Yale University Press

Christen Købke (1819–1848) was arguably the greatest painter of Denmark’s “Golden Age,” the period of the nation’s supreme artistic achievement. He had the remarkable ability to invest the simplest corner of town or countryside with charm and delicacy, without resorting to the artificial rhetoric of academic traditions. He endowed ordinary people and places, and simple motifs, with a universal significance; a world in microcosm. This beautiful book, written by leading scholars of Scandinavian art, offers an overview of Købke’s achievement within its cultural context, and also highlights the most innovative aspects of his work, including outdoor sketching, his fascination with painterly immediacy in the treatment of light and atmosphere, his exquisite originality, and his experimental outlook.

Gabriel Metsu (1625-1667) employed an unusual variety of styles, techniques, and subjects, making him a particularly difficult artist to characterize. From his early days in Leiden until his death in Amsterdam at the height of his career, his unparalleled mastery of the brush allowed him to paint a remarkable range of history paintings, portraits, still lifes, but most of all, exquisite genre paintings. And whatever his subject matter, his work reveals an unrivalled talent for imbuing figures with a human and personable character. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Metsu held a place as one of the most celebrated painters of the Dutch Golden Age, and his works were acquired for noble collections throughout Europe, while his contemporary Johannes Vermeer was almost unheard of. In the 20th century their positions were reversed as Vermeer's reputation soared. This enlightening book resituates Metsu as one of the leading genre painters of his time. It offers a portrait of the age through his patrons and his wide network of contacts and colleagues in Amsterdam, as well as analysis of Metsu's technique as a draftsman and as a painter, and it documents the fashions and fabrics of the time through his work.

Born in Bologna, Annibale Carracci (1564–1609) was one of the most revolutionary artists of the late Renaissance. Even before turning twenty, he rebelled against convention by investing his art with a sense of naturalism uncommon to paintings of the period. His early painting The Butcher’s Shop, a cherished work in the Kimbell Art Museum’s collection, marks the beginning of Carracci’s artistic journey and remains one of his most powerfully naturalistic works. This fascinating study explores the origins and significance of The Butcher’s Shop, placing it within the artist’s own career as well as the broader context of Italian painting. Detailing the uniqueness and vitality of Carracci’s style, C. D. Dickerson emphasizes the remarkable plein-air quality of the painting and explains how Carracci may have achieved this utterly novel effect, though in fact executing the work indoors in his studio. He also sets Carracci’s work in the tradition of butcher’s shop paintings in Renaissance Italy, analyzes the painting in relation to the reality of the occupation at the time, and investigates where in Bologna such a butcher’s shop might have stood.

Presenting the first formulation of the central subject, this volume challenges major assumptions long held by Western art historians and provides new ways of thinking about, looking at, and understanding Byzantine art in its broadest geographic and chronological framework, from A.D. 300 to the early nineteenth century. Byzantine art abandoned classical ideals in favor of formulas that conveyed spiritual concepts through stylized physical forms. Scholarship dealing with Byzantine icons has previously been largely focused on depictions of holy figures, dismissing representations of architecture as irrelevant space-filling background. Architecture as Icon demonstrates that background representations of architecture are meaningful, active components of compositions, often as significant as the human figures. The book provides a critical view for understanding the Byzantine conception of architectural forms and space and the corresponding intellectual underpinnings of their representation. Introduced by four thought-provoking essays, the catalogue divides the material as included in the exhibition into four categories identified as: generic, specific, and symbolic representations, and a final grouping entitled “From Earthly to Heavenly Jerusalem.” This handsomely illustrated volume addresses various approaches to depicting architecture in Byzantine art that contrast sharply with those of the Renaissance and subsequent Western artistic tradition.

Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) was the pre-eminent portraitist of the Regency period, depicting monarchs, political leaders, aristocratic families, society beauties and actresses with bravura flair. This important book explores Lawrence's political friendships and allegiances along with his exceptional role as witness to significant historical events and contrasts these with his remarkable ability to depict the charm and innocence of childhood. Elected President of the Royal Academy in 1820, Lawrence was instrumental in establishing the status of the artist in nineteenth-century Britain.

