The two titles included in this set are: The Master's Muse (Read more...) The Hermitage Dogs (Read more...)

The three titles included in this set are: Terry Frost (Read more...) Francis Bacon (Read more...) British and Irish Art 1945–1951 (Read more...)

Off-mint.

After a brief account of his life, from young trainspotter to railway artist, Wrenford Thatcher presents reproductions of 86 paintings – ‘my attempt to relive the years before that fateful day in 1968 which saw the end of working steam’ – with notes on the location and locomotive in each painting. From the Princess Arthur of Connaught departing Rugby at night, to the A4 60014 Silver Link at Hatfield, the book journeys through 70 years of Thatcher’s paintings.

Now housed in the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden, these scrapbooks, described by Edward Bawden himself as a ‘mass of ancient rubbish’, are in fact a vast and intriguing collection of Christmas cards, letters, cuttings, photographs and drawings. With reproductions of pages from all five scrapbooks and notes on the ‘scraps’ and the people mentioned, this volume is the closest thing we have to an autobiography of one of the finest, but most reclusive British artist-designers of the 20th century.

From images of the first industrial war by Edward Wadsworth, Paul Nash and CRW Nevinson, to Sybil Andrews’s abstract illustrations of urban life, this catalogue examines the impact of Continental Futurism and Cubism on British modernist printmakers. The book focuses on 13 artists, with reproductions of over 100 prints, arranged thematically by subject matter and stylistic direction, and essays on linocut block printing and the Grosvenor School artists. The catalogue accompanied an exhibition held in Boston and New York.

Slightly off-mint.

Carry Akroyd had been painting the East Midlands countryside for some years when a commission to celebrate the poet John Clare, also closely associated with the area, led her to be profoundly influenced by him in her responses to nature and the landscape. This album of her paintings, linocuts and screen prints, inspired by this association, depicts the plants and creatures of field and hedgerow, the flat vistas of the fens and the patchwork farmland of Northamptonshire. Slightly off-mint.

The enthusiastic art collector George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont, was a friend and patron of Turner, who often visited him at Petworth House in Sussex . 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.

Off-mint

Slightly off-mint.

Reproductions of Vladimir Tretchikoff’s green-faced woman once hung in countless suburban homes. This illustrated biography reveals how, despite being born in poverty in Siberia, he made his name as an artist in Singapore. He fled the island when it was invaded by the Japanese and almost drowned when his boat was sunk, but then relaunched his career in South Africa, receiving both massive popular success and critical disdain.

After Michael Robinson’s succinct, illustrated essays tracing the progress of the Impressionist movement from Édouard Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862) to Monet’s Waterlilies (1903), this volume from the Masterpieces of Art series presents 88 full-page reproductions of some of the greatest Impressionist works. In three sections – paintings of modern life, landscape and domesticity – the selection includes Renoir’s The Theatre Box (1874), Degas’ L’Absinthe, and The Sea at L’Estaque (1878) by Cézanne.

Early success made Rembrandt rich and famous in the booming Amsterdam of the 1630s but his extravagance led to penury in later life. Considered the quintessential ‘old master’ painter today, his unconventional compositions and expressive intensity were groundbreaking in his own time. This succinct biography includes reproductions of key paintings as well as newly commissioned illustrations that place the artist in his historical and social context.

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.

London has fascinated painters for centuries, and central to that appeal has been the Thames. The 158 paintings in this book follow the river from Whistler’s Chelsea in the west to Turner’s Greenwich in the east, accompanied by an introductory text for each area and extensive captions giving historical context. Along the way are Monet’s Houses of Parliament, Lowry’s Piccadilly Circus, and St Paul’s, depicted both in 18th-century splendour by Canaletto and amid the ruins of the Blitz by David Bomberg.

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, but 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.

Frank Holl is an overlooked Victorian talent who tragically worked himself to death at the age of 33. He was one of Van Gogh’s favourite English painters and an influence on the great artist. As a portrait painter he has been compared to Watts and Millais, but it was the darkness of Holl’s social realism, bleak depictions of poverty and of the underworld, that resonated with his contemporary admirers. This illustrated volume is the first retrospective and reappraisal of this significant British artist.

