Philip IV of Spain (ruled 1621–1665) was known as the 'Planet King', shining brightly in the universe of the arts even if the Golden Age of Spanish painitng coincided with imperial decline. The Buen Retiro Palace surpassed any palace ever built in Europe for the collection of paintings it contained, most of them commissioned in the 1630s from the finet painters in Europe at the time – Velázquez and Zurbarán, Rubens, Claude, Poussin, Jan Both, Herman van Swaneveld, Domenichino, Lanfranco and others. This magnificent catalogue contains a mouthwatering display of paintings by these masters, and examines in particular the Battle Paintings and the Hercules series of the throne room (Hall of Realms), the Landscape Gallery, and the hitherto virtually unknown History of Rome cycle. Many of these works, already famous, are now seen in their original context, while others have remained uidentified in the Prado's storerooms until now.

Spanning some 350 years, the Thomson Collection of historic ship models contains examples of exquisite workmanship and some of the masterpieces of the genre. Pride of the collection are the rare British dockyard models made to scale for affluent 18th-century clients closely associated with the Navy. A large number of models – made from wood and bone, with rigging of human hair – were made by some of the 120,000 French and other prisoners of the Napoleonic Wars. The diverse collection also includes tugs, dredgers, trawlers, cargo vessels, passenger steamers, private yachts, corvettes, battleships, cruisers, torpedo boat destroyers and two aircraft carriers. The author (curator at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) considers the rich history and the artistry of model shipbuilding. New photography captures the incredible workmanship – the carving, casting, gilding and stitching – that such model-making demands.

Manet's well-known painting in the National Gallery London of a café-concert – a kind of cabaret performance and musicmaking that was the latest fashion in Paris of the 1870s – has a peculiar history. The painter initially planned an ambitious canvas with which he grew dissatisfied, then cut it in two, one half being the painting in the National Gallery and the other half now in Winterthur in Switzerland. He repainted both fragments to make each work as a picture in their own right, but modern technology has discovered and reconstructed the original greater work. New research has also identified the café, the Reichshoffen, and even the Folies-Bergère performance that is advertised on a poster represented in the picture. This study of a pivotal work in the troubled painter's oeuvre reveals his pioneering genius and the modernity of his search to capture a distillation of life in his own time through disconcertingly direct brushstrokes. The book discusses and illustrates related drawings and other paintings on the same theme, which would culminate a mere three or four years later in the Bar in the Folies-Bergère in the Courtauld Gallery, London. Without the experimentation, false paths and new discoveries of the Reichshoffen he would never have painted that masterpiece.

There has never been a display like it. This is the catalogue to an ambitious exhibition at the Goldsmiths’ Hall, London, which will comprise 250 gold and silver objects and sets of objects spanning the history of the Church from the earliest possible times to the present day.A foreword by the Rt Revd Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, and twelve essays by distinguished authorities will illustrate aspects of evolving liturgy and Church history such as the medieval Mass, Church patronage in the Middle Ages, and the English Reformation. Historical themes from post-Reformation centuries will include Catholic recusancy, the 17th- and 18th-century altar service and the medieval revivals that mirrored the Victorian Tractarian movement. Important commissions from the 1980s and 1990s for Lichfield Cathedral and York Minster will also be discussed. Essays will be accompanied by new photography of key objects, many of them the ‘secret’ treasure of individual parish churches.The guiding principle of the exhibition is that all loans be in the possession of the Church or other religious foundations. Objects have been selected from cathedrals, Oxford colleges and ‘royal peculiars’ such as St George’s Chapel at Windsor. The majority are from parish churches great and small up and down the country.

