Susie Hamilton’s dynamic practice is concerned with a wide range of subjects but often focuses on solitary people in impersonal public spaces or natural wildernesses. From the heroic, isolated exploits of astronauts and Arctic explorers to lone shoppers in supermarkets, all subjects are equal under her gaze. Other works turn attention towards crowds on beaches and in hotel dining rooms, who, as in Hamilton’s paintings of single figures, are invaded by blooms and veils of paint. Comprising over 300 paintings in oil and acrylic and numerous works on paper, Hamilton’s work is here divided into thematic sections that bring insight to her research. As critic and broadcaster Charlotte Mullins observes, ‘Hamilton often uses literature as a springboard for her work. Her paintings draw out the ambiguities of Shakespeare, the fragmentary chaos of TS Eliot, the melancholy of Andrew Marvell.’ From the power of her transmutative, barely human figures presented at the Ferens Art Gallery (2002), to the more recent progression of Hamilton’s solitary forms which move across desert, tundra and forests under attack from natural and unknown forces, her often otherworldly figures remain resilient.As Mullins reflects in her introduction, however, Hamilton’s work is not all ‘pain and suffering.’ Nor is it solely concerned with the human figure. Mullins writes, ‘There is joy too, particularly when she turns her probing eye to the natural world. She captures the quizzical gaze and lightning speed of monkeys, white paint splattering the surface as they race through salt flats. We see the lethal precision of a shark in the depths, the pale camouflage of an owl in a snowstorm, the perfect balance of an ape as it leaps from vine to vine.’The development of Hamilton’s work further unfolds in an enlightening interview with writer and broadcaster Louisa Buck, from the night-time desolation of motorways and petrol stations to an evolving interest in human and animal figures. Buck’s in-conversation also details Hamilton’s series ‘Plumpers’ and ‘Mutilates’, uneasy figures who border categories of abstraction and representation.Writer, editor and international curator Anna McNay, in her eight-part extended essay commissioned for the publication, discusses Hamilton’s literary influences in detail, drawing out the ways that Hamilton’s own biography shapes the work and informs her perspectives on landscapes, people and animals.Designed by Hyperkit and edited by Anneka French, the publication has been produced by Hurtwood and published by Anomie, London.Susie Hamilton (b. London, 1950) studied Fine Art at St Martins School of Art and Byam Shaw School of Art. She read English Literature at London University, gaining a PhD in Shakespeare studies (1989). She lives and works in London and has been represented by Paul Stolper Gallery since 1996. Since 2018 Hamilton has been commissioned by mental health charity Hospital Rooms to create wall-paintings in psychiatric intensive care units and made three works for the central staircase of the new Springfield Hospital, London (2022).Recent solo exhibitions include Unbound, Paul Stolper, London (2022);in atoms, Paul Stolper, London (2016);Here Comes Everybody, St Paul’s Cathedral, London (2015);Black Sun, Studio Hugo Opdal, Flø, Norway (2009);World of Light, Triumph Gallery, Moscow (2008);New Paintings, Galleri Trafo, Oslo (2007);Leisure Paintings, Paul Stolper, London (2006);Dissolve to Dew, St Edmund Hall, Oxford (2005);Immense Dawn, Paul Stolper, London (2003);Paradise Alone, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull (2002);Mutilates, St Giles’ Cripplegate Church, London (2001).Hamilton’s work is represented in collections including Government Art Collection, British Museum, Science Museum, Imperial College Healthcare Art Collection, Richard Heaton Collection, Murderme Collection, Deutsche Bank, St Paul’s Cathedral, The Women’s Art Collection, Brehman Collection, The Methodist Modern Art Collection, The Priseman Seabrook Collection and The Groucho Club.

