Old Masters
Division and Revision: Manet's Reichshoffen Revisited
96 pages, paperback, 285 x 230 mm, 70 colour illustrations
PRICE: £20.00
ISBN: 9781903470770
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Essays by Juliet Wilson-Bareau and Malcolm Park. Edited by Maria Reinhard-Felice
Manet's well-known painting in the National Gallery London of a café-concert – a kind of cabaret performance and musicmaking that was the latest fashion in Paris of the 1870s – has a peculiar history. The painter initially planned an ambitious canvas with which he grew dissatisfied, then cut it in two, one half being the painting in the National Gallery and the other half now in Winterthur in Switzerland. He repainted both fragments to make each work as a picture in their own right, but modern technology has discovered and reconstructed the original greater work. New research has also identified the café, the Reichshoffen, and even the Folies-Bergère performance that is advertised on a poster represented in the picture.
This study of a pivotal work in the troubled painter's oeuvre reveals his pioneering genius and the modernity of his search to capture a distillation of life in his own time through disconcertingly direct brushstrokes. The book discusses and illustrates related drawings and other paintings on the same theme, which would culminate a mere three or four years later in the Bar in the Folies-Bergère in the Courtauld Gallery, London. Without the experimentation, false paths and new discoveries of the Reichshoffen he would never have painted that masterpiece.
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Seldom has there been a gift of equal magnificence. In 1947 the 7th Duke of Wellington presented to the nation his London residence – Apsley House – together with a large part of its contents, the collection of the 1st Duke. Among the paintings are some of the finest canvases from the Spanish Royal Collection, captured by the 1st Duke of Wellington from Joseph Bonaparte in 1813. There are also important seventeenth-century Dutch paintings bought by the 1st Duke himself, as well as a series of French and British portraits of his illustrious contemporaries and depictions of battle scenes, which provide a visual record of the Napoleonic period. More
The Harold Samuel Art Collection is a unique collection of 17th-century paintings from the Golden Age of Holland. Bequeathed to the City of London in 1987 by Lord Harold Samuel of Wych Cross, a wealthy property developer and entrepreneur, this remarkable collection of 84 works – the best collection of Dutch and Flemish art in Britain – enriches the splendor of the interior of the Mansion House. More
This book is about a family tree: the line of descent that can be traced from Perugino in Italy in the fifteenth century to Edouard Manet in France in the nineteenth. It is not the usual kind of genealogy, of those connected by blood, more an ‘apostolic succession’, following the way in which art in Europe was taught, from one generation to the next, from 1480 to 1880. More
The group of about one hundred French bronzes in the Wallace Collection is justly considered one of the finest such collections in the world. Fifty-one of the best are featured in this book, the first in-depth study of the subject in English. More
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Celebrating the Beckett Centenary.
Awarded third prize by The Art Newspaper/Axa Art Prize for best catalogue of the year published in the UK - "admired for the quantity of new material it presented about Beckett himself and the worlds of literature and visual arts". More
Since the early Bronze Age the sword has been a sign of wealth, status and the power of divine right. Yet, before the sixteenth century the sword was almost never carried on the person in everyday life. It was a rare, noble weapon, carried into battle by the aristocratic warrior class but set aside in time of peace. However, the increasing prominence of the Renaissance middle classes brought a fundamental change to the sword's place in society. Now large numbers of non-noble but often wealthy and upwardly mobile people could also afford rich things like fine clothes, jewelry and weapons. More
