Old Masters
The Courtauld Cézannes
128 pages, paperback, 260 x 216 mm, 100 illustrations
PRICE: £25.00
ISBN: 978 1 903470 84 8
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Edited by Stephanie Buck, John House, Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen and Barnaby Wright. Essays by John House, Elizabeth Reissner and Barnaby Wright. Catalogue by Stephanie Buck, John House and Joanna Selborne
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.
The collection includes such masterpieces as the iconic Montagne Sainte-Victoire, c. 1887 – one of the finest examples of Cézanne’s treatment of this subject – and Card Players, c. 1892–95, which show Cézanne working at the height of his powers. Through examination of such works, this book will chart the development of the artist’s revolutionary approach that would later see him acclaimed as the father of modern art. Extensive new research by the Courtauld’s Department of Conservation and Technology will add fresh insights into the artist’s working methods and techniques. Also under scrutiny are an important group of nine hand-written letters, held by the Courtauld, in which Cézanne reflects upon the fundamental principles of his artistic practice. In a letter to Emile Bernard Cézanne famously advised his protégé to “treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone”. This celebrated statement would become a theoretical underpinning for the move towards abstraction in the twentieth century.
Accompanying an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London, 26 June – 5 October 2008
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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
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
Celebrating the Beckett Centenary.
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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
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