Richly illustrated with colourful, quirky rag rugs (also known as hooked rugs), this delightful book examines Winifred Nicholson’s relationship with the Cumbrian craft, the way in which she helped revive the tradition in the 1960s and ’70s, and her influence on contemporary makers. For anyone interested in textiles, naive art, British folk traditions or mid-century craft, this book will be a treasure trove.British artist Winifred Nicholson (1893–1981) initially encountered rag rugs in Cumberland in the early 1920s, when, with her husband Ben Nicholson (1894–1982), she visited her neighbour Margaret Warwick, who was sat in her kitchen making a rug from scraps of old clothing. The Nicholsons were interested in ‘naive art’ at that time and had explored the work of Rousseau, as well as African sculpture, but this was the first time they had come face to face with naive art being made in their own country. In 1960 Winifred moved back to Banks Head, the old Cumbrian farmhouse she had owned since 1923. It was here that she helped to revive the local ‘hooky’ rag rug making tradition. Through Winifred’s efforts, well over a hundred new rugs were made. Notable makers included Mary Bewick, Janet Heap and Florence Williams. Winifred herself designed a number of rugs, and she also encouraged her grandchildren, who were paid a pound a time for a design.This beautiful book also presents a number of contemporary rag rug makers, with direct links to Winifred. Emma Tennant, who lives in Scotland not far from Winifred’s house, was inspired to start making rugs after seeing the ones in Winifred’s home. Also included are works by Winifred’s nieces Louisa Creed and the late Jenny Steinbugler. The author also discusses the extensive rag rug collection at Chillingham Castle, Northumberland, which has interesting parallels with Winifred Nicholson’s approach to rug making, as well as the rug by Lucie Aldridge in the Fry Art Gallery, Essex.

Minami Kobayashi (b.1989) is a Japanese artist based in London. Covering a significant period of development in her practice as a painter, this publication coincides with her second major solo exhibition, The Song of Jujubes, at Frestonian Gallery, London. Kobayashi’s paintings depict familiar yet surreal scenes, created from an amalgamation of memories, places and ordinary people. In her dreamlike ambiguous narratives, nature, animals and humans are given equal status; her realms are symbiotic societies with multiple creatures. She captures transitory and fluctuating moments, depicting her protagonists in states of flux, vulnerability and openness. Rendered in a postImpressionist palette, her compositions are a potent mix of playfulness and deeper themes of human and natural life.Bringing together eleven new canvases, The Song of Jujubes takes its title from a song that the artist used to sing as a teenager in her hometown of Nagoya, Japan. It begins with a girl eating one jujube fruit every night, wondering what she will do when they are all gone. Imbued with a sense of nostalgia and loss, the works consider what ‘home’ means and the strong relationship between people and place.This publication documents Kobayashi’s paintings chronologically, from her early works of 2016 to 2024. In a foreword, the Directors of Frestonian Gallery, Matt Incledon and Rollo Campbell introduce the inner world of the artist and the themes of The Song of Jujubes. In an interview with Lisa Wainwright, Kobayashi discusses her time studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her unique painting technique and the symbolism in her scenes. She also expands upon her artistic influences, including Ukiyoe woodblock prints, the tenets of Buddhism, Tarot and the Nabi painters, such as Félix Vallotton, Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. In her essay ‘Temperature of a Memory’, Laura Allsop analyses Kobayashi’s recent paintings in relation to memory and place, particularly the artist’s hometown of Nagoya.Edited by Incledon and designed by Joe Gilmore, the book is copublished by Frestonian Gallery and Anomie Publishing, London.

Anomie Publishing is an independent international arts publishing house based in London. This special edition of Anomie’s catalogue has been produced to celebrate ten years of making and publishing books with some of the most exciting names in contemporary art (and beyond) of our times.Edited by Anna McNay and with an introduction by Anomie’s publisher, Matt Price, the publication features entries on all of Anomie’s titles from autumn 2013 to autumn 2023, along with Q&As with Anomie-published artists Anna Freeman Bentley, Tom de Freston, Nick Hornby, Matthew Krishanu, Kathryn Maple and Caroline Walker. Matt Price is a London-based arts publisher, editor and writer. He has published over sixty books and catalogues under his Anomie imprints, and edited publications for other publishers including Phaidon, Rizzoli, Thames & Hudson and Hatje Cantz. He has compiled and written two volumes of The Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting.Anomie Publishing was established in 2013 in Wakefield, UK. Now based in London, Anomie is dedicated to enabling quality arts books – especially small and medium print-run titles – to reach the book trade. Anomie works in partnership with public and commercial galleries, museums, arts organisations, agencies, academic institutions, charities, collectors, established artist studios and private clients to publish or co-publish books. In 2022 Anomie started Anomie Collections – an initiative to encourage and support the private acquisition of works by British painters.

