Yale University Press

»nspiring Impressionism»explores links between Impressionists and the major European art-historical movements that came before them, demonstrating how often beneath the Impressionists’ commitment to capturing contemporary life there lay a deep exploration of the art of the past. Presenting Impressionist works by artists including Manet, Monet, Degas, Bazille, Cassatt, and Cézanne alongside those of Raphael, El Greco, Rubens, Velázquez, and others, the book shows that while the Impressionists moved toward modernity and spontaneity, they remained conscious of and interested in the traditions, techniques, and subject matter of their predecessors. Essays by leading scholars reveal the ways Impressionists drew inspiration from earlier artists from periods ranging from the Italian Renaissance through the early 19th-century Classical and Romantic traditions. A detailed chronology and fascinating comparisons of landscapes, portraits, nudes, still lifes, and genre paintings provide readers with new opportunities to understand the work of both the Impressionists and Old Masters.

Paul Mellon (1906-1999) was an unparalleled collector of British art. His collection, now at Yale in the museum and study centre he founded to house it, rivals those in Britain's national museums and is unquestionably the most comprehensive representation of British art held outside of the United Kingdom. This book and the exhibition that it accompanies celebrate the centenary of his birth. Five introductory essays examine Paul Mellon's extraordinary collecting activity, as well as his role in creating both the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London as gifts to his alma mater (Yale 1929). A lavishly illustrated catalogue section showcases 150 of the most exquisite and important paintings, watercolours, drawings, prints, sculpture, rare books, and manuscript material in the Yale Center's collection, including major works by Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Stubbs, John Constable, and J. W. M. Turner.

The history of America is largely a history of the sea. This marvelous book features a selection of more than two hundred of the finest objects from Mystic Seaport that tell the history of America and its maritime heritage. Presented with accessible texts and beautiful reproductions are masterpieces of maritime painting, exquisite photographs of classic yachts and powerboat races, and diverse prints and watercolors. Unique examples of American folk art-yarn paintings, reverse paintings on glass, sailors' valentines, shadowbox ship models, and ships in bottles-are also explored in detail, along with watercraft, scrimshaw, ship figureheads, and silver yachting trophies. Essays written by distinguished experts describe the individual forms of expression, discuss the artists and craftsmen, and offer commentary on the ways in which America's maritime history is interwoven with its economic development and cultural history. Elegantly designed and lavishly produced, «America and the Sea «offers intriguing new evidence of the indisputable relevance of maritime history to American life and art.

From the 1850s to the 1950s, American art and culture progressed from provincial status to international prominence, and American art transitioned from figurative depictions of the particular to abstract interpretations of universal ideals. This beautiful book chronicles this complex century of maturation through a selection of paintings from the extraordinary collection of the Addison Gallery of American Art. Coming of Age begins with Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, and the Hudson River School landscapes that embody the new nationalism of mid-nineteenth-century America. Their successors, Luminists like Jasper Cropsey and Fitz H. Lane, infused their immediate surroundings with glowing light and crystalline clarity, while contemporary Barbizon-influenced tonalists, such as George Inness, sought to capture the American ethos through an emotional, atmospheric landscape language. In the later 19th century, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Eastman Johnson depicted native subjects through the lens of realism. Childe Hassam and Maurice Prendergast brought Impressionist aesthetics to America, while expatriates including John Singer Sargent and James McNeil Whistler established themselves in European art capitals. In New York, turn-of-the-century Ashcan school painters captured the gritty cityscape that would later host champions of modernism Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, and Marsden Hartley. In the 1930s, European-trained artist Josef Albers introduced a generation of American painters to new theories of color and space from which emerged the breakthrough Abstract Expressionists. By the 1950s, American art had come of age, as Americans securely held the vanguard position in the international art world.

William Holman Hunt was one of the three major artistic talents of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Hunt’s work was always characterized by great seriousness of purpose, and his paintings include many of the most beautiful and powerful images of that midcentury explosion of creativity. This catalogue raisonée gives him the attention he deserves. The book includes an introduction that assesses Hunt’s life and artistic practice and discusses his aims, philosophy, and religious beliefs, which shed light on his works. While many of his paintings, with their extraordinary effects of light and color, are immediately accessible, his mature works incorporate symbolism that cannot be fully understood without a detailed knowledge of his intentions, and the catalogue entries thoroughly explore this. The volume presents Hunt’s oils and works on paper in two separate sections, and appendixes provide additional information on his illustrated letters, etchings, published illustrations, sculpture, and furniture.

