters were drawn to the drama and grandeur of mountains. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Newark Museum, New Jersey, this book explores the artistic dialogue between the Swiss painter Alexandre Calame (1810–64) and the American Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902). More than 100 illustrations reproduce their work, alongside that of contemporaries such as Turner, Ruskin and Sargent.

Turner was a regular visitor to Petworth House in Sussex, the home of his friend, patron and enthusiastic art collector George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont. Published to accompany an exhibition at the house, celebrating the restoration of the ‘Carved Room' with Turner’s gouache drawings and landscape paintings reinstated, this catalogue includes themed essays on Turner's country house art in general, and Petworth in particular, by academics from the National Trust and Tate Museum.

Cécile Debray takes a fresh approach to Henri Matisse, an artist often ‘perceived and introduced as a singular, unique and isolated force’. In this catalogue and the exhibition of 105 paintings that it accompanied, she draws together works by Matisse and his contemporaries, among them Derain, Léger, Dufy and Picasso, exploring their reciprocal influences and common sources to give a new account of Matisse and his times, from the Moreau Group in the 1900s to the paper cut-outs of the 1940s.

Rodin’s The Thinker has been a prominent exhibit at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor gallery since its opening in 1924, the museum’s founder having been a significant patron of the artist. This exhibition catalogue, published in 2017 to commemorate the centenary of the sculptor’s death, includes newly commissioned photographs of many of Rodin’s most important works, including The Burghers of Calais, The Gates of Hell and The Kiss, as well as plaster models and fragments.

After a brief spell in Peru as an infant, Paul Gauguin’s life is characterized by his travel to different parts of France and its colonies. The Breton peasants and indigenous Tahitians he encountered became a major influence on his work. This succinct biography includes reproductions of key paintings as well as newly commissioned illustrations that place the artist in his historical and social context.

George Lance was the Victorian artist who almost single-handedly effected the revival of still life painting. He was much admired by contemporaries such as JMW Turner, yet today his name is all but forgotten. Intended to restore his reputation and bring his art to a contemporary audience, this biography, which is extensively illustrated with his paintings, explores his life and work, including the controversy that led to his exclusion from the Royal Academy.

David Olusoga explores the role of art in the moments of first contact, interaction and conflict between different civilizations, first in the Age of Discovery when Europe’s early imperialists encountered the indigenous peoples and art of other continents: contacts that resulted in mutual curiosity as well as conquest. In Part Two, The Cult of Progress, Olusoga looks at artistic reaction to post-industrial modernization in the 19th and early 20th centuries, ending with Otto Dix’s great triptych, The War (1932).

Painter, book illustrator and newspaper sketch artist, the versatile John Gilbert (1817–97) was a huge celebrity in his day. This assessment examines the life and career of a now-neglected Victorian artist. More than 150 illustrations reproduce his work in various media, while essays explore his relationship to Old Masters and contemporaries, scientific examination of his techniques, his transactions with his framers and colourist, and what his success reveals about the 19th-century art market.

Between 1890 and 1905, prints became extremely popular in Paris, and leading artists such as Bonnard, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec embraced the medium. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, this catalogue reproduces more than 160 prints, posters, theatre programmes and book illustrations from the period. The accompanying essays examine how the fashion for printmaking developed, describe the various techniques and explore the numerous applications of this ‘new notion’ of art.

Popular Victorian paintings were often reproduced as engravings, but photographers also recreated the scenes with actors, to produce stereoscopic cards for commercial sale. Originally published to accompany the exhibition at the Tate Gallery, this slipcased volume explores the relationship between paintings, popular illustrations and cartoons (such as those published in Punch), and 3D stereo photographs. It also includes a stereoscope to view the examples, which are mainly drawn from the collection of Queen guitarist Brian May.

To mark its 80th anniversary in 2017, the Georgian Group organized an exhibition celebrating the craftspeople who maintain key buildings and landscapes. This catalogue presents the 115 exhibitors, all of whom employ time-honoured working methods, and examines the relationship between the national charity and traditional British craftsmanship.

Thomas Weaver (1774–1844) was an accomplished artist working during the late 18th century, when innovative methods of breeding produced bigger and better domestic animals. Weaver was among a small group of artists who pioneered the painting of owners’ and breeders’ prize sheep, cattle, hounds and thoroughbred stallions. Written by a descendant, with access to Weaver’s papers and diaries, this book tells the story and reproduces the paintings of a successful animal artist during the Agricultural Revolution.