Seventeenth-century Dutch paintings of the laid table are rich with products of the trade that made the country's fortunes during this period — yet they are traditionally interpreted as moralizing against excess. This is the first book to unpack the complex histories of these commodities in order to explore the contradictory implications in these extraordinary pictures. The vast scope of the Dutch trade network carries this study to the far corners of the earth: from domestically sourced cheese, herring and beer, to grain, lemons and wine from the rest of Europe, pepper, porcelain and tea imported by the Dutch East India Company, and the West India Company's salt, tobacco, sugar and even slaves. Drawing from a wide array of sources, from period medical treatises to the then-equivalent of the daily news and the scholarship of historians then and now, the book illuminates a wealth of allusions within a genre supposedly devoid of narrative. Anthropological in its approach to art as a cultural system, this study makes a distinctive interdisciplinary contribution not only to its field of art history but to the history of foods, economic history, post-colonial discourse on the meetings between Europe and its many Others in the early modern period, and most of all, the profound intersection of all these concerns in the visual culture of the age. As striking pictorial expressions of a significant stage in the development of capitalist consumer culture, these paintings ultimately reveal much more than meets the eye. Their traditional moralizing interpretation is challenged by the 'trade secrets' uncovered in this account. Serving up the fruits of global commerce on glowing silver platters comfortably removed from the exploitation that fuelled the Dutch Republic's phenomenal rise to prosperity, they pose food for thought for today's society as well.

In Britain today the output of excellent ceramics seems more eclectic than elsewhere. This stylish and wide-ranging survey comprises examples of clay art by one hundred major artists, covering the period from the late 1980s through 2009. Drawn from the Diane and Marc Grainer Collection, it includes works by Allison Britton, Edmund de Waal, Kate Malone, Grayson Perry, Julian Stair, Steve Dixon, and Nick Arroyave-Portela, among others. The selection balances functional objects and sculpture; hand-built, thrown, and moulded techniques; varieties of scale and colour; and cerebral and emotional content. All the ceramics here are rooted in the materiality of clay. The properties of the raw material, from its soft, malleable texture to the alchemy of slips and glazes, are at the core of the artists' passion. And, as the text reveals, the younger generation is moving into new directions of art practice. It is published in conjunction with the inaugural exhibition at the Mint Museum Uptown, Charlotte, NC.

Drawing on a wealth of unpublished sketchbooks, journals and writings, this essential guide to John Brett (1831-1902) investigates the painter who was seen as the leader of the Pre-Raphaelite landscape school. As well as the familiar early works, including «The Val d'Aosta» and «The Stonebreaker», it provides rich information on his later, less-known coastal and marine paintings. Brett's turbulent friendship with John Ruskin is discussed, as are his relations with his beloved sister Rosa, and his partner Mary, with whom he had seven children. His fervent interest in astronomy, his love of the sea, and his lifelong pursuit of wealth and recognition are all examined in this reassessment, which concludes with a catalogue raisonne of his works, prepared by his descendent Charles Brett. It is published to coincide with an exhibition of John Brett's work at Birmingham, Barber Institute, 30 April — 4 July; London, Fine Art Society, 20 July — 7 August; and, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, 14 September — 28 November.

Working in his villa in the south of France, Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) suffused his late canvases with radiant Mediterranean light and dazzling color. Although his subjects were close at hand—usually everyday domestic scenes—Bonnard rarely painted from life. Instead, he made pencil sketches in diaries and relied on these, along with his memory, as he executed the works in his studio. These interiors thus often conflate details from the artist’s daily life with fleeting, mysterious evocations of his past. The spectral figures who appear at the margins of the canvases, overshadowed by brilliantly colored baskets of fruit or other props, create an atmosphere of profound ambiguity and puzzling abstraction: the mundane rendered in a wholly new pictorial language. The 75 paintings, drawings, and watercolors in this volume, some rarely seen treasures from private collections, all made between 1923 and 1947, are central to the ongoing reappraisal of Bonnard as a leading figure of French modernism.

