148 Products

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.

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.

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.

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.

These paintings of our cities, harbours, farmland and moorlands are by twelve different artists – among them Constable, Cotman, Turner and Paul Nash. Envelope not included. Please note: the May bank holiday has been moved since 2020 calendars were printed; each calendar contains an addendum slip with information on the new holiday.

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.

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.

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.

An experienced hobby sailor, painter Francis Smitheman brings his own sense of the sea as well as extensive historical research and a profound respect for the classical masters to his maritime pictures. This collection of his oil paintings, completed over a period of 30 years, contains a series of pictures of Nelson’s battles, scenes from the Pool of London in the age of sail, polar exploration vessels and imagined historic scenes at famous ports.

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 by Mary Schafer and Johanna Bernstein and a wealth of photographs and reproductions, accompanied the exhibition.

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.

Charting the life and career of Abigail McLellan (1969–2009), Sturgis describes how her childhood obsession with ‘making’ culminated in a place at Glasgow School of Art. Choosing portraiture, she often exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, though her real passion lay in painting flowers and nature. This first monograph of the artist is richly illustrated with photographs and reproductions that reflect her boundless creative energy, even as she was losing her battle with MS.

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.

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) earned his living and his fame through portraiture, but enjoyed and valued painting landscape above the ‘curs’d face business’. Published to accompany the first exhibition devoted solely to his landscape paintings and drawings, and illustrated with 35 finished works and 23 drawings and variations, this volume reveals the themes to which Gainsborough returned again and again, among them the ‘modesty of nature’, ‘quietness and ease’ and evening light.

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.