In the 1880s Suzanne Valadon was a model for Auguste Renoir and other Impressionists. She was also a painter of considerable talent – a fact that she initially kept secret. Born in poverty in rural France, she was acclaimed by Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, and became the first female painter exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. This illustrated biography traces the life and career of an exceptional woman whose art spanned many styles and who made her mark in a male-dominated world.

With reproductions of many unfamiliar works, this book takes a novel approach to artists’ and travellers’ experience of the eternal city between 1700 and 1870: it revisits the history of Rome in terms of the city’s environment and pervasive mal’aria.

Franz and Ferdinand Bauer were ground-breaking 18th- and early 19th-century natural history artists. Growing up in Austria, Franz went on to work at Kew Gardens, while Ferdinand travelled to Australia. This volume includes pioneering microscopical drawings depicting plant anatomy, and newly discovered animals, such as the platypus and koala.

With excellent reproductions of 90 etchings, woodcuts, lithographs and drawings from the collection of European works on paper in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, this volume presents the work of more than 70 artists, from the Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna to Edgar Degas in the late 19th century. The book includes works by many of the great European masters, among them Dürer’s Melencolia (1512) and Little Devil’s Bridge (1809) by Turner, with substantial commentaries on every artist.

An untrained prodigy, Gustave Doré (1832–1883) became the highest paid illustrator in France at the age of 16 and a world-famous artist by the 1830s, mainly on account of his lithographs for literary works including Dante’s Divine Comedy, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and the Fables of La Fontaine. In this volume from the Masterpieces of Art series, a concise account of Doré’s life and art accompanies around 90 reproductions of his profoundly influential work.

Portly squires and foppish dandies, Jane-Austenesque heroines and their grotesque chaperones, dashing young officers and corrupt politicians… Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827) skewered the follies and vices of his age better than any satirist since Hogarth. This catalogue brings together 100 of his scabrous engravings, largely from the Royal Collections. Mercilessly lampooning King George III, his troublesome offspring, and politicians such as William Pitt, they form a rogues’ gallery of Georgian England, and remain an inspiration to cartoonists today.

Coming to life in just a few, seemingly effortless lines and the occasional wash of colour, Edward Lear’s nonsense birds have personality, attitude and, quite often, very human traits. Drawing on the British Library collections, this book presents birds from several of Lear’s original nonsense books, and includes stories, limericks, birds for learning colours and birds for learning the alphabet.

‘Thomas Gainsborough lived as if electricity shot through his sinews and crackled at his finger ends.’ A gentle, empathetic family man, he also had a volatile streak that could lead him to slash his paintings, and a loose way of talking that shocked society. This biography reveals how an easygoing Suffolk lad was propelled to the highest echelons of Georgian Bath and London by his unique natural talent, and explores the contradictions of this complex and charismatic painter.

From James Hardy senior (1801–1879), who painted portrait miniatures in the 1820s, the traditions and skills of painting were handed down through generations of the Hardy family, whose members included some of the leading genre and animal painters of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing on a collection of unpublished letters, documents and photographs inherited from the artists’ descendants, Kimber Hardy presents the first comprehensive assessment of their work.

Poet, designer, printer and publisher, William Morris was a man of great energy, range and depth. This illustrated volume surveys his varied achievements and the work of Morris & Company (‘the Firm’), with essays on stained glass; the decoration of houses; the art of the book; and Morris’s chosen artistic successor at the Firm, John Henry Dearle. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Huntingdon Library in California, the book ends with a discussion of Morris’s influence in America.

From the 1880s to around 1914, a group of young painters based in Glasgow challenged the traditional art of the Scottish Academy, favouring instead the naturalistic ideas of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, and en plein-air painting. The realism and freedom of their portraits, informal scenes and landscapes was to revolutionize Scottish art. This book introduces the Glasgow Boys – among them James Guthrie, John Lavery, Arthur Melville, George Henry and David Gauld – and presents over 85 reproductions of their work.

In eight illustrated essays, this book explores the artists’ complex created by George Frederic Watts (1817–1904) and his wife Mary (1849–1938) in the village of Compton in Surrey. Each chapter focuses on one of the Arts and Crafts-inspired buildings, its decoration and purpose: Limnerslease, the house designed by Sir Ernest George, the Compton Pottery and studio, the gallery and Mary Watts’s Art Nouveau chapel.

