The 110 letters, which include correspondence with Gainsborough's friends and relative, are supplemented by 37 documents in the artist's own hand, chiefly instructions to his bankers and receipts for payments from clients. Illustrations are included of all the people to whom Gainsborough wrote whose portraits exist and of friends and works of art described in the letters."--BOOK JACKET.
The Discourses on Art of Sir Joshua Reynolds form one of the most eloquent literary documents in the history of European art. Composed as lectures to the students at the Royal Academy in the late eighteenth century, they both summarize the art theory of the previous three hundred years and point towards attitudes prevalent in the nineteenth century. Reynolds' general topic is the education of the artist. He is concerned with the essentials of the problem: the purpose of art, the nature of the creative process, and the artist's relation to tradition. He treats these questions with a breadth and clarity that won the immediate admiration of his contemporaries and have continued to hold the attention of readers ever since. No other body of art criticism by an Englishman has enjoyed such sustained respect. This standard edition of the Discourses is now reissued in a new format and with improved illustrations. It has long been recognized as a fundamental text for the study of eighteenth-century English painting, and this edition is generally considered to be the definitive one.
William Blake's wife once said of him: "I have very little of Mr. Blake's company; he is always in Paradise". This fascinating and generously illustrated biography of the great English artist, poet, and mystic brings us very much into Blake's company, presenting, often in the words of his contemporaries, almost everything that is known of his life and times. G.E. Bentley, Jr., tells us that although Blake struggled with the ways of the world in his youth and early manhood, he was always frustrated that these ways were not his own. Instead he spoke the language of radical religious dissent, standing outside the popular political and social conventions of his time and lamenting the power of Church and State. Blake learned to participate in traditions of vision and piety, to exult in the power of the spirit and in visionary art and literature. He created a new gospel of art, other-worldly and fundamentally spiritual, and in his old age, he exhibited a serenity in poverty and a devotion to the realm of the spirit that was revered by his disciples. Blake's life bears the shape of great art itself, says Bentley. From his youthful vaulting ambitions in painting, engraving, poetry, and music, through his mature flirtation with fortune, to his joyful return to the vision and confidence of his youth, Blake's life provides a pattern of noble self-sacrifice and wise self-understanding that is an inspiration to his generation and to ours.
For many years, historical architectural colour has been an elusive topic, since paint fades and discolours, and most early schemes have been obliterated by succeeding phases of redecoration. In parallel with this, the taste of later generations has also overlaid earlier ideas of colour with a mass of subjective opinion and received wisdom. To remedy matters, this objective study combines information from documentary sources with data obtained from the technical investigation of significant interiors by important architects of the period, and presents for the first time a coherent outline of true historical practice. It is an essential complement to more conventional architectural studies of form and space. In a series of chapters, the noble interiors of Inigo Jones are contrasted with more intimate spaces of the period; and the succeeding drabness adopted in many rooms of the second half of the seventeenth century is set against its taste for marbling, graining, and imitation japan. It is shown how the new foundation established by the Palladians came to provide the basis for the lively use of colour by Robert Adam and his contemporaries; and the study concludes by showing how the development of colour theory in the early nineteenth century superseded eighteenth-century ideas and, combined with the Regency taste for the exotic, led to an entirely new outlook, much of which still forms present-day preconceptions.
Here in two beautifully produced volumes is the first complete catalogue of Whistler's paintings ever published. This monumental work records in the fullest possible detail the history, provenance, and sources of all Whistler's known paintings, including many that were destroyed or have since disappeared, and includes full-page reproductions, many of them in color, of the paintings that are still extant.
This book - the study of Westminster Abbey in more than fifty years - places the Abbey's physical and artistic growth in the context of the political and religious culture of its time. Published on the 750th anniversary of the major building program of the abbey, it is a fitting tribute to one of the most ambitious royal edifices and art holdings ever constructed.
Wyndham Lewis was equally talented as a writer and a painter. Providing an overview of the visual, literary and philosophical dimensions of Lewis's work, Edwards also considers them as an integrated whole. He also discusses Lewis's fascist sympathies.
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