Inverting rules with obvious relish, Florentine artist Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522) is known today—as he was in his own time—for his highly personal visual language, one capable of generating images of the most mesmerizing oddity. In this book, Dennis Geronimus overcomes the scarcity of information about the artist’s life and works—only one of the nearly sixty known works by Piero is actually signed and dated—and pieces together from extensive archival research the most complete and accurate account of Piero’s life and career ever written. Unfettered imagination was the sign under which Piero exercised his pictorial invention, and yet the complicated artist was also a product of his culture. The book fills gaps in the artist’s biography and provides intensive analysis of Piero’s protean imagery, discusses his various patrons and commissions, and lists his extant, lost, and uncertainly attributed works.

Parmigianino (1503–1540) was one of the Italian Renaissance’s great geniuses. Characterized by a distinctive and elegant style and exquisite draftsmanship, he was also one of the first painter-etchers, engraving his own work and disseminating it throughout Italy and northern Europe. This beautiful volume, the definitive work on Parmigianino, focuses on both the public world of his paintings and the private realm of his drawings. It encompasses the latest research and takes full advantage of recent cleanings and restorations of the artist’s major works. David Ekserdjian, a leading authority on Parmigianino, draws on more than twenty years of research on the artist to consider his entire oeuvre—paintings, drawings and prints. The book contains several unpublished drawings and a new painting, and it brings together for the first time the new paintings and drawings that have been discovered and published in recent years, some by Ekserdjian himself. The author discusses these works in the context of the artist’s career and development, demonstrating the extraordinary extent of Parmigianino’s creative powers.

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, the artist known as Man Ray (1890–1976) revealed multiple artistic identities over the course of his career—New York Dadaist, Parisian Surrealist, international portraitist, and fashion photographer––and produced important works as a photographer, painter, filmmaker, writer, and maker of objects. Alias Man Ray considers how the artist’s life and career were shaped by his turn-of-the-century American Jewish immigrant experience and his lifelong evasion of his past. As an exploration of the artist’s deliberate cultural ambiguity, which allowed him to become the first American artist to be accepted by the Paris avant garde, this book examines the dynamic connection between Man Ray’s working-class origins, his assimilation, the evolution of his art, and his willful construction of his own artistic persona, as evidenced in a series of subtle, encrypted self-references throughout the artist’s career. Beautifully illustrated, Alias Man Ray will stand as a definitive study of an incomparable figure in 20th-century art.

Everything about Sarah Bernhardt is fascinating, from her obscure birth to her glorious career—redefining the very nature of her art—to her amazing (and highly public) romantic life to her indomitable spirit. Well into her seventies, after the amputation of her leg, she was performing under bombardment for soldiers during World War I, as well as crisscrossing America on her ninth American tour. Her family was also a source of curiosity: the mother she adored and who scorned her; her two half-sisters, who died young after lives of dissipation; and most of all, her son, Maurice, whom she worshiped and raised as an aristocrat, in the style appropriate to his presumed father, the Belgian Prince de Ligne. Only once did they quarrel—over the Dreyfus Affair. Maurice was a right-wing snob; Sarah, always proud of her Jewish heritage, was a passionate Dreyfusard and Zolaist. Though the Bernhardt literature is vast, Gottlieb’s Sarah is the first English-language biography to appear in decades. Brilliantly, it tracks the trajectory through which an illegitimate—and scandalous—daughter of a courtesan transformed herself into the most famous actress who ever lived, and into a national icon, a symbol of France.