A new understanding of the birth of jazz through a fine-grained social history of early African American musicians/>/>Brassroots Democracy recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orleans musicians to reveal how early jazz was inextricably tied to the mass mobilization of freedpeople during Reconstruction and the decades that followed. Benjamin Barson presents a "music history from below," following the musicians as they built communes, performed at Civil Rights rallies, and participated in general strikes. Perhaps most importantly, Barson locates the first emancipatory revolution in the Americas—Haiti—as a nexus for cultural and political change in nineteenth-century Louisiana. In dialogue with the work of recent historians who have inverted traditional histories of Latin American and Caribbean independence by centering the influence of Haitian activists abroad, this work traces the impact of Haitian culture in New Orleans and its legacy in movements for liberation./>/>Brassroots Democracy demonstrates how Black musicians infused participatory music practice with innovative forms of grassroots democracy. Late nineteenth-century Black brass bands and activists rehearsed these participatory models through collective performance that embodied the democratic ethos of Black Reconstruction. Termed 'Brassroots Democracy,' this fusion of political and musical spheres revolutionized both. Brassroots Democracy illuminates the Black Atlantic struggles that informed music-as-world-making from the Haitian Revolution through Reconstruction to the jazz revolution. The work theorizes the roots of the New Orleans brass band tradition in the social relations grown in maroon ecologies across the Americas. Their fruits contributed to the socio-sonic commons of the music we call jazz today.

The volcanoes on the Alaska Peninsula and the fifty-seven volcanoes that project into the Aleutian Islands form the northern rim of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Many are in Alaska’s national parks, monuments, and preserves. They continue to erupt, creating new Earth surfaces, and the deposits of lava, pumice, and ash ejected by these volcanoes create primeval ground: a true wilderness where few people on Earth other than volcanologists have traversed. Gary Freeburg has wandered and lived among Alaska’s volcanoes for regular periods during the last twenty years. The volcanoes he visits are alive and in some cases still steaming, and its lands are coarse and free of distraction: a vacuum of emptiness that embraces solitude and silence stirred only by the winds that blow and the rains that fall. The Earth surfaces that he walks are hard and largely barren of plant life, except where surfaces are shielded by the wind or are near water sources. There, new life returns in the form of lichen and tiny plants and insects and animals—bees, bear, fox, mayflies, and Alaskan hares—taking their rightful place in these vast, remote national parks, monuments, and preserves, reminding us that they are signs of hope that Earth will continue to evolve, regenerate, and renew itself long after we humans are gone.Freeburg’s writings, photographs, and drawings reflect what it is like to seek solitude and live among Alaska’s wild volcanoes. His travels were mostly solo treks in which he was flown in with supplies, a camera, sketchbooks, and journal to share his thoughts and artistically render his experiences. Each day spent in Alaska’s volcanic wilderness affirmed the importance of this place for the author and those who can only dream of such a place. His book seems to explain: How fortunate it is to have magical places and national parks like Alaska’s volcanoes, how fortunate we are to be alive on this magnificent Earth.

This book sheds new light on one of the most important artworks of the early Italian Renaissance, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco cycle of Good and Bad Government in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. By connecting the images with the Hymn to Justice inscribed on the walls and highlighting Ambrogio’s ingenuity and personal approach to the subject the volume presents a fresh reading of its rich artistic message. In 1338 Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted three huge frescoes, known today as Good and Bad Government, on the walls of the Sala dei Nove, the Room of the Nine, in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, where the city’s nine executive magistrates presided over the destiny of this famous commune. The frescoes were meant to be strong visual reminders of the Nove’s duties and an admonishment of the nefarious effects of bad government. Boasting the largest artist’s signature of all time, the frescoes are testament to the extremely high esteem in which Ambrogio’s art was held by his fellow citizens. Nowadays Good and Bad Government has become one of the most widely reproduced works of the early Renaissance and is recognized for its many innovations, including the first European panorama of a cityscape and countryside. But what sort of visual journey was Ambrogio asking the Nove to make through this expanse? In pursuit of an elusive answer, the murals have become one of art’s great puzzles, challenging scholars and public alike. Scant attention, however, has been paid to the images themselves. They have been studied merely as symbols and allegories of abstract political concepts in which good and bad government are starkly juxtaposed. Despite his enormous signature, Ambrogio has been treated more as a servile illustrator than a creative artist, disregarding his highly personal approach to painting and the way his visual ingenuity, from composition to brushwork, shaped a far more complex and fascinating message. This book attempts finally to illuminate Ambrogio’s pictorial strategy by reading it in light of the Hymn to Justice inscribed upon the walls. The frescoes enrich the poet’s message, subtly changing and even subverting it. Instead of a pictorial lecture straightforwardly contrasting a utopia with a dystopia, Ambrogio blurs the binaries and invites the viewer to look beneath the idyllic surface of Sienese civic life.

