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Enlightened Eclecticism
"The central decades of the 18th century in Britain were crucial to the history of European taste and design. One of the period's most important campaigns of patronage and collecting was that of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland: Sir Hugh Smithson (1712-86) and Lady Elizabeth Seymour Percy (1716-76). This book examines four houses they refurbished in eclectic architectural styles--Stanwick Hall, Northumberland House, Syon House, and Alnwick Castle--alongside the innumerable objects they collected, their funerary monuments, and their persistent engagement in Georgian London's public sphere. Over the years, their commissions embraced or pioneered styles as varied as Palladianism, rococo, neoclassicism, and Gothic revival. In every instance, minute details contributed to large-scale projects expressing the Northumberlands' various aesthetic and cultural allegiances. Their development sheds light on the eclectic taste of Georgian Britain, the emergence of neoclassicism, and the cultures of the Grand Tour and the Enlightenment."--Jacket flap.
The Story of Drawing
Drawing is at the heart of human creativity. The most democratic form of art-making, it requires nothing more than a plain surface and a stub of pencil, a piece of chalk or an inky brush. Our prehistoric ancestors drew with natural pigments on the walls of caves, and every subsequent culture has practised drawing – whether on papyrus, parchment or paper. Artists throughout history have used drawing as part of the creative process. While painting and sculpture have been shaped heavily by money and influence, drawing has always offered extraordinary creative latitude. Here we see the artist at his or her most unguarded. Susan Owens offers a glimpse over artists’ shoulders – from Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Hokusai to Van Gogh, Käthe Kollwitz and Yayoi Kusama – as they work, think and innovate, as they scrutinise the world around them or escape into their imaginations. The Story of Drawing loops around the established history of art, sometimes staying close, at other times diving into exhilarating and altogether less familiar territory.
Flesh and Bones
This illustrated volume examines the different methods artists and anatomists used to reveal the inner workings of the human body and evoke wonder in its form. For centuries, anatomy was a fundamental component of artistic training, as artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo sought to skillfully portray the human form. In Europe, illustrations that captured the complex structure of the body—spectacularly realized by anatomists, artists, and printmakers in early atlases such as Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica libri septem of 1543—found an audience with both medical practitioners and artists. Flesh and Bones examines the inventive ways anatomy has been presented ...
Creator of Nightmares
A critical biography of the eighteenth-century painter. Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) was one of the eighteenth century’s most provocative and inventive artists. He is best known for his painting The Nightmare, which channeled a new form of gothic imagery for the Romantic age. This engaging study of the artist’s career unveils Fuseli’s complexities, navigating contradictions between literary and painted works, sacred and secular themes, and traditional patronage versus competitive exhibitions. Plotting Fuseli’s trajectory from Zurich to Paris, Rome, and ultimately London, Creator of Nightmares paints an image of Fuseli as an astute marketer and self-proclaimed genius who transformed himself from a priest to an Enlightenment writer, a mercurial force in the art world, and finally a revered teacher.
Painting in Stone
A sweeping history of premodern architecture told through the material of stone Spanning almost five millennia, Painting in Stone tells a new history of premodern architecture through the material of precious stone. Lavishly illustrated examples include the synthetic gems used to simulate Sumerian and Egyptian heavens; the marble temples and mansions of Greece and Rome; the painted palaces and polychrome marble chapels of early modern Italy; and the multimedia revival in 19th-century England. Poetry, the lens for understanding costly marbles as an artistic medium, summoned a spectrum of imaginative associations and responses, from princes and patriarchs to the populace. Three salient themes sustained this “lithic imagination”: marbles as images of their own elemental substance according to premodern concepts of matter and geology; the perceived indwelling of astral light in earthly stones; and the enduring belief that colored marbles exhibited a form of natural—or divine—painting, thanks to their vivacious veining, rainbow palette, and chance images.
Rubens
The first study devoted to classical art’s vital creative impact on the work of the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens. For the great Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), the classical past afforded lifelong creative stimulus and the camaraderie of humanist friends. A formidable scholar, Rubens ingeniously transmitted the physical ideals of ancient sculptors, visualized the spectacle of imperial occasions, rendered the intricacies of mythological tales, and delineated the character of gods and heroes in his drawings, paintings, and designs for tapestries. His passion for antiquity profoundly informed every aspect of his art and life. Including 170 color illustrations, this volume addresses t...
Dr Johnson's Friend and Robert Adam's Client Topham Beauclerk
Dr Johnson said that he would walk to the ends of the earth to save Beauclerk. Other people who claimed to be his friends rejoiced at his early death. How did the beautiful youth of Francis Coates’ 1756 portrait become a man whose greatest claim to fame was causing an infestation of lice at Blenheim Palace through lack of personal hygiene? A great-grandson of Charles II and Nell Gwyn, he lived a privileged life thanks to fortuitously inherited wealth. He employed Robert Adam to build him a house at Muswell Hill which has almost completely disappeared from the records of Adam’s work due to a dispute about the bill. He was one of the leading book-collectors of the time, with a library of 3...
Drawn from the Antique
"This catalogue examines one of the most important educational tools and sources of inspiration for Western artists for over five hundred years: drawing after the Antique. From the Renaissance to the 19th century, classical statues offered young artists idealised models from which they could learn to represent the volumes, poses and expressions of the human figure and which, simultaneously, provided perfected examples of anatomy and proportion. For established artists, antique statues and reliefs presented an immense repertory of forms that they could use as inspiration for their own creations. Through a selection of thirty-nine drawings, prints and paintings, covering more than four hundred years and by artists as different as Federico Zuccaro, Hendrick Goltzius, Peter Paul Rubens, Charles-Joseph Natoire, Henry Fuseli and Joseph Mallord William Turner, this catalogue provides the first overview of a phenomenon crucial for the understanding and appreciation of European art."--Page 2 of cover.
Women Patrons and Collectors
In looking at the history of collecting, one may be excused for regarding it as an activity in which, traditionally, women have shown little interest or in which they have not been involved. As the present volume shows, women—particularly aristocratic women—not only resisted this discrimination through the ages, but also built important collections and used them to their own advantage, in order to make statements about their lineage, power, cultural heritage or religious preferences. That is not to say that there was not an increasing number of middle-class women who became draughtswomen, painters and natural scientists and who found it equally beneficial for their chosen profession to c...
Antiquities in Motion
An exciting new approach to understand the trade of antiquities in early modern Rome traces the journey of objects from discovery to display. Barbara Furlotti presents a dynamic interpretation of the early modern market for antiquities, relying on the innovative notion of archaeological finds as mobile items. She reconstructs the journey of ancient objects from digging sites to venues where they were sold, such as Roman marketplaces and antiquarians’ storage spaces; to sculptors’ workshops, where they were restored; and to Italian and other European collections, where they arrived after complicated and costly travel over land and sea. She shifts the attention away from collectors to peas...