Born in 1895 in a remote fishing village in Spain, Cristobal Balenciaga learned sewing and tailoring at his mother's knee. By 1937, the talented and persistent young man had opened his own design salon in Paris, and in the years following World War II, he emerged as a designer to be reckoned with in the world of haute couture. The House of Balenciaga grew to serve an international clientele from locations in Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona, and from 1937 to its closing in 1968 created some of the most outstanding and innovative examples of French and Spanish haute couture of the era. This beautifully illustrated book presents nearly 70 Balenciaga creations for day and evening, along with 25 hats, from the extraordinary archives of the Texas Fashion Collection of the University of North Texas. The book also includes striking fashion photographs from Vogue magazine and Harper's Bazaar by Richard Avedon and Louise Dahl-Wolfe. A series of essays explores many aspects of the designer's work, among them his contributions to fashion history; connections with such other prominent designers as Hubert de Givenchy and Oscar de la Renta; important relationships with Neiman Marcus and fashion buyer Bert de Winter in Dallas; and his close friend and client Claudia Heard de Osborne.

From 1874 to 1882, John Singer Sargent produced more than 200 paintings and water-colours aside from portraiture, including figures in landscape settings, architectural studies, seascapes, subject paintings, and studies after old masters. This book discusses these pictures. Each painting is documented with exhibition history and bibliography.

My Dear Mr. Stalin is the first publication that contains the complete correspondence between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin. This collection of more than three hundred hot-war messages, never before fully available in any language, is an invaluable primary source for understanding the relationship that developed between these two great world leaders during a time of supreme world crisis. The correspondence, secret at the time, begins with a letter Roosevelt wrote to Stalin offering aid to the Soviet Union following Hitler's surprise attack in 1941. It ends with a message that was an attempt to minimise the differences between the two leaders, approved by Roosevelt only minutes before his death in 1945. The book traces the evolution of their unique relationship, revealing the statesmanship of the two men and their thinking about the grave events of their time. An informative introduction to the volume and generous annotations set the letters in context.

During the reigns of Louis XV (1723-74) and Louis XVI (1774-92), fashion and furniture were not simply meant to be beautiful but were also intended to arouse, attract, and seduce. Published in response to the critically acclaimed and hugely popular exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum in the fall of 2004, Dangerous Liaisons focuses on fashion and its interplay with the paintings, furniture, and decorative arts of eighteenth-century France. Featuring beautiful color photographs of the exhibition’s installation, details of the garments, and supplementary historical material, the book demonstrates how the extravagant clothing of the period reiterated the splendor of Rococo and Neoclassical interiors.

Comic artist Ivan Brunetti, the creator of Schizo, offers a best-of anthology of contemporary art comics, along with some classic comic strips and other historical material that have retained a 'modern' sensibility. As with Chris Ware's selections for his best-selling McSweeney's anthology, Brunetti's choices make for a highly personal book ('my criteria were simple: these are comics that I savor and often revisit') that serves as a broad historical overview of the medium and a round-up of some of today's best and most interesting North American comic artists. Included here are works from such well-known artists as Robert Crumb, Kim Deitch, Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Ben Katchor, Charles Burns, Gary Panter, Seth, Phoebe Gloeckner, Daniel Clowes, Lynda Barry, Joe Sacco, Jamie and Gilbert Hernandez as well as many other pioneers whose names may be less familiar. Brunetti offers selections from the works of more than seventy-five avantgarde comic artists. His selections are arranged by genre, and grouped thematically. Luxuriously produced, and printed in four-colour throughout, the book is a must-have for collectors, aficionados, readers of comics, and those generally interested in cutting-edge art and literature.

This beautiful book focuses on Laurelton Hall, Louis Comfort Tiffany's extraordinary country estate in Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York. Beginning in 1902, Tiffany (1848-1933) designed every aspect of the immense home, which had eighty-four rooms and eight levels, and extensive grounds into which the house was carefully integrated. Tiffany's residential masterpiece was also a quasi-museum, for he filled it with his own works — windows, glassware, pottery, enamels, lamps, oil paintings, and watercolours — as well as with objects from his collections of Islamic, Asian, and Native American art. Laurelton Hall burned down in 1957, but about ten years earlier most of its contents had been removed and sold. Every aspect of the estate is examined and re-created in this volume: its terraced gardens with fountains and pools; the many outbuildings; and Tiffany's life there. The interior decoration of Laurelton Hall, a particular focus of the book, is represented by both numerous period photographs and newly commissioned colour photography of surviving artworks and salvaged architectural components from the estate. For all who admire Tiffany and his work, this book presents a unique portrait of his remarkable home.