At a time when division, polarization, and antagonisms pervade the United States, here is hope for the future. Landscapes of Hope shows how people from all walks of life and backgrounds can come together, talk and work out details, compromise, and do something special for generations to come: safeguarding 900,000 acres of spectacular wild country in Utah.Perched on the western edge of the Colorado Plateau, the Greater San Rafael Swell spans 8,000 square miles in south-central Utah and showcases a rich tapestry of landscapes. Its colorful geological strata span 350 million years of Earth’s history and contain a remarkably well-preserved fossil record from times when primitive marine species first emerged, to the era of dinosaurs and the appearance of large mammals. The region’s arid climate and isolation have also worked together to preserve cultural artifacts left by Indigenous peoples who occupied the area for more than ten millennia.As the treasures of the Greater San Rafael Swell became widely known during the 1960s, conservationists undertook campaigns to designate large tracts of public lands in the region as wilderness, where “the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Initially, some residents of Emery County, located at the heart of the Greater Swell, strongly opposed these efforts, concerned that wilderness designations could limit ranching and mining, undermine residents' livelihoods, and sever their cultural ties to the lands.At first, reconciling these opposing views seemed impossible, but, starting in the late 1990s, Emery County leaders and residents engaged a wide spectrum of stakeholders in discussions spanning more than two decades. In 2019, their efforts to find common ground culminated in the passage of the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act. This comprehensive federal legislation designated substantial portions of public lands for multiple uses, while creating twenty-five new wilderness and other protected areas, safeguarding nearly 900,000 acres.Landscapes of Hope celebrates the commitment of those who take rightful pride in their legacy and who forged the legislation, conserving landscapes of extraordinary beauty and profound cultural importance. The fruits of their endeavors are portrayed in photographs and stories that showcase the sublime grandeur of the areas now protected in perpetuity.

‘Working with homeless people has totally changed me, turned me inside out and upside down. They’ve challenged my values, they’ve changed the way I see Irish society, they’ve changed the way I see God, they’ve done everything for me.’ - Fr Peter McVerryPublished to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Peter McVerry Trust, this book tells the story of the people behind it. The forty voices range from Paddy Fay, the first resident of Fr Peter McVerry’s Tabor House hostel in 1979, to other service providers, sponsors, fundraisers and board members. Published to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Peter McVerry Trust, this book tells the story of the people behind it. The forty voices range from Paddy Fay, the first resident of Fr Peter McVerry’s Tabor House hostel in 1979, to other service providers, sponsors, fundraisers and board members. Media voices include: Miriam O’Callaghan, Linda Martin, Rick O’Shea, Matt Cooper, Claire Byrne and Ray D’Arcy.With photos spanning forty years, including from Peter and contributors, this book highlights the impact that Peter and the charity have made, especially as Ireland’s largest provider of Housing First services.

This stunning catalogue of 15th and 16thcentury Italian drawings from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen will showcase highlights from this outstanding but still relatively little known part of the collection. It includes internationally significant sheets by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Pontormo, Pisanello, Giorgione and Tintoretto, as well as an important group of early Venetian drawings and a large number of workshop studies by Fra Bartolommeo. Published to accompany exhibitions at the Fondation Custodia, Paris, and The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, this volume will mark the conclusion of a five year cataloguing project at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, funded by the Getty Foundation. During the project all the Italian drawings were fully researched and catalogued, many for the first time. Several of these drawings have not been published in the last 70 years, if at all.The catalogue is a scholarly touchstone for this part of the collection. It includes two essays and 111 catalogue entries based on the online catalogue texts prepared by several Italian drawings specialists. They include the most well known drawings in Rotterdam as well as drawings that have never been published or exhibited before, such as newly attributed sheets by Pontormo, Federico Zuccaro and Aurelio Lomi.