View painting in 18th-century Venice began with the emergence of Luca Carlevarijs and ended with the death of Francesco Guardi in 1793, followed by Napoleon’s invasion and the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797. In between, a constellation of remarkable painters captured the city in dazzling pictures that are among the greatest achievements in 18th-century art. Canaletto may be the artist popularly associated with Venice, but he had many rivals who competed for commissions, often from foreigners whose patronage was to determine the later course of Venetian view painting. All the major figures are represented here—Bellotto, Carlevarijs, Guardi, Joli, Marieschi, and Vanvitelli—together with fascinating contemporaries such as Cimaroli and Tironi. Charles Beddington sets the scene with an overview of the artists then working in the city, and draws on the latest research and scholarship to illuminate the complex stylistic relationships between them. Succinct, lively biographies for each artist are followed by short introductions to the works, grouped chronologically by artist. Each painter saw the same topography with his own unique vision; this beautiful book demonstrates the varied responses to the cityscape, with its ever-changing light, as well as to its spectacles and ceremonies.

The sheer beauty of the work of sixteenth-century artist Parmigianino (1503-40) makes it easy to imagine that he discovered his style without any effort. But nothing so elegant as his drawings and paintings could have been achieved effortlessly. A close study of the artist's work, particularly his drawings, reveals the sources of his style and the creative struggles he endured. This lavishly illustrated book offers a comprehensive reassessment of Parmigianino's work as a draftsman, discussing in detail more than eighty of the artist's works on paper selected from collections around the world. Among Renaissance artists, Parmigianino was perhaps more conscious than any of the potential of the graphic arts to convey, and indeed broadcast, complex ideas. He explored this potential by means of his numerous drawings and through the etchings he produced on his own as well as through the engravings and chiaroscuro that were made after his designs. In these media, the artist's influence travelled farther and wider than it could have through his paintings alone. This book coincides with the quincentenary of the artist's birth in Parma and accompanies an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, from October 3, 2003 to January 4, 2004, and at the Frick Collection, New York, from January 27 to April 18, 2004.

In 1701, Tsar Peter the Great decreed that all residents of Moscow must abandon their traditional dress and wear European fashion. Those who produced or sold Russian clothing would face 'dreadful punishment'. Peter's dress decree, part of his drive to make Russia more like Western Europe, had a profound impact on the history of Imperial Russia. This engrossing book explores the impact of Westernization on Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and presents a wealth of photographs of ordinary Russians in all their finery. Christine Ruane draws on memoirs, mail-order catalogues, fashion magazines, and other period sources to demonstrate that Russia's adoption of Western fashion had symbolic, economic, and social ramifications and was inseparably linked to the development of capitalism, industrial production, and new forms of communication. This book shows how the fashion industry became a forum through which Russians debated and formulated a new national identity.

What is still life? We are familiar with the objects portrayed but have difficulty explaining the essence of this popular art form. Erika Langmuir examines the special fascination of still life, and what distinguishes it from other categories of painting. She discusses its evolution from the trompe l'oeil wall paintings of antiquity, through its revival in the age of Caravaggio and Velazquez, and again in the works of Cezanne and Picasso. Originally published as Pocket Guide Still Life, this eloquent survey benefits from a wider format, new reproductions and updated references.

From purses to parasols, spectacles to slippers, wigs to walking sticks, the Rijksmuseum has a superb collection of fashion accessories that also includes a rich array of more familiar items: hats, gloves, and shoes for both men and women. Ranging from the 15th to the 21st century, the objects in this stylish book are grouped by color, allowing intriguing juxtapositions of period, material, and type. Many of these accessories were originally received as gifts on all kinds of occasions and for all kinds of reasons: a souvenir from a distant country sent to the family back home; a pair of gloves or a purse embroidered with symbols of marriage and the couple's initials; an ivory fan commissioned in Canton, carved with the initials of a lover or inscribed with an amorous allusion; an embroidered cap from a wife to a husband to mark the birth of a child; a fan for a daughter from her grateful parents for her loyal obedience; or a gift for wedding guests to take home. Superb photography and award-winning design make this an exceptionally desirable book for every follower of fashion with a sense of history.

