This fascinating book tells the story of Thomas Hardy's Wessex. Accompanying a multi-venue exhibition, it explores Hardy's life and work. Internationally-acclaimed writer Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is best known for his evocative depictions of the West Country landscape and its people, a region that he called 'Wessex'. What is less well-known is that this landscape also inspired him in many other aspects of his life, from campaigning for animal welfare to questioning the way society viewed women. This publication accompanies a blockbuster, multi-venue exhibition of the largest collection of Thomas Hardy memorabilia ever to be displayed at once.  Hardy was born in the West Country, a few years after Queen Victoria came to the throne, and spent most of the rest of his life among its landscapes and people. When he turned writer, these landscapes and people re-emerged as his 'partly-real, partlydream country' of Wessex, in novels like Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure. Hardy's Wessex now conjures up a range of mental images: from raging seas on the coast to haunting ancient monuments, Victorian towns packed with life to peaceful hillsides grazed by sheep. However, through Hardy's 87-year life span, the West Country changed dramatically. Ideas of the role of women, humans' responsibility to animals, the realities of war, love and courtship, superstition, social structure, religion and how people related to the world around them altered fundamentally. Through his stories and campaigning, Hardy was keen to show not only the rural idyll, but also the tensions and difficulties that lay beneath these views.  These dramatic landscapes were the lens through which Hardy presented his worldview to his readership. From the tragedy of a woman saying farewell to her sailorlover on the end of Portland Bill, to a shepherd losing his flock and facing ultimate ruin on the chalky hills. The landscapes shape his characters, whose stories in turn convey his messages of social change to his readers. This publication will explore the impact that Wessex had on Hardy's works, and how living there shaped his views on the often divisive social issues of the period. Uniting beautiful landscape imagery with a selection of personal items from Hardy's life, this book will show you the man behind the literature.

This fascinating book provides a fresh perspective on the understanding of sacred imagery and its use through selected studies related to seventeenthcentury Roman visual culture. Painting, Patronage and Deovtion: A Focus on Seven Roman Baroque Masterpieces will accompany an exhibition of works by prominent Baroque artists, at the Villa Mondragone, a Renaissance Papal Villa in the countryside of Rome. The highlight of catalogue and exhibition is a group of masterpieces by seven prominent artists of the seventeenth century: six altarpieces by Carlo Saraceni, Valentin de Boulogne, Andrea Sacchi, Andrea Camassei, Pietro da Cortona, and Carlo Maratti, and one easel painting by Guido Reni commissioned for private devotion. Most of the paintings will be on public view for the first time. The publication offers new approaches to the study of the complex processes involved in the making of a work of art. By reconstructing the religious and social dynamics of artistic patronage and the context of worship and devotion in which these paintings - fully documented by primary sources - were executed, the volume explores the visual impact of these works on the viewers. This beautifully illustrated book will feature remarkable new photographs and details of diagnostic analysis of Pietro da Cortona’s and Carlo Maratti's altarpieces.

This beautiful publication presents a facsimile of a sketchbook by the Dutch artist and illustrator Peter Vos (1935-2010), along with a volume of introductory essays. The title derives from the sketchbook's detailed drawings of 333 birds. From time immemorial people have been fascinated by birds and have created images of their winged companions. The artist Peter Vos was one of them. He kept bird diaries in which he noted down the birds he came across and captured them in pen and ink and watercolour. He took pleasure in entrusting all elements of a bird to paper - their characteristics, but mostly their characters. Hunched down or in full stretch, in the water and on land, on their behinds, their necks turned ninety or a hundred and eighty degrees, foreshortened or in three-quarter view, preening their plumage and their wings poised for flight: Peter Vos often depicted his birds several times on one sheet so that you really get to know them. 333 birds was a project, a task Vos set himself: fill an empty book with 333 birds drawn as beautifully as possible. He completed it over a period of eighteen months - from June 1980 to December 1981. He began by going to zoos to sketch the birds. Days later the sketches were worked out in the book. With the meticulous layout and the Latin names, Vos was referencing the field guides and the nineteenth-century books of plates. But he, unlike the creators of those books, was trying to draw the individual bird not the species. Crooked feathers are not straightened, an odd pose uncorrected and the blind eye simply drawn. Peter Vos's drawings are records of his encounters with individual birds. We should see 333 birds as an expression of curiosity for his companions. He loved those winged friends he presents to us in a long line in all their glory and individualities - true to nature and with an understanding of their characters, honestly, as befits friends.