This volume focuses on a wide range of Victorian-era objects from Britain and the United States in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The following topics are explored: still-life painting in nineteenth-century America; the burgeoning Victorian print market; a fascinating sketchbook used by the English painter Edward Burne-Jones; a spectacular Gothic-style British wine cabinet; and a rare photographic album compiled by an aristocratic English family. Also featured, in a portfolio section, are other highlights from the museum’s Victorian collection, including furniture, paintings, photographs, textiles, and works on paper by such noted artists as Julia Margaret Cameron, William Morris, and John Everett Millais.

Late in his career Thomas Gainsborough became preoccupied with the theme of the cottage door, and he created a group of paintings and drawings that show rustic figures clustered around the open door of a cottage set in a deeply wooded landscape. Often seen as exemplars of the rural idyll, these works were among the first landscape paintings to reflect the eighteenth-century aesthetic of sensibility. As a way of seeing, sensibility valued nature for its innocence and simplicity, and images, such as Gainsborough’s cottage subjects, for their power to move the viewer. This lovely book brings together the cottage door paintings and essays that discuss Gainsborough’s departure from the more naturalistic style of his earlier career and that place his new concern with sentimentalism and artificiality in the context of sensibility and the growing interest in expressive, even sensational, visual spectacles. To this end, contributors to the volume investigate new viewing practices associated with sensibility, the meaning of the cottage for Gainsborough and his contemporaries, the artist’s creation of affecting landscapes through the use of peasant subjects, and his theatrical treatment of these subjects in order to heighten his viewers’ emotional responses.

The notion of a golden age set in an earthly paradise has long kindled the human imagination. Virgil envisioned such a place of bucolic pleasures — erotic and unsullied, sometimes shadowed by blunted desires and doubts — in his Eclogues, set in the valley of Arcadia in ancient Greece. His poems defined for Western art and literature a theme that continues to this day. Their resonance as a foundation for European painters around 1900 is the subject of this beautifully illustrated catalogue, which focuses on three monumental paintings — Paul Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98), Paul Cezanne's The Large Bathers (1906), and Henri Matisse's Bathers by a River (1909-10, 1913, and 1916-17). Other masterpieces by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Nicolas Poussin, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes establish the high value given to Arcadia in the history of French painting. These are joined by major works by Henri Edmond Cross, Robert Delaunay, Andre Derain, Pablo Picasso, Henri Rousseau, and Paul Signac, as well as paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, and Natalia Goncharova to suggest the vitality of this subject outside the canonical French definitions. Distinguished scholars place these artists within the larger context of this inventive period in art history.

The first decades of the twentieth century brought enormous change in Britain. Men's and women's roles came under scrutiny, class and social structures were transformed. This book casts new light on the notorious Bloomsbury Group and how the issues of their day influenced their interpretation and decoration of the home. Christopher Reed analyses the rooms designed by Bloomsbury artists as spaces in which to be modern. The book traces the development of Bloomsbury's domestic aesthetic from the group's influential promulgation of Post-Impressionism in Britain around 1910 through the 1930s. In detailed studies of rooms and environments created by Virginia Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry, Reed challenges the accepted notion that these artists drifted away from modernism. He presents their work as an alternative form of modernism, later suppressed by sexist and homophobic attitudes that disparaged the decorative arts and domesticity in general, as well as Bloomsbury in particular. The aesthetic and ideological implications of the Bloomsbury interiors were international in scope, Reed argues, and these domestic designs served as an important marker along the route to modernity.

Oil sketches by Peter Paul Rubens, created at speed and in the heat of invention with a colourful loaded brush, convey all the spontaneity of the great Flemish painter's creative process. This ravishing book draws from both private and public collections to present in full colour 40 of Rubens's oil sketches. Viewers will find in these informal paintings an enchanting intimacy and gain a new appreciation of Rubens's capacity for invention and improvisation, and of his special genius for dramatic design and colouristic brilliance. The book investigates the role of the oil sketch in Rubens's work; the development of the artist's themes and narratives in his multiple sketches; and the history of the appreciation of his oil sketches. It also explores some of the unique aspects of his techniques and materials. By revealing the oil sketches as the most direct record of Rubens's creative process, the book presents him as the greatest and most fluent practitioner of this vibrant and vital medium. This book is the catalogue of the exhibition that appears at the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut; the Berkeley Art Museum; and the Cincinnati Art Museum. The exhibition at the Bruce Museum coincides with the Metropolitan Museum's exhibition of Rubens's Drawings, and a number of joint events have been arranged.

