Essentially a domestic biography whose main concern is the tragicomedy of manners enacted by a closely knit group of friends and lovers, Wives and Stunners tells the story of Janey Morris, Georgie Burne-Jones, Lizzie Siddall, Effie Gray and less well-known, Marie Spartali, Aglaia Coronio and Mary Zambacco.
This is the story of Faberge's Imperial Easter eggs - of their maker, of the tsars who commissioned them, of the middlemen who sold them and of the collectors who fell in love with them.
Illuminating reflections on painting and drawing from one of the most revered artists of the twentieth century'Thank God for yellow ochre, cadmium red medium, and permanent green light'How does a painter see the world?
A landmark illustrated history of rural church monuments - the forgotten national treasures of England and WalesDeep in the countryside, away from metropolitan abbeys and cathedrals, thousands of funerary monuments are hidden in parish churches.
'We live within a spectacle of empty clothes and unworn masks'In this series of remarkable pieces from across his career, John Berger celebrates and dissects the close links between art and society and the individual.
From the bestselling author of Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts, a captivating account of the last surviving relic of Thomas BecketThe assassination of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170 is one of the most famous events in European history.
Since its establishment 150 years ago as the world's first urban subway, the London Underground has continuously set a benchmark for design that many transit systems around the world - from New York to Tokyo to Moscow and beyond - have followed.
The multi-award-winning meditation on survival, care and the place of literature in an unequal world'Around that time my daughter and I had this exchange:Anne, imagine if the world had nothing in it.
'I have never read such a stimulating short guide to art' Lynn Barber, Sunday Times Now Grayson Perry is a fully paid-up member of the art establishment, he wants to show that any of us can appreciate art (after all, there is a reason he's called this book Playing to the Gallery and not 'Sucking up to an Academic Elite').
A unique opportunity to learn about the lives and creativity of the world's leading artistsHans Ulrich Obrist has been conducting ongoing conversations with the world's greatest living artists since he began in Switzerland, aged 19, with Fischli and Weiss.
This book takes a dramatically original approach to the history of humanity, using objects which previous civilisations have left behind them, often accidentally, as prisms through which we can explore past worlds and the lives of the men and women who lived in them.
Visionary English Socialist and pioneer of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris argued that all work should be a source of pride and satisfaction, and that everyone should be entitled to beautiful surroundings no matter what their class.
John Ruskin overturned Victorian society s ideas about art and architecture, arguing that ancient buildings must be conserved for their deep, mystical links with the past and that creative design is essential not for financial gain, but to communicate eternal human truths.
Leonardo is the greatest, most multi-faceted and most mysterious of all Renaissance artists, but extraordinarily, considering his enormous reputation, this is the first full-length biography in English for several decades.
Setting Realism in its social and historical context, the author discusses the crucial paradox posed by Realist works of art - notably in the revolutionary paintings of Courbet, the works of Manet, Degas and Monet, of the Pre-Raphaelites and other English, American, German and Italian Realists.
In this remarkable collection of 100 manifestos from the last 100 years, Alex Danchev presents the cacophony of voices of such diverse movements as Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Feminism, Communism, Destructivism, Vorticism, Stridentism, Cannibalism and Stuckism, taking in along the way film, architecture, fashion, and cookery.
At thirty one, Michelangelo was considered the finest artist in Italy, perhaps the world; long before he died at almost 90 he was widely believed to be the greatest sculptor or painter who had ever lived (and, by his enemies, to be an arrogant, uncouth, swindling miser).
One of the most widely read books on modern design, Nikolaus Pevsner's landmark work today remains as stimulating as it was when first published in 1936.
Artist, architect, poet and philosopher, Leon Battista Alberti revolutionized the history of art with his theories of perspective in On Painting (1435).
A new selection of Vincent Van Gough's letters, based on an entirely new translation, revealing his religious struggles, his fascination with the French Revolution, his search for love and his involvement in humanitarian causes.
Beginning with Cimabue and Giotto in the thirteenth century, Vasari traces the development of Italian art across three centuries to the golden epoch of Leonardo and Michelangelo.
When John Constable fell in love with Maria Bicknell, granddaughter of a Suffolk country neighbour, he little knew how long it would take to make her his wife.
For nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, the Italian Renaissance was nothing less than the beginning of the modern world - a world in which flourishing individualism and the competition for fame radically transformed science, the arts, and politics.
A new departure in Penguin Classics: a book containing one of the greatest of all Renaissance woodcut sequences - Holbein's bravura danse macabreOne of Holbein's first great triumphs, The Dance of Death is an incomparable sequence of tiny woodcuts showing the folly of human greed and pride, with each image packed with drama, wit and horror as a skeleton mocks and terrifies everyone from the emperor to a ploughman.
A leading art historian presents a new grammar for understanding the meaning and significance of printIn process and technique, printmaking is an art of physical contact.
A beautifully illustrated examination of the women artists whose inspired search for artistic integrity and equality influenced Expressionist avant-garde cultureWomen Artists in Expressionism explores how women negotiated the competitive world of modern art during the late Wilhelmine and early Weimar periods in Germany.
The young Thomas Eakins's most revealing letters-published here for the first timeThe most revealing and interesting writings of American artist Thomas Eakins are the letters he sent to family and friends while he was a student in Paris between 1866 and 1870.
How remarkable changes in ancient Greek pottery reveal the transformation of classical Greek cultureWhy did soldiers stop fighting, athletes stop competing, and lovers stop having graphic sex in classical Greek art?
How New York's Lower East Side inspired new ways of seeing AmericaNew York City's Lower East Side, long viewed as the space of what Jacob Riis notoriously called the "e;other half,"e; was also a crucible for experimentation in photography, film, literature, and visual technologies.
The first history of indigenous photography in the Middle EastThe birth of photography coincided with the expansion of European imperialism in the Middle East, and some of the medium's earliest images are Orientalist pictures taken by Europeans in such places as Cairo and Jerusalem-photographs that have long shaped and distorted the Western visual imagination of the region.
A unique look at how classical notions of ascent and flight preoccupied early modern British writers and artistsBetween the late sixteenth century and early nineteenth century, the British imagination-poetic, political, intellectual, spiritual and religious-displayed a pronounced fascination with images of ascent and flight to the heavens.
A new look at the interrelationship of architecture and sculpture during one of the richest periods of American modern designAlloys looks at a unique period of synergy and exchange in the postwar United States, when sculpture profoundly shaped architecture, and vice versa.