Throughout his long career, David Hockney has insistently explored diverse ways of depicting the visible world. He has scrutinised the methods of the old masters, and explored radical departures from their cherished assumptions. The exhibitions accompanied by this volume are the first to focus on this central theme in his art. 'Western art' from the Renaissance until at least the late 19th century has been dominated by the depiction of nature. Was this to be accomplished by direct looking (called “eyeballing” by Hockney) or with the assistance of optical theory and devices, such as cameras? Hockney has experimented with the full range of existing strategies, overtly using perspective in some of his classic pictures and rigorously investigating optical aids for the imitation of nature, including the camera obscura and camera lucida. Yet he has come to reject the photograph as the definitive image of what we see. Along the way, he has identified a 'camera culture' in European painting from 1400, arguing very controversially that the supreme naturalism of painters like Jan van Eyck are the product of optical devices. His book, Secret Knowledge (2001), with its majestic panorama of paintings over the course of five centuries, claims that art historians have missed the central aspect of painters’ practice. The 'Hockney thesis' has been received more favourably outside the professional world of art history than in it. His own artistic practice has been in vigorous dialogue with his radical thesis, and he has progressively demonstrated new and dynamic ways of characterising the visual world without perspective and other conventional techniques. This quest results a series of joyous challenges to our ways of seeing in the major exhibition in Cambridge at the Fitzwilliam Museum and in the Heong Gallery (Downing College). It will look at the whole span of Hockney’s varied career and at the nature of the optical devices he has tested. His vision will be explored in the setting of traditional masterpieces of naturalistic observation, and in the context of modern sciences and technologies of seeing. The first section of the book looks at his thrilling experiments in seeing and representing in broad historical and contemporary contexts. This is followed by discussions of pre-photographic devices for capturing the appearances of things by optical means. The third section includes essays on Hockney’s experiments from the perspectives of neuroscience and computer vision. In short, it reveals in a new way the working of Hockney’s unique eye.

This stunning catalogue presents for the first time an outstanding group of modern drawings by European and American masters, assembled by the late Howard Karshan and his wife, Linda, who recently presented the works to The Courtauld. Accompanying their exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, the catalogue features drawings by renowned artists including Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Sam Francis, Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter and Georg Baselitz. The Karshan gift is a significant addition to The Courtauld’s collection. The works demonstrate Howard and Linda Karshan's sensibility for the expressive power and rich variety of drawing as an art form. The drawings are characterised by innovative mark-making and distinctive use of line. Examples range from radical watercolours by Cézanne and highly expressive finger drawings in ink by Louis Soutter, to abstract compositions made by Henri Michaux whilst experimenting with Mescalin to explore the subconscious, and on to works by Twombly that further broadened the possibilities of draughtsmanship. The 25 drawings of the Karshan gift will be shown at The Courtauld Gallery when it reopens in late 2021, following a major transformation project. This catalogue will include an interview with Linda Karshan, two essays and a fully illustrated catalogue with detailed entries on each work.