In the Grand Canyon and on the icy flanks of Mount Everest, deep in rainforests and deserts, under water and at the mouths of live volcanoes Tony Foster paints his expansive watercolours at the edges of the world. Presented here with personal accounts of his journeys, they are an exultant testament to the power of art and the richness and fragility of our planet. His meticulously executed watercolours demonstrate his complete mastery of the centuries-old tradition of English landscape painting. For Foster each work is a page in a visual diary, a richly pictorial chronicle of events and encounters along the way which constitutes both journey and destination. In his composite images, maps and diagrams, together with details of flora and fauna, contextualize the principal subjects. The packets of seeds, like the pouches of volcanic dust, combine similarly the narrative of particular journeys with different time scales and forces of nature. Tony Foster has succeeded in seeing, and conveying by means of the most subtle of visual metaphors, eternity in a grain of sand.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's La Loge (The Theater Box), 1874, is one of the masterpieces of impressionism and a major highlight of The Courtauld Gallery's collection. Its depiction of an elegant couple on display in a loge epitomizes the Impressionists' interest in the spectacle of modern life. At the heart of the painting is the complex play of gazes enacted by these two figures. In turning away from the performance, Renoir focused instead upon theater as a social stage where status and relationships were on public display.

This catalogue accompanied an exhibition at the Groeninge Museum, Bruges, which celebrated one of the greatest European artists of the late fourteenth century, André Beauneveu, apparently born in Valenciennes c. 1335. Active throughout the Southern Netherlands, his reputation grew swiftly and in 1364 he was commissioned by the King of France, Charles V, to create a group of royal tombs at St Denis. In the 1370s he oversaw another ambitious funerary project, for Louis de Mâle, Count of Flanders, at Courtrai, whilst continuing to undertake major civic commissions at Ypres, Mechelen and his home town of Valenciennes. Beauneveu spent the last years of his career in Bourges working for the most celebrated royal patron of all, Jean, Duc de Berry. The extraordinary scope of Beauneveu's talent was fully exploited by Jean de Berry, for whom he produced manuscript illuminations, made designs for stained glass and oversaw the construction of his château at Mehun-sur-Yevre. However, it is primarily his unrivalled skill in the handling of stone which gives Beauneveu such significance, not only in the context of Northern sculpture but also for the arts of Europe as a whole. The known sculptural oeuvre of Beauneveu, however, is not substantial. The reappearance of the Virgin and Child once in the collection of Eduoard Aynard at the Abbey of Fontenay and its new attribution to this sculptor "who had no better nor equal in any land" dramatically increases our knowledge of his work and must entail a rethink of many histories of French and Flemish art in the fourteenth century, for we now have not two but three life-sized figures from which our view of his style and achievements can be formed.

This catalogue accompanied an exhibition at the Groeninge Museum, Bruges, which celebrated one of the greatest European artists of the late fourteenth century, André Beauneveu, apparently born in Valenciennes c. 1335. Active throughout the Southern Netherlands, his reputation grew swiftly and in 1364 he was commissioned by the King of France, Charles V, to create a group of royal tombs at St Denis. In the 1370s he oversaw another ambitious funerary project, for Louis de Mâle, Count of Flanders, at Courtrai, whilst continuing to undertake major civic commissions at Ypres, Mechelen and his home town of Valenciennes. Beauneveu spent the last years of his career in Bourges working for the most celebrated royal patron of all, Jean, Duc de Berry.The extraordinary scope of Beauneveu's talent was fully exploited by Jean de Berry, for whom he produced manuscript illuminations, made designs for stained glass and oversaw the construction of his château at Mehun-sur-Yevre. However, it is primarily his unrivalled skill in the handling of stone which gives Beauneveu such significance, not only in the context of Northern sculpture but also for the arts of Europe as a whole.The known sculptural oeuvre of Beauneveu, however, is not substantial. The reappearance of the Virgin and Child once in the collection of Eduoard Aynard at the Abbey of Fontenay and its new attribution to this sculptor "who had no better nor equal in any land" dramatically increases our knowledge of his work and must entail a rethink of many histories of French and Flemish art in the fourteenth century, for we now have not two but three life-sized figures from which our view of his style and achievements can be formed.

