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A leading British painter, John Hoyland (1934–2011) gained early critical acclaim and went on to exhibit at the Serpentine Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts. Concentrating on his later work, and produced in collaboration with the artist, this book reproduces over 100 of his paintings and explores the processes that compelled him to create art to ‘inspire the spirit … liberate and fire the imagination’, and to refute the label of ‘abstract’.

Although ranked alongside Whistler and Sargent as one of the leading portrait painters of his age, John White Alexander (1856–1915) earned critical acclaim for his figure paintings, which often showed women in evocative poses and flowing dresses. Illustrated with 90 images, this first in-depth biography discusses the artist’s childhood poverty, the influence of his muse Juliette Very, and how he used techniques learned from his contemporaries to create his own style.

Based on a love of Atget’s evocative photographs, Tessa Newcomb visited Paris repeatedly from 2007–12, making drawings from which to paint intimate vignettes of everyday Parisien life – a woman daintily eating in a patisserie, birds on sale at a local market, chess players in the shade of trees. A hundred of her watercolours and oils are reproduced in this volume, with her written observations about the scenes that inspired her.

In a career spanning most of the 20th century Backus produced numerous paintings of Florida that now provide testament to its tropical past, with unspoilt beaches and tidal rivers edged with palms and mangroves, and the dramatic weather conditions it endures. With over 200 illustrations, this biography celebrates his life and art, revealing his talent and the humanitarian spirit that led him to mentor the group of African American artists known as the Highwaymen.

Now considered a leading artist of the 20th century, David Bomberg (1890–1957) was heavily influenced by cubism and his radical style saw him expelled from the Slade School of Art. Marking the 60th anniversary of his death, and featuring over 100 reproductions of his work, this monograph reassesses his life and career, exploring his engagement with Jewish culture, his work as a graphic artist and his later achievements as a more expressionist portrait and landscape painter.

Full-blown cavalry charges were a feature of the First World War right up to the final months, in spite of the introduction of the machine gun, while horses were also a key part of supply lines. The contemporary illustrations in this volume accompany an extended history of the equestrian war, revealing how they were sourced from around the world and often kept in awful conditions with only rudimentary veterinary care.

An avant-garde British artist of the early 20th century, Robert Bevan (1865–1925) studied in London, Paris and Pont-Aven, where he met Paul Gauguin in the 1890s. After his return to England and a period of painting in the countryside, he became a founding member of the Camden Town Group. This first comprehensive study of Bevan’s life and art is illustrated with the whole range of his work, including the well-known paintings of London’s working horses and cab yards.

There are only 35 known paintings by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), but while limited in numbers, they include works of extraordinary quality, including best-loved masterpieces such as The Milkmaid, The Little Street and Girl with a Pearl Earring. In this large format book, Arthur Wheelock, an authority on northern Baroque art, provides an informative introduction and detailed commentary on all 35 paintings, each with a full-page reproduction and many of them accompanied by related works.

Mary Cassatt’s tender images of women and children offer an insight into domesticity and their subjects’ everyday lives, and redefined portraiture as a genre. Introduced by two essays outlining her career and beliefs, the 50 examples collected here range from 1878 to 1914 and reveal the influence of Japanese prints and Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and child as well as Cassatt’s mastery of Impressionism.

Representing modernism in America and Australia, the artists featured in the 2016–17 Making Modernism exhibition defied convention to depict the complexity of the 20th century in their own way. The accompanying catalogue contains essays focusing on 14 individual works, and how they reflect their creator’s innovative approaches to still life, landscape and identity; a further 51 images; a short biography of each painter; and a timeline tracing their careers.

Throughout the 1970s Francesco Clemente (b.1952) travelled regularly from Rome to India and created a body of drawings that question Western rationality and capitalism and helped define neo-expressionism. This collection of over 100 of his images focuses predominantly on his depictions of the human body, and the themes of spirituality, sexuality, myths and dreams that would influence his later paintings.

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John Boardman traces the development of Greek vase painting before the Classical period, from the ‘Dark Ages’, through the Geometric and Orientalizing styles, to the regional schools of the 6th century, which competed with the dominant Corinthian and Athenian painters.

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Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid (1666–68) was purchased by the American steel magnate Henry Clay Frick in 1919 and is now one of the most important paintings in the Frick Collection, New York. Handsomely illustrated with reproductions of works by Vermeer and his contemporaries, this volume looks at the painting of the maid handing a letter to her mistress from two perspectives, with an art historical essay by Margaret Iacono and an appreciation by the film director James Ivory.

This was the first book in the Frick Diptych series in which each volume focuses on a single masterpiece from the Frick Collection in New York. The painting under scrutiny is Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous portrait of Sir Thomas More (1527), and Xavier Saloman’s in-depth account discusses both artist and sitter, their relationship and their historical context. The book includes ‘A letter to Thomas More, Knight’, a contribution from the historical novelist Hilary Mantel.