In 2020, the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett celebrates its 300th anniversary. Founded in 1720 by Augustus the Strong as a museum specializing in works on paper, the collection – now with over half a million works, from the Middle Ages to the present day – has always acquired contemporary art alongside recognised masterpieces. The collection – which includes exceptional works by Jan van Eyck, Dürer, Verrocchio, Grünewald, Cranach, Holbein, Rembrandt, Caspar David Friedrich, Ludwig Richter, Toulouse Lautrec, Mondrian, Hermann Glöckner, Gerhard Altenbourg, A. R. Penck, Georg Baselitz and Evelyn Richter – began in the 18th century with drawings, miniatures and prints, before photography was added in 1898 as the promising future means of reproduction. The people in charge of the collection always had a keen eye for the art of their contemporaries and often demonstrated particular foresight in their acquisitions. Many of the works that were contemporary and still unknown at the time of their acquisition are now considered special treasures and rank equally with those that had been added to the collection as masterpieces. Exemplary are freshly printed etchings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, which were little known at the time, and were bought in the 18th century. And towards the end of the 19th century, the then director Max Lehrs promoted artists directly, such as Max Klinger and Käthe Kollwitz.Today, the Kupferstich-Kabinett occupies an outstanding international position thanks to the high quality and abundance of works. However, the collection is often hidden from the public. Works on paper in particular require special protection and, due to their fragility and extreme sensitivity to light, they can only rarely leave the safety of the depot. The anniversary gives reason to air many masterpieces of the collection, and offers the opportunity to look into both the past and into the future, and to anchor the Kupferstich-Kabinett with its seemingly inexhaustible holdings as a lively, innovative and democratic place in the public consciousness – as a place where creativity and knowledge, critical thinking and aesthetic pleasure can be experienced.The exhibition of 84 masterpieces, which opens in Dresden in April 2020, will then travel to New York in October 2020, where they will be presented in the prominent, international context of The Morgan Library & Museum.

This catalogue accompanies an exhibition which presents artefacts from burial mounds of the Saka people of East Kazakhstan, who, over 2,500 years ago, lived lives rich in complexity. The Saka people occupied a landscape of seemingly endless steppe to the west, bounded by mountains to the east and south. Known to be fierce warriors, they were also skilled craftspeople, producing intricate gold and other metalwork. Their artistic expression indicates a deep respect for the animals around them – both real and imagined. They dominated their landscapes with huge burial mounds of sophisticated construction, burying their horses with elite members of their society. Recent excavations and analyses, led by archaeologists from Kazakhstan, have demonstrated that by looking through a scientific and social lens at what the Saka left behind we can paint a picture of a complex society. We can start to understand how it affected the way people lived, how they travelled, the things they made and what they believed in. Including contributions from experts at Nazarbayev University, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, and the University of Cambridge, this publication details the results of new archaeological research from East Kazakhstan. It is richly illustrated with photographs of intricate gold artefacts in the Saka-Scythian animal style, landscape and aerial photography of the burial mounds, and details of the excavations and analyses. Grounded in decades of careful study, papers by the two leading Kazakhstani archaeologists of the East Kazakhstan region, Professors Zainolla Samashev and Abdesh Toleubayev, demonstrate current archaeological thinking in Kazakhstan today. These papers are complemented by material from a team of international scholars, which contribute the results of new scientific analyses on the artefacts, and wider Eurasian perspectives on the Saka people and their practice of horse burial.