Now a major reference work on Scottish art, Hardie's book was the first comprehensive study devoted to Scottish painting. Revised and updated in this third edition, the book traces the history of painting in Scotland and discusses its major artists since 1837, with emphasis on the period from about 1860 to 1914 and three important groups: William McTaggart and his contemporaries; the Glasgow School and Charles Rennie Mackintosh; and JD Fergusson and the Scottish Colourists. With 150 colour reproductions.

Thomas Bush Hardy was one of the most successful and prolific marine watercolourists of the 19th century, depicting the elements of sea and sky and the vessels that were then undergoing rapid change, with drama and subtlety. This account of his life and career, illustrated with over 200 reproductions, provides a chronicle of his trips up and down the English coast, to the Dutch beaches and French Channel ports, and to his beloved Venetian lagoon.

Alexander Reid was 'a prince among dealers' whose energy, enthusiasm and judgement shaped the artistic tastes of his day. A friend and champion of Whistler and Van Gogh - to whom the red-bearded Glaswegian bore such a resemblance that the Dutch artist's painting of him was long mistaken for a self-portrait - he went on to promote the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists. With 94 colour illustrations, this first-ever biography charts the life and work of this important and influential figure.

In this study of the hugely influential American-born artist James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), Robin Spencer shows how profoundly the painter was influenced by the poetry and literature of his time. The famous libel trial with Ruskin is also discussed and, for the first time, many of the paintings are illustrated in the original frames created by Whistler himself.

Although less well-known than his friend and contemporary William Morris, Lewis F Day was one of the most influential figures of the Arts and Crafts movement. Convinced that the highest aesthetic ideals could be applied to industrial design, he produced a range of distinctive furniture, clocks, stained glass, pottery and tiles, while his magazine articles provided a perceptive commentary on the changing fashions of his day. This handsome book is well illustrated with examples of Day's striking work.

Although better known for their stained-glass windows, Louis Comfort Tiffany and the Tiffany Studios created entire interior designs for many of America's leading congregations – Protestant, Catholic and Jewish – providing mosaics, floors and lighting in addition to objects such as altarpieces, pulpits, candlesticks, headstones, vestments and jewellery. Focusing on their church decorations and memorials, this lavish exhibition catalogue reproduces preliminary cartoons and sketches as well as archive photographs of finished pieces, many never before published.

Turner was a young man when he arrived in Salisbury in 1795, but already he had started to produce acclaimed watercolour studies of cathedrals, many of them undergoing restoration by the architect James Wyatt. Accompanying an exhibition at Salisbury Museum that examined the important commissions that resulted from Turner's contact with the region, this volume contains many rarely seen Turner works on architectural projects including William Beckford's eccentric Fonthill Abbey, Stourhead, buildings on the South Coast and Stonehenge.

The Victorians were passionate about flowers, both in their gardens and in art, and the period saw some of the most superb botanical journals ever published. This volume reproduces hand-coloured lithographs from one of the finest from the 1860s, The Floral Magazine, a collaboration between the botanical illustrator James Andrews and the Rev HH Dombrain. Each of the 95 plants is shown in a full-page reproduction, with Dombrain's text revealing the preoccupations, joys and setbacks of Victorian flower growers.

This second volume in a three-part biographical series covers the years 1732 to 1750 in the life of English artist, satirist and social critic William Hogarth (1697-1764) when approached and defined. 96pp colour plates

The Glasgow Boys, a group of young artists that included James Guthrie, John Lavery, Arthur Melville, George Henry and Edward Atkinson Hornel, revolutionized Scottish painting in the years between 1880 and 1895. William Hardie gives a pocket-sized and authoritative introduction to the artists, their fresh, realist views of the Scottish countryside and Scottish people, and the social background to their art.

Along with his contemporary Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827) was the greatest graphic satirist of Georgian England, whose scurrilous cartoons mercilessly lampooned the follies of his age and its rulers. Yet he kept no diary and wrote few letters, so little is known about him. Drawing on newspapers, church records and other contemporary accounts, this fully illustrated study sheds new light on Rowlandson's family background, artistic training and professional associations, his travels in Britain and abroad, and his friendships.