Although Goya (1746–1828) received no portrait commissions until he was 37, such works make up nearly a third of his painted oeuvre. Produced to accompany an exhibition of more than 60 portraits, this volume reveals the range of Goya’s technical and stylistic achievements. In particular, it shows how the artist built on the model of earlier court painters, including Velázquez, while giving new psychological depth to depictions of the royalty, philosophers and military men of his own revolutionary times.

In a scholarly, richly illustrated study of the mid-17th-century Neapolitan art world, Marshall charts the links between the artisans, painters and dealers of this bustling city and its wealthy patrons and consumers of art. Among the topics examined are the working lives of artists, the process of buying and selling cabinet pictures, the rise of the exhibition, and the careers of successful artists such as Luca Giordano, Jusepe de Ribera and Massimo Stanzione.

Painted by the Venetian Giovanni Bellini around 1508, the Dudley Madonna is named after its 19th-century English owner. Still in private hands, it is seldom exhibited, making this study a rare glimpse at a key work in the artist’s development. With more than 50 reproductions of work by Bellini and his contemporaries, it explores his response to younger painters such as Titian, and records the painting’s provenance and conservation history.

Richard Harrison enrolled at Chelsea School of Art in the 1980s to study product design but soon turned to painting. His style was essentially abstract until he developed a more figurative approach through a fascination with the landscape and Biblical and mythical subjects favoured by the old masters. This retrospective of his work includes a biography and appreciation of his oeuvre and reproductions of over 200 of his paintings.

A unique style of court painting, combining Persian, Indian and European elements, developed under the Mughal emperors who ruled India from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Drawing on the collection of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, this book reproduces 80 examples, ranging from scenes of adventure and court ceremonial to botanical illustrations. The introduction and accompanying texts explain the development of the genre and the context of the paintings.

Published to accompany an exhibition at the National Museum of Wales, this catalogue traces the development of landscape painting in Britain from the classicism of the 18th century, through the Romantic Movement to the environmental concerns of today. There are more than 80 plates, including work by Gainsborough, Constable, Turner, Monet and Sisley, and two essays, exploring the response of artists to the Industrial Revolution and the role of the Welsh landscape in British art.

With the focus on a select group of twelve paintings, among them Le Bassin des Nymphéas (1904) and Wisteria Number 1 and 2 (1920), this catalogue of an exhibition at Cincinnati Art Museum examines aspects of Monet’s work, including the depiction of water and the sanctuary of Giverny during the First World War, and ends with an article on Monet and his garden written in 1891 by the French art critic Octave Mirbeau.

Dulwich Picture Gallery in London holds one of the finest collections of 17th- and 18th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings in the world. This catalogue, organized alphabetically by artist, features over 220 landscapes, portraits, Biblical and allegorical scenes, and still lifes. Among the highlights are Rembrandt’s Girl at a Window and Van Dyck’s Samson and Delilah. After describing the history of the collection, the authors provide a short biography of each artist and detail the origin, provenance and symbolism of their paintings.

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.

Bequeathed to the Corporation of London, this private collection of some 80 works was hung in Mansion House until the building’s refurbishment prompted the exhibition tour that brought them to the wider public. This accompanying catalogue reproduces landscapes, still lifes and genre paintings by Brueghel the Elder, Hals, Ruisdael and Tenier the Younger, among others. The text charts the history of the collection, the origins and provenance of each painting, and introduces each artist.

Discussing and reproducing 103 works, from Stone Head (1933) to Easter and the Totem (1953), this catalogue, with essays and commentary, focuses on Jackson Pollock’s artistic development as a figurative artist, leaving aside the familiar ‘drip’ paintings. Originally accompanied an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Bound in grey linen.

This celebration of Britain’s favourite animals and their offspring contains over 50 watercolours by zoologist Hannah Dale, portraying the young of Britain's best-loved birds and animals, both wild and domesticated. The selection ranges from fox cubs dozing in a tangled heap to a peacock chick displaying its tiny tail feathers. All are accompanied by descriptions of the creatures and their early days.