This book tells the fascinating story of the rhinoceros Miss Clara, the most famous animal of the eighteenth century. It accompanies the fi rst ever major loan exhibition devoted to Clara and celebrity pachyderms in the UK and will off er a signifi cant contribution to scholarship on the subject. The latest in the Barber’s acclaimed objectin-focus series, Miss Clara focuses on a small bronze sculpture of a rhinoceros, and also considers other celebrity beasts, the emergence of menageries and zoos, and the significance of the capture and captivity of these big beasts within wider academic discussions of colonialism and empire. 'Miss Clara' arrived in Europe from the Dutch East Indies in 1741, brought by a retired Dutch East India Company captain, Douwe Mout van der Meer, who then toured her round Europe (including England) to huge acclaim and excitement. Jungfer Clara (so christened while visiting Würzburg in 1748) was the fi rst rhino to be seen on mainland Europe since 1579 and the object of great wonder and aff ection. Her fame generated a massive industry in souvenirs and imagery from life-scale paintings by major masters to cheap popular prints; there were even Clara-inspired clocks and hairstyles. This book will look at the phenomenon of Clara but, unlike previous studies of the subject, will focus primarily on sculptural/3D representations of her, within the context of other celebrity pachyderms represented by artists between the 16th and 19th centuries. Miss Clara is one of the most remarkable and best-loved sculptures in the Barber and was praised by the great German art historian and museum director Wilhelm von Bode as 'the fi nest animal bronze of Renaissance' - a telling tribute to its quality, even if he misunderstood its date. The Barber’s cast is one of only two known, the other being at the V&A. There are also closely related marble versions. Other celebrity beasts featured will include the elephants Hansken, Chunee and Jumbo; Dürer’s and various London rhinos; and the hippo Obaysch, star of London Zoo in the 1850s, and the fi rst to be seen in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. The publication will consist of entries for the thirty exhibits - included extended texts by Dr Helen Cowie (York University) on images of Chunee and Obaysch - preceded by three essays. Robert Wenley, Deputy Director of the Barber Institute, and the curator of the exhibition, will relate the story of Miss Clara (and of other celebrity rhinos), and explore the sculptural representations of her, presenting new research into their attribution and dating. The eminent sculptural historian, Dr Charles Avery, formerly of the V&AMuseum and Christie’s, will write a complementary essay about celebrity elephants in Europe between 1500 and 1700. Dr Sam Shaw (Open University), will discuss private menageries and public zoos between about 1760 and 1860 in the UK, and consider celebrity pachyderms as emblems of empire and colonialism.

Accompanying an exhibition at Philip Mould & Company, this lavish catalogue tells the story of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s enduring attachment to their home at Charleston Farmhouse, and showcases the work the artists produced between the two world wars. This stunning collection of artwork is beautifully presented alongside illuminating, illustrated essays, an interview and complete catalogue.Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant's enduring attachment to their home at Charleston Farmhouse, its idyllic surroundings, and constant fl ow of visitors can be witnessed through their art. Beginning with radical modern works influenced by European trends - from painted furniture to depictions of food preparation in the kitchen, from the barns to the pond, the people to the household cat - this catalogue tells astory of over thirty years of astonishing artistic productivity.Charleston was not just the Bloomsbury Group's country retreat but a venue for their progressive social self-expression. It was also a family home. Focusing on Vanessa and Duncan's most productive years of creativity, between and including two world wars, this catalogue will explore how Charleston fed their artistic impulses and ideas to produce a glorious canon of art.

Accompanying an exhibition at the Frist Art Museum, this lavishly illustrated catalogue is the first major study in English about manuscript illumination, painting, and sculpture in the northern Italian city of Bologna between the years 1200 and 1400. By focusing on Bologna, Europe’s first university city, this publication aims to expand our understanding of art and its purposes in the medieval world.Universities are a medieval invention, and Bologna has the distinction of having the oldest one in Europe. Its origins have been traced to the late 11th century, when masters and students started gathering in the city to study Roman law. The academic setting gave rise to Bologna’s unique artistic culture. Professors enjoyed high social status and were buried in impressive tombs carved with classroom scenes. Most importantly, teachers and students created a tremendous demand for books. By the mid-13th century, the city had become the preeminent center for manuscript production in Italy. Most books were made outside traditional monastic scriptoria, within a revolutionary commercial system involving stationers, parchment makers, scribes, illuminators, and clients. A new style of script, called the littera Bononiensis, distinguished Bolognese books, and the city’s illuminators were celebrated in Dante’s Divine Comedy. The legal textbooks produced in great numbers in the city are remarkable for their heft and size. In addition to illuminations, which include colorful narrative scenes, these manuscripts often contain in their margins the notes, corrections, and doodles of their original owners.The seven essays in this publication – by academics, a conservator, curators, and a museum educator – create a rich context for the nearly seventy works of art in the exhibition, which are drawn primarily from American libraries, museums, and private collections. Many of these works have never been studied in depth or published before. The authors explore medieval Bologna – its porticoed streets, towers, communal buildings, main piazza, and mendicant churches – and how the city became a center for higher learning at the end of the Middle Ages. They describe the way books were made there, including identifying the pigments used by illuminators. The authors also discuss the illustrious foreign artists called to work in the city, most notably Cimabue and Giotto; the devastating impact of the Black Death; and the political resurgence of Bologna at the end of the 14th century that led to the construction of the Basilica of San Petronio, one of the largest churches in the world, in honor of the city’s patron saint.

