180 pages, paperback, 220 x 254 mm
PRICE: £20.00
ISBN: 978 1 905256 33 4
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.
The catalogue will trace the evolution of Turner’s extraordinarily inventive approach to the making of landscape in watercolour. It will focus specifically on Turner’s travels in search of inspirational and commercial landscape views as well his entrepreneurial promotion of his work through print making. We follow Turner’s progression towards an increasingly poetic vision of landscape in which time, light and colour and the transitory effects of weather become his prime concern. Finally, his late works – characterized by a powerfully expressive experimentation which pushed the boundaries of watercolour technique – are considered.
The selection of works will include eight rarely seen, magnificent watercolours bequeathed to The Courtauld in 2007 by the late Dorothy Scharf. Comparison with closely related works from Tate and private collections will enable viewers to trace the development of certain compositions, including the celebrated panoramic view of the Crook of Lune, from early sketches and exploratory ‘colour beginnings’ to finished watercolours and, in some cases, published prints.
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
Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the opening of the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow in 2007, this book provides a full study both of William Hunter - the many-faceted surgeon/connoisseur - and of his collection of art, which not only contains a number of outstanding masterpieces, such as a Rembrandt, but also provides a revealing snapshot of the taste of the period. While illuminating this crucial transitional period in British art, the book is at the same time a catalogue of the Hunterian collection. More
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
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
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
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
Accompanying an exhibition that promises to be the most comprehensive survey of Indian painting that the West has ever seen, this beautiful two volume catalogue spans 800 years of Indian painting, and some 240 masterpieces by more than 40 artists. These great Indian masters are unquestionably the equals of Dürer, Michelangelo or Vermeer. 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