There can be few examples of intensive fashioning and self-fashioning by a Renaissance figure more remarkable than Prince Henry (1594-1612). Two decades after the appearance of Roy Strong's revelatory Henry Prince of Wales and England's Lost Renaissance this collection of essays re-examines the extraordinary artistic and cultural response to Prince Henry and presents many new findings in the context of recent scholarship. In the present age, in which anti-heroes are preferred to heroes exemplifying virtue and honour, and in which 'idols' are raised in the expectation that they will sooner or later fall, the investment of great hopes in Prince Henry, and the extreme importance attached to the creation of a fitting image for him, extending even to its posthumous development, indicate that early modern society regarded its leaders very differently from our own.

When Oskar Reinhart (1885–1965) bequeathed a significant part of his remarkable art collection – chiefly of French nineteenth-century painting but also containing a number of outstanding Old Masters – to the Swiss nation, he did so on condition that the works of art would never be loaned. As a consequence the many very important works in the collection have not been discussed in major exhibition catalogues and have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. This volume, with full entries on the entire collection of 207 works by 45 leading scholars in their field, both American and European, and superb plates carefully checked against the originals, sets out to rectify this state of affairs. Artists represented by several works in the collection that Reinhart made his monument include: Cézanne (11), Chardin (4), Corot (9), Courbet (10), Daumier (20), Delacroix (9), Géricault (2), Van Gogh (5), Maillol (8), Manet (4), Picasso (4), Pissarro (2), Renoir (15), Sisley (2). A well illustrated introduction explains the ideas and context behind Reinhart’s collecting and affords insights into his character.

Adam Elsheimer is first recorded in 1600 and by 1610 he was dead. But, rather like Giorgione, who had died young in Venice 100 years earlier, Elsheimer was influential on the coming century to a degree out of all proportion to his brief career and small oeuvre. He developed a wonderful mastery of light, a dramatic chiaroscuro that gave new depth to his subject-matter, and a rather less definable poetic feeling that gives a very special savor to all his painting. “What is remarkable about this volume is the number of quality reproductions of the artist's work that can be seen together for the first time. This collection of paintings demonstrates more comprehensively than ever before Elsheimer's extraordinary intuition for light and atmosphere” (Antiques Magazine).

The National Gallery of Ireland was founded in 1854 and has since acquired an extraordinary collection of masterpieces by artists such as Caravaggio, Lanfranco, Poussin, Rubens, Uccello, Velázquez, and Vermeer, as well as British artists such as Gainsborough and Reynolds and the leading lights of Irish art, from James Barry to Jack Yeats. The Gallery has expanded steadily, benefiting from the royalties to the works of George Bernard Shaw and from numerous generous donations by figures such as Lane, Milltown, Beit, Mahon, and Chester Beatty. The story of the Gallery, with all its tribulations and struggles, good and bad luck, good and bad judgement, all its personalities, is told for the first time. It displays the breadth and depth of the collection, but it also reveals much about the rebirth of a nation and changing attitudes to art over time.

The first volume cataloging the Irish painters in the National Gallery of Ireland covers more than 220 paintings from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, including figures such as George Barret, James Barry, Hugh Douglas Hamilton, William Hickey, Nathaniel Hone, Charles Jervas, James Latham, Thomas Roberts, and Martin Archer Shee. All of the paintings are illustrated in excellent color reproductions. These paintings are not only of intrinsic interest but provide important insights into the social, political, cultural, and environmental history of eighteenth-century Ireland.

Best known for a dramatic, layered and visionary urban imagery, Richard Walker (born 1954) is a painter, printmaker and photographer. He works in a variety of media, including acrylic, collage, pastel, watercolour, charcoal and pencil, mainly on canvas and paper. This unique book is both a kind of autobiography – compiled and written by himself – and a selective catalogue of his work, past and present. Peter Parker, biographer of Christopher Isherwood, also interviews the artist. “From an early age I wanted to be an architect .... Then, when I went to New York, I saw for the first time these monumental buildings which you couldn’t ignore. The word ‘portrait’ is apt because they had real presence and character. Later I became more interested in the space and light than in the buildings themselves ....”