First brought to Britain from North America in 1687, the magnolia is considered to be one of our most beautiful ornamental trees. This volume presents over 150 large-scale and finely detailed paintings of the flowers by award-winning botanical artist Barbara Oozeerally. Each illustration is accompanied by authoritative information about their cultivation, and full botanical descriptions, covering all hardy species and around 100 hybrids.

From the Blitz to the Swinging Sixties, London was home to a major art scene. Several key players – Auerbach, Bacon, Freud – were figurative painters rebelling against the prevailing Abstract orthodoxy. Others – Bridget Riley, John Hoyland – found their own distinctive forms of abstraction. Gayford’s study profiles the artists and explores their influences and connections. Drawing on first-hand interviews and illustrated with 114 paintings and photographs, it recreates the Soho bohemia these painters inhabited, with its friendships, feuds and legendary drinking sessions.

Best known as a furniture designer and architect, Irish-born Eileen Gray was a pioneer of Art Deco in the Paris of the 1920s and a follower and associate of Le Corbusier, among other luminaries of the period. This collection of her private and essentially unknown artworks was assembled for an exhibition at London’s Osborne Samuel Gallery in 2015 and comprises drawings, paintings, collages and photographs made between the 1920s and the 1950s.

Twentieth-century war at sea posed problems for artists: gone were the traditional naval confrontations; in modern, long-range battle the enemy could be invisible, in the sky or under the surface. Drawing on the National Maritime Museum’s outstanding collection of modern British art, this volume looks at how artists rose to the challenge of depicting the Navy and Merchant Marine at war. With over 160 colour reproductions, it discusses works by artists including Norman Wilkinson, John Everett, Eric Ravilious and Charles Wheeler.

Started in 1936, four years before her marriage to Francis Picabia (1879–1953), and left unfinished two years before his death, this album of photographs, sketches and cuttings was compiled by Olga Picabia (1905–2002) and chronicles the life of the French avant-garde artist and poet. Reproducing 207 pages of the album, this book offers a unique view of a great romantic and artistic partnership.

The art of drawing and painting with pastel is comprehensively explored in this illustrated guide for the serious artist. Beginning with a look at historical use of the medium, the author (an accomplished pastel artist herself) explains best studio practice, how to adapt pastel use for different genres, the working process (including application, gradating tone and making corrections), and how to care for finished works. Felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

Most of the glyphs carved on the stone monuments of the ancient Maya civilization have now been deciphered. This handbook presents around 200 of the script’s symbolic characters, each with an interpretation of the concept that it expresses. The glyphs are arranged thematically to show what the Maya’s written records reveal about their lives and beliefs, their vigesimal number system and the complex organization of their solar and ritual calendars.

In the four series of paintings reproduced here – Anatomías,Atlas, Vanitas and Venus – the Spanish artist Fernando Vicente reveals the inner composition of bodies, exploring themes of vanity, mortality and the ‘body as a lie’.

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.

The artist Stanley Spencer made several attempts to write an autobiography, but completed none of them. His grandson has combined these fragments with his notebooks, diaries and letters to provide a first-hand account of his life. Illustrated with Spencer’s paintings and drawings alongside period photographs, the resulting narrative records the development of his art and personality from his childhood in Cookham through his training at the Slade to his experiences in the First World War.

In the immediate post-war period, lifelong partners Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde were, with Freud and Bacon, among the most admired artists of their generation but during the 1950s their work fell out of fashion and alcoholism and poverty hastened their decline. Published to accompany the exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, this retrospective charts their careers and turbulent private lives, and includes reproductions of their most significant paintings, prints and drawings.

In the 1960s, when the fashion in art was towards the abstract and conceptual, John Bellany (1942–2013) focused on the figurative, paying homage to Old Masters in his depictions of the fishing communities of the east of Scotland, among which he had grown up. This retrospective reviews his entire oeuvre, from these early large canvases, through the phantasmagoric, expressionist paintings of the following decades, to the more optimistic landscapes and allegorical compositions of the 21st century.