Famous across Europe as a portrait painter whose sitters included British royalty and an American president, the Hungarian-born artist Philip de László went to the Netherlands in 1901, with a commission from the Van Loon family, and afterwards became very popular with Holland’s cosmopolitan sociey. This catalogue of an exhibition at Museum Van Loon in Amsterdam presents reproductions and commentary on 50 Dutch portraits, along with illustrated essays on the artist and the art of portraiture.

Exploring the treasures of the Vatican’s museums, palaces and the Basilica of St Peter, this set of 100 cards covers ancient sculpture and details of Renaissance architecture as well as frescos and paintings by Michelangelo, Raphael, Fra Angelico, Titian, Caravaggio, Poussin and many others. Each card measures 162 x 162 mm, with a reproduction or photograph on one side and a description of the work by the art historian Anja Grebe on the reverse. Boxed set.

Monet at Giverny, Renoir at Les Collettes, the American Impressionist Childe Hassam in Celia Thaxter’s garden at Appledore, and, contemporary with the Impressionists, Gertrude Jekyll’s creation of Munstead Wood; these are among the artists and the inspirational gardens described and illustrated – by both paintings and photographs – in this unusual study.

The Chelsea Physic Garden Florilegium Society was founded in 1995 to record the flora of this historic botanic garden. It has since generated an extensive archive of meticulously executed artworks and this volume reproduces over 70 watercolours by the finest contemporary illustrators. Ranging from ferns and flowers to woodland trees, each full-page illustration is accompanied by notes about the plant and its use in traditional and modern medicine.

Focusing on trees, flowers and seascapes, this illustrated manual explains how to identify the elements of a scene that capture its essence and develop them to create a personal vision in the spirit of the Impressionists. Aimed at landscape painters of all levels, advice is also given on tools and materials, the transition from plein air to the studio, and techniques including wax resist and scraping for texture.

Among over 120 full-page details of paintings in this volume are the naked feet of Christ, Napoleon’s gold-embroidered boots and the discarded pink slipper of Ingres’ La Baigneuse de Valpinçon. Posing the question, ‘How can we decipher the mysteries – or the enigmas – concealed in this fragmentary narrative?’ Margo Glantz discusses this intriguing way of approaching art and the meanings that feet and shoes can convey. The full paintings appear at the end of the book.

The art historian Katy Norris presents the first account of the short life and prolific career of the British artist Christopher Wood (1902–1930), illustrated with over 130 reproductions and photographs of his paintings, drawings and stage designs. Norris provides analysis of the works and discusses the influence of fellow artists in Cornwall and Cumbria, Wood’s engagement with the Parisian avant-garde, and the ‘gathering storm clouds’ of his final year in Brittany.

This Scots ballad, about a ship’s captain sent on a fateful voyage, was strikingly illustrated by Robert Burns (1869–1941). His version is reproduced here with a selection of his other work; essays cover the ballad’s origins and music, Burns’ biography and his use of heraldry. Off-mint.

The former poet laureate tells the story of three generations of an artistic family: George, a leading Australian painter; Constant, a composer-conductor; and Kit, who managed rock group The Who. With cultural insights into topics ranging from revivalist art and classical music to post-war ballet and pop, this book depicts a family whose artistic urges were frequently undermined by internecine strife and self-destructive tendencies.

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.

Paul Nash (1889–1946) is now recognized as a major British artist, who drew on Modernism and Surrealism to create a distinctive vision of the English landscape. Illustrated with 100 colour images, this survey of his life and work assesses the impact his time as a war artist had on him, explores his work as a book illustrator, and considers what his poetry and other writing reveals about his personal mythology.

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.

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.

Duchamp (1887–1968) is now seen as a critical figure in the development of modern art thanks to his provocative conceptual works of the 1910s and his association with important post-war collectors such as Peggy Guggenheim. This biography examines an unusual career that produced few artworks and involved years of studying and playing chess.

This first volume in The Hermitage Collections showcases the masterpieces collected by successive Russian rulers and the splendour in which they are displayed. Ranging from Ancient Greece and Rome to 18th-century European sculpture, the artworks offer an encyclopedic view of world culture as well as an insight into the personal tastes of the country’s elite. An introductory essay explaining the history of the building and collection precedes over 250 photographs of the museum and its treasures. Slightly off-mint.

Although an accomplished draftsman and painter, Coecke was famed amongst his contemporaries for his complex tapestry designs, which were acquired by rulers including Henry VIII and the Medici. Focusing on 20 tapestries and produced to accompany an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this well-illustrated volume explores the development of his style, and the scale, innovation and mastery of colour that epitomize his contribution to Renaissance art in Flanders.

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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 essay 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, 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.

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.

In words and photographs, Boris Friedewald traces the life of Salvador Dalí and the various incarnations of his moustache, from the art student dandy of the 1920s to the artist’s death in 1989; and he describes the afterlife of the moustache in popular culture and even haute couture.

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.

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.

This catalogue of an exhibition at the Royal Botanic Gardens explores the history of Kew and presents views of its grounds and buildings, in oils and watercolour, by 50 contemporary artists including Kurt Jackson, Steve Whitehead and Sir Peter Blake.

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.

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 reproduces 94 examples of 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 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.