This book is devoted to a monumental and superbly illuminated very large early fourteenth-century Mamluk Qur’an in muhaqqaq script. It constitutes the final part (Juz’ 30) of a superb two-volume Qur’an of which the first volume is preserved in the National Museum in Damascus while the second volume, from which the present section originates, is widely dispersed. More
Although the life of George Scharf has not been well-documented, he has left a remarkable legacy of drawings, watercolours and lithographs, which, in a most vivid and detailed manner, describe the life of London in the first half of the 19th Century. In many ways, his work can be compared to that of other great chronicler of early Victorian London – Charles Dickens. The characters that populate The Pickwick Papers or Little Dorrit can all be glimpsed in Scharf’s sketches and prints. More
AVAILABLE MAY 2010. In late 2007 the National Gallery of Art, Washington, acquired one of the finest private European holdings of Old-Master drawings – the Wolfgang Ratjen Collection – including 120 German drawings. This unique survey of drawings includes work by many of the most important artists from the German-speaking areas of Europe, including Switzerland and Austria. More
In the winter of 1586, Hakob Jughayets'i, one of Armenia's most celebrated illuminators, completed work on a Gospel Book with an extensive and extraordinary programme of narrative miniatures and marginal figures. More
“A clean and solid mosaic of thick paint in a light key” was a phrase aptly used by the leader of the Camden Town Group of artists, Walter Sickert, to describe the painting of this Edwardian group, who depicted their tea-and-cake world in a comparatively timid, but subtle and charming, Post-Impressionist style. More
The portly figure of Henry VIII depicted by Holbein may be very familiar, but this book reveals much more about the portrait, the sitter, the artist and his workshop. It gathers together and analyses the several copies and variants of Holbein’s Whitehall cartoon of Henry VIII, more than one of which is by the only significant painter immediately after Holbein in England, Hans Eworth. More
"[the book] has the air of brilliant performance about it, of the excitement of meticulous research and proved discovery [...] Simon has written with pace and passion the best book yet on Hogarth, encyclopaedic in its range of enquiry, utterly free of the jargon and nonsense of so much new art history." Brian Sewell, Evening Standard More
There was no bigger issue in the twentieth century than housing. In peace or war, people need homes, and a growing population and demands for better standards put architects, planners and sociologists to work. The century was known for its public housing, culminating in the tower blocks that once peppered major cities such as Birmingham and Glasgow, now fast disappearing. More
“Here is a perfect piece of architecture”, remarks Nikolaus Pevsner in The Buildings of England on St Catherine’s College, Oxford. Arne Jacobsen (1902-1971), famous also for his organically shaped chairs and the cutlery used in the film 2001, designed every inch and every piece of furniture in this building personally; this, and his similarly crafted SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, constitute two unparallelled twentieth-century masterpieces with lasting resonance in the twenty-first. More
This book presents magnificent artefacts collected by an aristocratic family of fabulous wealth. It shows goldsmith’s work and jewellery of extraordinary quality, and a number of decorations and commemorative medals, dating mostly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These include some of the finest creations of their time, by artists such as Hans Petzolt of Nuremberg and Augsburg’s Drentwett family, as well as renowned Hungarian goldsmiths of the Mannerist and Baroque era. More