Published to coincide with Elizabeth Blackadder’s 80th birthday retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery in 2011, this catalogue showcases her work, from a self-portrait in 1951 to watercolours of Crabs and Shells in 2011, revealing the intuitive nature of her art and its diverse range. A chronology of her life is accompanied by essays from Philip Long and John Leighton, who argue that Blackadder is one of Scotland’s greatest living artists.

Head of Painting at Falmouth School of Art from 1960 to 1981, Francis Hewlett (1930–2012) remained a figurative artist, exploring what he called the ‘essential geometry’ of observed objects, despite the prevailing fashions of the period. Including over 200 paintings and drawings, this biography charts his lifelong dedication to art, from his early studies in Bristol, London and Paris to his completion of a major series of paintings in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

For Professor Goswamy, an Indian painting ‘presents to us a layered world of meaning’, and his analysis and commentary on each of these 101 paintings encourages the reader to explore them with ‘eyes, mind and heart’. The works are in four sections: Visions, depicting imagined sights such as gods, heroes or the Cosmic Egg; Observation, picturing real scenes and people; Passion, with works inspired by poetry or emotion; and Contemplation, expressed in paintings of holy men.

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 biography traces the life and career of an exceptional woman who made her mark in a male-dominated world.

Created around 1480–88 by the Spanish artists Fernando Gallego and Maestro Bartolomé, the 26 panels from the main altarpiece of the cathedral in Ciudad Rodrigo, Castile, are among the most important and iconographically ambitious art works produced in late 15th-century Spain. Beginning with a history of the paintings, which are now in the University of Arizona Museum of Art, this volume comprises essays on the two artists, technical studies of the paintings and a catalogue of the altarpiece.

Although Claude Monet intended the three water lily paintings he named Agapanthus to stay together, the panels were bought by three different American galleries in the late 1950s. In 2011, the paintings were reunited and exhibited as a triptych at the Saint Louis Art Museum. This volume, with an essay by the curator Simon Kelly, a technical study, and many details of the panels accompanied the exhibition. 3 page fold-out included.

Published alongside the 2017 Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition on the centenary of Edgar Degas’s death, this collection features a broad range of his paintings, drawings, pastels, etchings and sculptures, and includes works by artists who influenced or were influenced by him. Eleven essays, written by leading scholars and specialists, examine Degas’s themes and artistic practices, and reflect his intense self-discipline, his lifelong desire to learn, and his ‘relentless pursuit of the infinite possibilities of a single subject’.

Starting with a tribute to the series editor by Nicholas Penny, this volume studies and catalogues eight paintings: from The Vendramin Family (c.1540–5) to The Death of Actaeon (c.1559–76).

From Captain Robert Orme (1756) to Mrs Jane Braddyll (1788), this volume catalogues 15 portraits and St John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1776), along with four essays and a chronology.

Raphael’s most haunting painting has tantalized art-lovers for centuries. Published to accompany a major US exhibition, this illustrated study explains the portrait’s historical context, its links to Petrarch’s poetry, and its relation to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

A contemporary of Francis Bacon and Euan Uglow, Scottish painter Craigie Aitchison (1926–2009) employed saturated colours and vivid shapes in his work, which included landscapes, portraits and still-lifes, with deceptive simplicity. This illustrated retrospective, containing detailed analyses of his paintings, explores his life and career and examines the motifs of black men, dogs and crucifixions which recurred in his work time and again, from his student days at the Slade School of Art to his later sojourns in Tuscany.

This first full-length biography of Terry Frost traces his life from his working-class upbringing in the Midlands, a four-year stint as a prisoner of war on Crete where he experienced the artist’s calling, his first abstract phase during the early years in St Ives, his major stylistic periods, coinciding with moves upcountry and travel abroad, and his subsequent return to St Ives in 1974, which inspired the colourful geometry of his later work.

Often exhibiting together during their lifetimes, contemporaries Joan Gillchrest, Bryan Pearce and Fred Yates were inspired to record the people and scenes of Cornwall in their individual, instantly recognizable styles, and to try to capture the unique magic of the county. Written as a companion to a 2011 exhibition that took place after their deaths, this guide provides short biographies of each artist, personal photographs, and many colour reproductions of their work.