The Klesch portrait by Titian of Guidobaldo II with his son Francesco Maria represents the duke of Urbino in his full power as supreme commander of papal troops, with his heir next to him. This rare, full-length double portrait has only recently been attributed to Titian after undergoing extensive analyses and restoration, revealing a beautiful painting in non finito manner, with bravura impasto passages entirely characteristic of the master, all of which is illustrated and explained in this new book. Titian provided portraits for the greatest men and women of Europe, Charles V and Philip II of Spain primary among them. For years the Klesch portrait was dismissed as a workshop product – partly because poor condition hid its true quality, but also because it was not believed that Titian could have deigned to create one for Guidobaldo, whose father Guidobaldo della Rovere (1514–1574) and family had a long history of patronizing the artist. Recent research, however, has thrown Guidobaldo's geopolitical significance into relief. He was supreme commander of Venice, the Papal States and then Spain. He sent thousands of soldiers to the major conflicts of his day, particularly the defense of Malta (1565) and the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and his engineers were sought throughout Europe for their ingenuity. In this volume full of new research, Ian Verstegen reveals that Guidobaldo was not peripheral but central to Italian politics and was regarded at several points in history as a key figure who could bring peace or who could influence major conflicts on the Italian peninsula, particularly the War of Siena, and then Pope Paul IV's offensive war against Spain. Anne-Marie Eze gives the first comprehensive examination of the painting's provenance, outlining the portrait's vicissitudes and reception at different moments in its near 500-year history, reexamining received wisdom about its past ownership, and presenting new documentary evidence to expand on and fill gaps in our knowledge of its whereabouts. Finally, Matthew Hayes and Ian Kennedy reflect on the technique, date, recent conservation, and authorship of the painting, proving it to be a masterpiece that only the great Titian could have created.

While there have been monographs on British artist-travellers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there has been no equivalent survey of what the writer, Henry Blackburn, described as ‘artistic travel' a hundred years later. By 1900, the ‘Grand Tourist' became a ‘globe-trotter' equipped with a camera, and despite the development of ‘knapsack photography', visual recording by the oldmedia of oil and watercolour on-the-spot sketching remained ever-popular. Kenneth McConkey's exciting new book explores the complex reasons for this in a series of chapters that take the reader from southern Europe to north Africa, the Middle East, India and Japan revealing many artist-travellers whose lives and works are scarcely remembered today. He alerts us to a generation of painters, trained in academies and artists' colonies in Europe that acted as crèches for those would go on to explore life and landscape further afi eld. The seeds of wanderlust were sown in student years in places where tuition was conducted in French or German, and models were often Spanish, Italian, or North African. At fi rst the countries of western Europe were explored afresh and cities like Tangier became artists' haunts. Training that prioritized plein air naturalism led to the common belief that a well-schooled young painter should be capable of working anywhere, and in any circumstances. At the height of British Imperial power, and facilitated by engineering and technological advance, the burgeoning tourism and travel industry rippled into the production of specialist goods and services that included a dedicated publishing sector. Essential to this phenomenon, the artist-traveller was often commissioned by London dealers to supply themed exhibitions that coincided with contracts for colour-illustrated books recording those exotic parts of the world that were newly available to the tourist, traveller, explorer, emigrant, or colonial civil servant. These works were not, however, value-neutral, and in some instances, they directly address Orientalism, Imperialism, and the Post-Colonial, in pictures that hybridize, or mimic indigenous ways of life. Behind each there is a range of interesting questions. Does experience live up to expectation? Is the street more desirable than the ancient ruin or sacred site? How were older ideas of the ‘picturesque' reborn in an age when ‘Grand Tours' once confi ned to Italy, now encompassed the globe? McConkey's widerangingsurvey hopes to address some of these issues. This richly illustrated book explores key sites visited by artist-travellers and investigates artists including Frank Brangwyn, Mary Cameron, Alfred East, John Lavery, Arthur Melville, Mortimer Menpes, as well as other under-researched British artists. Drawing the strands together, it redefi nes the picturesque, by considering issues of visualization and verisimilitude, dissemination and aesthetic value.