"Affrilachia," a term first coined in 1991 by Kentucky poet Frank X Walker, refers to the cultural contributions of African Americans who live in Appalachia, a largely mountainous region stretching over thirteen states from Mississippi to New York. Although Black Americans have greatly influenced the popular culture landscape in this region, their stories, trials, and triumphs are often undocumented because Appalachia is perceived as wholly white.In this stunning visual history, photographer and curator Chris Aluka Berry gives voice to the broad spectrum of African Americans who have lived in the Appalachian region over the centuries. Berry, who spent six years in western North Carolina, northeast Georgia, and eastern Tennessee, immersed himself in the communities and lives of Black Appalachians to present the diversity and commonalities of the proud people in the region. His intimate and revealing photographs capture Arican Americans in various settings—churches, homes, revival services, family gatherings, and homegoing celebrations.Completing this comprehensive collection are powerful narratives from the people who inhabit these places, and contributions from Appalachian writers Kelly Navies and Maia Surdam, whose poignant and powerful poems and essays offer historical perspective and broaden the book's archival importance.The first book of its kind, Affrilachia: Testimonies is an inspired historical artifact that honors, represents, and celebrates the proud people of color whose history and existence has greatly contributed to the broad tapestry of Appalachia.

An Eastern Caribbean music festival as a window on social change/>/>Every year, on a weekend before Christmas, the small Caribbean island of Carriacou, Grenada, holds its annual Parang Festival, featuring concerts, performances of local quadrille dance, Hosannah band (a cappella singing) competitions, and the climactic string band competition. Born in the years leading up to Grenada's 1979 Socialist Revolution, the Parang Festival today offers a vehicle for Carriacouans to articulate and assert a progressive understanding of local cultural identity as well as a regional, pan-Caribbean belonging. Rebecca S. Miller examines the varying impact that factors such as cultural ambivalence, globalization, and technology have had on the performance of Carriacou's folk and traditional music and dance forms. Using archival sources and current ethnography, she illuminates the enduring significance of the Parang Festival to illustrate the social and political history of Carriacou as well as this culture's contemporary process of modernization. The book includes a web link allowing the reader to listen to a variety of musical examples.

The role of performing art in one of the world's most diverse and complex societies/>/>This book is the first comprehensive overview of Javanese performing arts from their origins to their dynamic present. Renowned scholar and musician Sumarsam draws from a lifetime of immersion in both wayang and gamelan to guide readers through the concept of the "in-between," revealing how the interplay of dualisms—myth and history, sacred and secular, personal and cultural—forms the bedrock of Javanese performance. Rigorously researched historical case studies reveal the intricate relationship between histories and mythologies in Java. Wayang, accompanied by gamelan, is a multimedia performance imbued with rich historical, aesthetic, religious, and emotional associations. Sumarsam delves into this intricate, profound, and ever-evolving art form, exploring its diverse manifestations and venues, from courtly village entertainment-cum-ritual to palace-based aesthetic expressions of cultural proficiency; from coastal mercantile entrepots to the verdant wet rice terraces of Java; from colonial plantation and textile factory cultures to communities centered around contemporary industrial estates and creative economy initiatives. An essential resource for scholars, musicians, and enthusiasts of wayang and gamelan, The In-Between in Javanese Performing Arts offers an unparalleled immersion into the heart of traditional Javanese performing arts, revealing their profound impact on Javanese culture, identity, and artistic expression.

The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America is the first book to tell the story of the Black cowboy experience in contemporary America. Although Black cowboys have been a fixture on the American landscape and frontier since the nineteenth century, few people are aware of their enduring contributions to the history of the West and how their unique culture continues to thrive today in urban as well as rural areas all over the country.The book features Ron Tarver’s beautiful, compelling, and often surprising contemporary images of African-American cowboys that not only convey the Black cowboy’s way of life and its rich heritage, but also affirm a thriving culture of Black-owned ranches and rodeo operations, parades, inner-city cowboys, retired cowhands, and Black cowgirls of all ages, too. Tarver, who grew up in a family of Black cowboys in Oklahoma, uses his artistry to question, if not upend, long-held notions of what it means to be a cowboy and, with that, what it means to be an American.The Long Ride Home couldn’t be more timely, coming on the heels of films such as Lil Nas X’s hit time-travel western, Old Town Road (2019), and Idris Elba’s Concrete Cowboy (2021), which was based on Greg Neri’s Ghetto Cowboy (2013), about Philadelphia’s contemporary African-American cowboy culture. Many of Tarver’s images were made in some of the same Philadelphia neighborhoods. Widespread interest in the Black experience in America will also make this book an especially important contribution to Black history.In addition to Tarver’s photographs, The Long Ride Home includes an essay by Art T. Burton, an expert on the history of Black cowboys. This book is both a tribute to and celebration of the Black cowboy in America. It is certain to be an invaluable addition to American history for years to come.

