"[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
This lavish and beautiful catalogue illustrates and discusses fifty-two French drawings dating from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, all from the Chateau de Versailles, which owns one of the finest collections of French drawings in the world. The catalogue has been prepared to accompany their exhibition at the Wallace Collection in autumn 2006. This is the only venue, and the drawings have never been discussed as a group. More
The Spooner collection of British watercolours is one of the finest of its kind, featuring all the leading artists of the period 1750–1850. Among the fine sheets included are watercolours of the Lake District by John White Abbott, and rural scenes by several artists – Gainsborough, Turner, Cozens, Rowlandson, Francis Towne, Samuel Palmer. Architecture dominates the setting in works by Girtin, Cotman and Sandby. More
‘A Time & a Place: Two centuries of Irish social life' focuses, through the art of their time, on Irish people engaged in recreational activities across the last two centuries. The book is arranged thematically, covering areas and subjects such as sport, music and dance, visits to the beach, religious observance and pilgrimage, theatre, circus, calendar customs, fairs and markets, pubs, clubs and parades. More
This catalogue accompanies an exhibition at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, and The Courtauld Gallery, London, which will be the first full display of the Courtauld’s outstanding collection of watercolours by J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851). The collection spans the artist’s career, ranging from an important early view of the Avon Gorge, Bristol, made when Turner was just sixteen years old, to examples of the monumental highly finished watercolours of his maturity and the celebrated expressive late works. More
Together with important First Nations material, the Thomson Canadian Collection is the largest of all private holdings of Canadian art. There are rare and incomparable examples of Northwest Coast Aboriginal art. Krieghoff’s inspired accounts of life in the Canadas, prior to Confederation, bring the light and atmosphere of history fully into the present. A staggering power to capture the fleeting and the fugitive in paint still distinguishes the work of the early 20th-century painter Morrice... More
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. More
The Courtauld Gallery holds the finest group of works by Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) in Britain. This is the catalogue to an exhibition showing the entire collection together for the first time, marking the culmination of The Courtauld Institute of Art’s 75th anniversary. The importance of the collection lies not only in its exceptionally high quality but also in its wide range, with seminal paintings and rarely seen drawings and watercolours from the major periods of the artist’s long career. More
When Oskar Reinhart (1885–1965) bequeathed a significant part of his remarkable art collection – chiefly of French nineteenth-century painting but also containing a number of outstanding Old Masters – to the Swiss nation, he did so on condition that the works of art would never be loaned. As a consequence the many very important works in the collection have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. Artists represented in the collection that Reinhart made his monument include: Cézanne, Chardin, Corot, Courbet, Daumier, Delacroix, Géricault, Van Gogh, Maillol, Manet, Picasso, Pissarro, Renoir. More
This fully illustrated catalogue brings to light a forgotten masterpiece of Regency sculpture - the beautiful and mysterious Capriccio by the Italian gem-engraver and medallist Benedetto Pistrucci (1783-1855). Thought lost since 1855, the Capriccio is an enigmatic composition of heaped-up fragments brilliantly carved from a single block of white marble. More