This groundbreaking new book presents 60 projects - past and present, real and imagined - of 'anarchist' architecture. From junk playgrounds to Extinction Rebellion in the UK, from Christiania to the Calais Jungle in Europe, and from Dignity Village to Slab City in the USA - all are motivated by the core values of autonomy, voluntary association, mutual aid and self-organisation. Taken as a whole, they are meant as an inspiration to build less uniformly, more inclusively and more freely. Architecture and Anarchism documents and illustrates 60 projects, past and present, that key into a libertarian ethos and desire for diverse self-organised ways of building. They are what this book calls an 'anarchist' architecture, that is, forms of design and building that embrace the core values of traditional anarchist political theory since its divergence from the mainstream of socialist politics in the 19th century. These are autonomy, voluntary association, mutual aid, and self-organisation through direct democracy. As the book shows, there are a vast range of architectural projects that can been seen to refl ect some or all of these values, whether they are acknowledged as specifically anarchist or otherwise. Anarchist values are evident in projects that grow out of romantic notions of escape - from isolated cabins to intentional communities. Yet, in contrast, they also manifest in direct action - occupations or protests that produce micro-countercommunities. Artists also produce anarchist architecture - intimations of much freer forms of building cut loose from the demands of moneyed clients; so do architects and planners who want to involve users in a process normally restricted to an elite few. Others also imagine new social realities through speculative proposals. Finally, building without authority is, for some, a necessity - the thousands of migrants denied their right to become citizens, even as they have to live somewhere; or the unhoused of otherwise affl uent cities forced to build improvised homes for themselves. The result is to significantly broaden existing ideas about what might constitute anarchism in architecture and also to argue strongly for its nurturing in the built environment. Understood in this way, anarchism off ers a powerful way of reconceptualising architecture as an emancipatory, inclusive, ecological and egalitarian practice.

Diana Armfield RA Hon RWS NEAC has a highly personal attachment to subject and a subtly distinctive affinity with the rhythms of form and tone. These qualities make her an important, influential figure in modern British art - and a very popular one. Flower paintings have brought her wide acclaim, but this book - created to mark her 100th birthday - also richly represents Diana's feeling for landscape and place. Including an inspiring number of more recent works, it brings her fascinating artistic and life story up to date. 'I think I was born making things', Diana comments to Andrew Lambirth, whose absorbing interview with her forms the narrative thread of Diana Armfi eld: A Lyrical Eye. Diana's was a creative childhood steeped in experiments with drawing, pottery and embroidery, played out against the backdrop of a picture-fi lled house, a lovely garden and an artistic family. She studied at Bournemouth, Slade and Central art schools, starting out as a talented textile designer - a legacy that lent her a unique approach to the geometry, cadences and colour qualities of a painting. After organising cultural activities for workers and troops in World War II, Diana became one half of a successful partnership designing textiles and wallpaper, whose work featured in the Festival of Britain in 1951. The 1960s brought a turn to painting and from 1966 Diana has been a regular exhibitor at the prestigious Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. She has continued to paint and draw throughout her life and, as this book clearly demonstrates, always thinks afresh about each subject she tackles in order to respond to it with a close,warm sincerity. Diana Armfi eld: A Lyrical Eye charts Diana's personal and artistic journey with over 200 beautiful reproductions of her work, tracing favourite subjects and events - from a Welsh landscape to an informal fl ower display or the much-loved location of a painting trip in Italy or France. Andrew Lambirth's interview also explores the unique bond with her husband, painter Bernard Dunstan, who died in 2017, looking at how two leading artists interwove their personal and creative lives over a marriage of almost 70 years. As well as this interview, Andrew has contributed an essay on Diana's work to the book. Diana's standing and popularity have led to regular exhibitions, especially at prominent London gallery Browse& Darby. Her work is held in private and public collections worldwide, from London's V&Ato the Yale Center for British Art.