The appealing genre paintings of great seventeenth-century Dutch artists — Vermeer, Steen, de Hooch, Dou, and others — have long enjoyed tremendous popularity. This comprehensive book explores the evolution of genre painting throughout the Dutch Golden Age, beginning in the early 1600s and continuing through the opening years of the next century. Wayne Franits, a well-known scholar of Dutch genre painting, offers a wealth of information about these works as well as about seventeenth-century Dutch culture, its predilections, and its prejudices.The author approaches genre paintings from a variety of perspectives, examining their reception among contemporary audiences and setting the works in political, cultural, and economic contexts. The works emerge as distinctly conventional images, Franits shows, as genre artists continually replicated specific styles, motifs, and a surprisingly restricted number of themes over the course of several generations. With hundreds of illustrations and a full representation of major artists and cities where genre painting flourished, this book will delight students, scholars, and general readers alike.It is included in «Choice's» Outstanding Academic Titles list, January 2006.

The friendship between William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones began when they met as undergraduates in 1853 and lasted until Morris' death in 1896, despite their differences in temperament and in attitudes to political engagement. This friendship was one of the defining features of both their lives, and yet the overlap in their artistic projects has not previously been considered in detail. In this deeply thoughtful book, Caroline Arscott explores particular aspects of the paintings of Burne-Jones and the designs of Morris and concludes that there are close interconnections in theme, allusion, and formal strategy between the works of the two men. She suggests that themes of bodily pain, desire and appetite are central to their vision. Through careful readings of Burne-Jones' painting and Morris' designs for printed wallpapers and textiles, she shows that it is possible to bring together fine art and design in a linked discussion that illuminates the projects of both artists.

Offers a look at the life and work of Luis Melendez, one of eighteenth-century Europe's greatest still-life painters.

In the aftermath of the Revolution, the French public turned to British history as a way of making sense of its recent past, and no French artist of the 19th century was more inspired by English subjects than Paul Delaroche. His monumental work The Execution of Lady Jane Grey was one of the most familiar and enduring images of his time, and remains today among the most popular paintings in the National Gallery. This authoritative book presents The Execution with other major history paintings and preparatory sketches that made Delaroche's reputation during his lifetime. It is complemented by an essay by the distinguished Tudor historian John Guy, who outlines the short life of Lady Jane Grey, Queen of England for nine days, and the development of her enduring mythical status as an innocent martyr.

Drawings by the great Italian Mannerist painter and poet Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) are extremely rare. This important and beautiful publication brings together for the first time nearly all of the sixty drawings attributed to this leading draftsman of the 16th century. Each drawing is illustrated in colour, discussed in detail, and shown with many comparative photographs. Bronzino's technical virtuosity as a draftsman and his mastery of anatomy and perspective are vividly apparent in each stroke of the chalk, pen, or brush. The younger generations of Florentine artists particularly admired Bronzino for his technical virtuosity as a painter, and Giorgio Vasari praised him for his powers as a disegnatore (designer and draftsman).

In 1975, a young art student named Jeff Koons (b. 1955) moved to Chicago, where he studied at the School of the Art Institute; worked as a studio assistant to his hero, painter Ed Paschke, for $1 an hour; and socialized with many of the city's most talented artists. This handsome book takes a fresh look at the rise and career of Jeff Koons, who is now arguably one of the world's most famous artists. Koons collaborated extensively on this book, which accompanies the first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. in 16 years and offers a survey of nearly thirty years of his work, beginning with iconic sculptures from 1979 to new paintings completed in 2007. Francesco Bonami reconsiders his career, making intriguing connections to the work of Andy Warhol, A. A. Milne, Marcel Duchamp, and Gustave Courbet, among others. This is the first publication to explore a little-known but highly influential period in the artist's career, his time in Chicago in the 1970s. It also provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to Koons' work for new audiences and short texts about each of his series and many major works.