128 pages, paperback, 26 x 216 mm, 80 colour illustrations
PRICE: £20.00
ISBN: 978 1 903470 73 2
Out of print in the UK, but still available in the US and Canada. CLICK HERE.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir's La Loge (The Theatre Box), 1874, is one of the masterpieces of impressionism and a major highlight of The Courtauld Gallery's collection. Its depiction of an elegant couple on display in a loge epitomizes the Impressionists' interest in the spectacle of modern life. At the heart of the painting is the complex play of gazes enacted by these two figures. In turning away from the performance, Renoir focused instead upon theatre as a social stage where status and relationships were on public display.
This book accompanied an exhibition in celebration of The Courtauld Institute of Art's 75th anniversary which united La Loge for the first time with Renoir's other treatments of the subject and with loge paintings by contemporaries, including Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas. Concentrating on the early years of Impressionism during the 1870s, the book explores how these artists used the loge to capture the excitement and changing nature of fashionable Parisian society. Lavishly produced contemporary journals such as La Mode Illustree included fine hand-coloured engravings showing the latest fashions modelled by elegant ladies in theatre boxes. A rich selection of this little-known graphic material from contemporary Parisian journals, as well as caricatures from the popular press, is also examined.
Accompanied an exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, London, 21 Feb - 25 May 2008.
Philip IV of Spain (ruled 1621-1665) was known as the 'Planet King', shining brightly in the universe of the arts even if the Golden Age of Spanish painting coincided with imperial decline. The Buen Retiro Palace surpassed any palace ever built in Europe for the collection of paintings it contained - Velázquez, Zurbarán, Rubens, Claude, Poussin.< 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
The Wallace Collection is fortunate to own probably the finest collection in the world of paintings by Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–1828) – ten oils and twenty-five watercolours. They represent most of his major areas of interest, ranging from richly costumed historical scenes to views in France and northern Italy, particularly Venice. 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
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
This is the revised and updated edition of a book that originally accompanied the first retrospective exhibition of de László since his death in 1937. It illustrates a rich and representative selection of his work, drawn from a range of private collections, and, aided by stunning colour plates, re-introduces this well-known but little studied artist to a wider public. 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
This is the only mongraph on the British sculptor Thomas Banks (1735–1805): it covers his entire oeuvre and is richly illustrated with new photographs of his remarkably accomplished sculpture. 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
‘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
Philip Alexius de László (1869–1937) was one of the most important portraitists of the early 20th century. Born in Hungary, he was trained in Munich and Paris and was soon receiving commissions from noble and royal families throughout Europe. Having married Lucy Guinness in 1900, in 1907 he moved from Vienna to England, where he had enormous success. 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
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
This is the revised and updated edition of a book that originally accompanied the first retrospective exhibition of de László since his death in 1937. It illustrates a rich and representative selection of his work, drawn from a range of private collections, and, aided by stunning colour plates, re-introduces this well-known but little studied artist to a wider public. More