This absorbing book explores the crown jewel of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's collection of rare books and manuscripts: Jean Bourdichon's Boston Hours. As court artist to King François I of France, Bourdichon produced paintings, books and even parade floats for the sovereign and his entourage. This publication accompanies the museum’s first ever exhibition dedicated to this spectacular illuminated manuscript. Painter to two kings, Jean Bourdichon remains today one of the most celebrated artists of the French Renaissance. By age twenty-four, he was already serving as "peintre du roy," a title which Bourdichon held for the rest of his life. His illustrious career at the French royal court led to a wide range of commissions - from portraits to wall maps to stained glass - but he is remembered principally for astonishing illuminated manuscripts. The peerless Grandes Heures for Queen Anne of Brittany remains the touchstone of this group which includes some of the most lavishly painted books of hours ever produced. One of these masterpieces - Bourdichon's Boston Hours - in the collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is the subject of this book. Bourdichon's only intact book of hours in the United States was acquired by Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1890 and became the crown jewel of her collection of rare books and manuscripts. Leading scholars Nicholas Herman and Anne-Marie Eze explore its history in depth, shedding new light on the book’s patronage and provenance - from the shelves of a wealthy Catholic landowner in Lincolnshire to the shop of a Venetian art and antiques dealer. This book is the latest in the Gardner's Close Up series, each installment focusing on an individual, outstanding work of art in the collection. This publication is the first dedicated to this rare treasure, and precedes an exhibition opening in summer 2022.

This beautifully and thoroughly illustrated book, which constitutes the first serious investigation of the relationship between Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, will be of considerable interest to both British and American art historians, and appeal to art lovers from both countries. West and Copley have always and properly been viewed as the two pre-eminent eighteenth-century American artists, despite the fact that, at the age of twenty-one, West left his native shores in 1760, never to return. He went on to become immensely successful in England, becoming, among other things, the second president of the Royal Academy of Arts. Copley spent half his working life also in England. However, before making the move across the Atlantic, he made his mark as an exceptionally talented artist, who, without any real training, painted likenesses of fellow Bostonians, including ones of figures such as John Hancock and Paul Revere, that have become icons of American history. While those portraits remain his most widely admired works, after 1775 and his resettling in England, he started painting distinctly different types of pictures, initially showing modern historical subjects in emulation of the model provided him by West, following, for example, West's celebrated Death of General Wolfe, exhibited in 1771, with his own Death of the Earl of Chatham, begun in 1779. For a brief span of time, the two expatriate Americans had a close working relationship, that we can see substantiallyreflected in both the formal language and the subject matter of many of their best works, but it eventually and inevitably turned into rivalry. The book begins with a brief prologue discussing the earliest of West's depictions of recent historical events and of subjects set in America, painted prior to Copley's arrival in England. It then follows the year-by-year evolution of Copley's painting from 1775 to his death in 1815, with an underlying focus upon his ongoing give-and-take with West, and it ends with examination of hitherto little-known and unstudied major late paintings, from after 1800, by both artists.