This bold catalogue brings together the work of two cultural icons for the very first time: Beryl Cook (1926–2008) and Tom of Finland (1920–1991). It was inspired by the 2024 exhibition Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland at Studio Voltaire in London. Beryl Cook was a painter renowned for her exuberant style and descriptions of everyday life. Her work captures the social milieu of the areas she lived in and visited, notably Plymouth. Her most enduring images are of larger-than-life women carousing in nightclubs, eating in cafés or enjoying ribald hen parties, rendered in graphic and colourful forms. Cook’s work came to prominence in the mid-1970s and she quickly became known as one of Britain’s best-loved artists, highly recognised for her distinctive works, which are both celebratory and provocative. Tom of Finland’s pioneering depictions of homosexual machismo in his images of bikers, soldiers, cowboys, sailors and labourers broadly represent queer, leather and muscle communities. A master draughtsman, he used his works to give form to an imaginative universe that, in turn, helped fuel real-world liberation movements and had significant influence on a wide range of cultural figures including the Village People, Freddie Mercury, Jean Paul Gaultier and Robert Mapplethorpe. Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland puts their work into conversation for the first time. The pairing is perhaps unexpected, yet immediate and compelling relationships between their practices are evident. Fundamentally, both artists employed a sustained and coherent way of hyper-realising the body in images that celebrate pleasure and deny shame. Together, their works reveal interconnected ideas surrounding sexuality, gender, taste and class. Artist and writer Huw Lemmey has contributed an incisive new essay exploring the queer contexts inherent to Tom of Finland’s work, but that also finds latent resonance in Cook’s paintings of gay bars and shapely women. He further considers the commercial forms of distribution that made their complex bodies of works highly accessible. Spanning five decades of paintings, drawings and archival materials, this companion catalogue contributes to new readings of the artists’ practices and their enduring impact on popular culture.

Portrait miniatures were highly prized in Europe for nearly four hundred years and, unusually, artists based in Britain were the acknowledged masters of this specialised field. Many of the best painters are represented in this remarkable but relatively little-known collection. As is illustrated and described in this book, miniatures were frequently made as tokens of love or memorials of loved ones; part-likeness, part reliquary and part-jewel, they might be wearable in a locket, on a bracelet or even on a finger ring, but their portability also made them desirable as gifts. Styles, techniques and modes of presentation naturally evolved between 1560 (the date of the first miniature in the catalogue) and around 1900. Some changes happened rapidly; in England, for example, the foundation of exhibiting societies in 1760s created a demand for larger miniatures that could hang on the wall alongside full-sized portraits. The Thomson collection includes fine examples of the work of Nicholas Hilliard (from the Elizabethan period) and John Smart (from the eighteenth century) as well as notable portraits by less familiar names such as Jacob Van Doordt and James Scouler. It is apparent from the scope and character of his acquisitions that Ken Thomson never planned an encyclopaedic collection. Reacting to miniatures that spoke most eloquently to him when held in the hand, or examined under a glass, he developed over time a fondness for particular artists and had no qualms about omitting others altogether. Using this collection housed at the Art Gallery of Ontario as a case study, the catalogue discusses the function of miniatures, their material presence, the circumstances in which they were made and aspects of their later history. The homes and studios of the most successful painters, as sumptuous as those occupied by oil painters, often passed from one generation to another: here, one key property in Covent Garden is described and illustrated. In this book, for the first time, a number of specialist artists’ suppliers are identified, showing where ivory could be obtained and enamel plates prepared and fired. The links between enamelling for clock and watch faces and enamelling for miniatures are demonstrated. The illicit practice within the late nineteenth and early twentieth century art trade of duplicating old miniatures, a topic generally avoided in the literature, is addressed here. Miniatures are difficult to display in museums, but recently-developed photographic methods of identifying pigments are also proving to be a way of introducing a new audience to this multi-layered subject. Eighteen years after Ken Thomson’s death, there could not be a more opportune moment to highlight his collection.