Writing ‘for people who enjoy looking at paintings and for people who paint’, Andrew Marr aims to help readers understand what they see when they are looking at art – particularly contemporary art – and how to improve as painters. Using his own paintings as examples of failures, and the works of artists including Patrick Heron, Robert Rauschenberg and Sarah Lucas, Marr addresses fundamental questions about taste, colour, motif, and the appreciation of modern art.

The world of fantasy artists Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell is one of muscle-bound heroes, beautiful - and also muscle-bound - women, dragons and monsters in other-worldly and often violent landscapes. In this volume the two artists present 145 reproductions of recent, previously unpublished images, and chapters telling their own stories and discussing elements of their art. With the book, inside the back cover, there is a set of ten limited edition art prints.

Born in Vienna, Roland Paris (1894–1945) lived and worked in Berlin during the interwar years, and his work, although made in the Art Deco period, has an idiosyncratic style, using grotesques, caricature and mockery in depictions of clowns, jesters, devils and temptresses. This volume presents an illustrated biography of Paris and over 180 pages of photographs showing his figurines in plaster, wood and bronze, and works on paper.

This study of the Genoese artist Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609–1664) is the result of a collaboration between the Denver Art Museum and the Royal Collection, with its unrivalled holdings of Castiglione’s works in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Reproducing over 90 paintings and dry-brush drawings and illustrating a further 30 details, the catalogue offers a new appraisal of the artist’s works, his life and volatile personality, and his position within 17th-century art.

‘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 vast natural talent, and explores the contradictions of this complex and charismatic painter.

Jules George travelled to Helmand as a war artist in 2010, in the wake of its bloodiest year for British troops. This book reproduces his sketches, watercolours and oil paintings, along with the work of four other artists who documented that conflict. Against the vast beauty of the Afghan landscape, they capture the experience of soldiers on patrol or caught in a firefight. Each artist’s work is accompanied by his or her first-hand account of war in Afghanistan.

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.

Discussing 60 works by Canaletto, Hogarth and other 18th-century British artists, this book places the paintings, particularly the urban views and architectural subjects, in the broad context of Britain’s growing confidence and prosperity.

Geordie painter John Coatsworth stumbled across his signature style in 1997 when he made a sketch of St James's Park stadium, bending the shapes and perspective to create vibrancy, rhythm and flow. His subsequent vibrantly coloured 'curvation' paintings quickly gained local commissions and an army of fans through cards and prints. This retrospective collection includes early works in different styles as well as his popular paintings of Newcastle and the North East.

Why did Rajastani court artists make the formal choices that characterize their tradition? In this series of in-depth studies, each illustrated with numerous reproductions of rare paintings, Aitken shows how traditional formal devices served as vital components of narrative meaning, expressions of social unity and sources of intellectual play; and she explores the relevance of Rajput court painting to contemporary art.

Analysing the lives and work of four artists in 15th-century Italy – Alessandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Pietro Perugino and Filippino Lippi – Michelle O’Malley explores the impact of economics on Renaissance art. She looks at how the growing demand for art exerted pressure on these sought-after painters who all produced high volumes of work; how they maintained quality; and how judgements made under economic pressures can be traced in specific paintings.

Inspired by the recent identification of a third autograph version of Thomas Gainsborough’s late masterpiece The Cottage Door in the Huntington Art Collections in San Marino, California, this book examines the multiple versions of designs that the artist produced in the 1780s. It demonstrates how, without the pressure of exhibiting annually or finishing commissioned portraits, Gainsborough’s work became more personal and more thoughtful.

Not only can one find the greatest variety of bird species in Norfolk as well as view spectacular mass migrations, but it is also one of the best spots to find rare birds and infrequent visitors to Britain. This celebration of the county’s avian scene offers research and statistics about the different types of habitats and the resident and visiting bird populations of each, together with almost 200 atmospheric watercolour illustrations by James McCallum.

‘I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.’ Numerous extracts from Van Gogh’s correspondence with his brother Theo run alongside a broad selection of his works in this highly illustrated volume, revealing much about the artist’s inner life, his hopes, health, travel plans and artistic intentions. While the letters run chronologically, the artwork dances between periods, the combination resulting in a moving visual account of a life lived through letters and art.