Although the interiors of aristocratic homes have received much attention, there has been little written about how the interiors of middle-class homes evolved through the ages. In this study, James Ayres traces the development — in words and pictures — of vernacular British interiors from the 16th to the mid-19th century. The work is a greatly expanded and revised version of Ayres' earlier work «The Book of the Home», and deals with a wide range of subjects, including heating and lighting, the use of colour and paint, details of doors, doorways and staircases, and much more. Ayres tells us, for example, that in Tudor England, glazed windows, door locks and floorboards were not simply considered to be fixtures in a middle-class home because of their expense, and it was only after such features became prevalent that these interiors grew more decorative and lavish. In pre-industrial Britain, textiles and printed wallpaper were used sparingly because of their cost, and colours and patterns were introduced through painted floors, ceilings, furniture and stencilled walls. People also took advantage of what was nearby; homes in the south-east, for example, made use of the cast and wrought iron products of Kent and Sussex, and those in Devon had locally-made earthenware fire-backs and firedogs. Ayres offers a mosaic that provides a vivid picture of the smaller domestic dwellings of the past. Embellished with early illustrations and the author's own line drawings and photographs, the work provides evidence for the treatment of historic interiors and inspiration for schemes of decoration today.

Mark Wilson Jones explores how the architects of ancient Rome approached design. Drawing on new archaeological discoveries and his own analyses of Roman monuments, the author discusses how the ancient architects dealt with the principles of architecture and the practicalities of construction as they engaged in the creative process.

The illustrious career of Edouard Vuillard (1868–1940) spanned the fin de siècle and the first four decades of the twentieth century. During that time, the French painter, printmaker, and photographer created a large number of extraordinary works. This gorgeous book—the most comprehensive and authoritative study of Vuillard’s art to date—presents some hundred works that reveal the full range of his renowned artistic abilities. In a series of illustrated essays, the authors explore Vuillard’s complex and diverse career, which began with his academic training in Paris in the late 1880s. By the early 1890s, Vuillard was painting the innovative and sensual Nabi paintings for which he is best known, characterized by complex patterns and vibrant colors. Vuillard was also beginning to paint provocative interiors and works associated with the avant-garde theater. The book concludes with an examination of Vuillard’s sumptuous large-scale decorations, luminous landscapes, and elegant portraits from the last decades of his career as well as a substantial selection of his pastels and prints, in addition to his photographs, many of which have never before been published.

This is the second volume of the catalogue raisonne of the work of the American painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). It comprises over 150 formal portraits and portrait sketches in oil and watercolour that he painted between 1889 and 1900. The catalogued works have been grouped into chronological sections, each with its own introduction to set the particular group in context. In addition, an overall introduction places Sargent in the context of European portraiture of the past and of his own time. Each work is documented in depth: entries include traditional data about the painting or watercolour; details of the work's provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography; a short biography of the sitter; a discussion of the circumstances in which the work was created; and a critical discussion of its subject matter, style, and significance in Sargent's career. With very few exceptions, all the works are reproduced in colour. There is also an illustrated inventory of Sargent's studio props and accessories and a cross-referenced checklist of the portraits in which they appear.

An exploration of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and its legacy, discussing its formation, the artists' theoretical concerns about depictions of the natural world, and their impact. This second edition is revised and updated to take into account artworks that have more recently come to light.

From about 1425, artists in the region which is now Belgium and The Netherlands created paintings which were startling in their realism and innovative approach. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, this book celebrates one of the great epochs of western art, from the work of the inventor of oil painting, Jan van Eyck, to that of the highly original genius, Peter Bruegel. More than 100 colour reproductions, with individual commentaries, present the accomplishments of the major figures of the period, including Robert Campin, Rogier van der Weyden, Gerard David and Hans Memling. Essays by specialists in the field discuss various aspects of the subject, and biographies are provided for all the artists represented, together with comparative illustrations of prints and paintings from collections other than that of The Metropolitan.

From haute couture to hot pants, from glamour to grunge, the past fifty years have witnessed some startling revolutions in fashion. This lively survey of postwar fashion not only describes the great designers and their creations but also places trends in clothing within their social and cultural contexts.

This beautiful and authoritative book is the first to examine the development of Gothic sculpture throughout Europe. It discusses not only the most famous monuments — such as the cathedrals of Chartres, Amiens, and Reims, Westminster Abbey, and the Siena Duomo — but also less familiar buildings in France, England, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Scandinavia. Numerous illustrations — including photographs taken specially for the book — accompany the text. For the student or general reader, this book sets a standard in the field and will remain indispensable for many years to come. Richard Camber, Antique International Paul Williamson has produced a miracle of clarity and compression in the latest volume of the Pelican History of Art... His subject is one of the most challenging and most studied subjects in Western art: the birth, growth and development of Gothic sculpture in its first 150 years. Michael Hall, Country Life Beautifully produced and judiciously written.... Williamson's is a book which has helped vindicate the genre of the synoptic survey and provide a superb text for students as well as a new foundation for specialist research.