In 1966 Mark Gambier-Parry bequeathed to the Courtauld the art collection formed by his grandfather Thomas Gambier Parry (who died in 1888). Since then, of the 28 ivories in the collection, about half have been on permanent display at The Courtauld, yet they have remained largely unknown, even to experts. This scholarly catalogue, full of beautiful new photography, is the first publication dedicated solely to the collection. There are examples of the highest quality of ivory carving, both secular and religious in content, and a number of the objects are of outstanding interest. The earliest objects date from the late 11th century.In his introductory essay, John Lowden discusses the sourcing and use of ivory in art from late Antiquity to the Modern period, comparing the properties of walrus, narwhal, African elephant and Indian elephant tusks. He examines the problems in the modern day study of medieval ivories - the principal problems being the extraordinary reticence of the sources and almost entire lack of inscriptions - and the questions of authenticity raised by copies and casts and radiocarbon dating.The ivories are a revealing tribute to the perceptive eye of Thomas Gambier Parry, a distinguished Victorian collector and Gothic Revival artist responsible for a number of richly painted church interiors in England, such as the Eastern part of the nave ceiling and the octagon at Ely Cathedral. Alexandra Gerstein introduces the Gambier Parry as a collector, not only of ivories but of Trecento and Quattrocento paintings - the area for which he is best known to day - and of 'curiosities', including 16th-century Italian maiolica, marriage chests (cassoni), medieval and Renaissance enamels, Islamic metalwork, and other decorative arts.

During the Tudor Age the South West was famed for the innovation and endeavor of its people. Devon sea dogs Drake, Raleigh and Hawkins sailed to ‘World’s End’ in their pursuit of treasure and glory, Exeter’s Nicholas Hilliard produced exquisite miniature portraits of courtiers while fellow Exonian Thomas Bodley re-founded Oxford University’s library, later named the Bodleian in his honor. These men lived during the religious turmoil and political intrigue of Elizabeth I’s reign– a time of opportunity for the merchants and traders of Devon. Many grew rich on the fruits of overseas trade and expressed their new status through fashionable houses, fine furnishings, decoration and valuable personal possessions. The demand for goods was met by a network of local craft workers: plasterers, masons, carpenters, lace-makers and goldsmiths. Aspects of their lives are revealed in this book, published to accompany the fascinating exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, which will draw together paintings, artifacts and documents from galleries, museums and record offices to tell the story of the South West and its people set against the backdrop of one of the most,evocative periods in British history. It was during the Elizabethan ‘Golden Age’ that West Country men became famous for their innovation and endeavour. Devon ‘sea dogs’ Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh and John Hawkins sailed to ‘World’s End’ in pursuit of treasure, glory and new dominions for the queen. Exeter’s Nicholas Hilliard produced exquisite miniature portraits of courtiers, while fellow Exonian Thomas Bodley re-founded Oxford University’s library, later named the Bodleian in his honour. These men achieved their fame and fortune in an age of religious turmoil and political intrigue, but it was also a time of opportunity – especially for the merchants of Devon. Many grew rich on the fruits of overseas trade and expressed their new wealth and status through fashionable houses, fine furnishings and valuable personal possessions. The demand for luxury goods for the new elite in society was met by a network of local craft workers. A recent Royal Albert Memorial Museum research project funded by The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art has combed the archives of record offices in search of information on their lives and products. Accompanying an exhibition at RAAM, this book places original manuscripts alongside the work of local goldsmiths, carpenters and masons to tell their tales. Of particular note are the silver communion cups: often fashioned from melted down pre-Reformation chalices, by leading Exeter goldsmiths such as Richard Hilliard (Nicholas’s father) and John Jones. The prosperity of South West merchants at this period fostered a sense of civic pride that was expressed through the foundation of hospitals, schools and almshouses, as well as improvements to waterways, such as the building of Exeter canal. By embracing the spirit of the Renaissance, it also became an age of scholarship and curiosity. Antiquaries such as Richard Carew, John Hooker and John Norden compiled the first regional histories and mapped the cities and monuments of the South West. And this sense of curiosity spread across the oceans. As evidenced by Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe in 1577-80, represented in the exhibition by the exuberant Drake Cup, and Raleigh’s ‘Virginia’ plantation project on the east coast of America. West Country to World’s End features some of Cornishman John White’s watercolour views of indigenous Algonquians and their settlements in the New World – rare visual traces of an extraordinary encounter between two cultures. The leading South West Tudors played out their roles against the backdrop of national and international politics. Many took prominent parts in repulsing the Spanish Armadas that threatened England’s security from 1588: the book publishes a rarely seen large-scale oil painting of Elizabeth and the Spanish Armada that captures the drama of the battle. It also explores the art of the Tudor court from the impact of Holbein – shown through stunning examples from the Royal Collection – through to the jewel-like miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard. The Exeter man’s contribution to the visual arts is celebrated in the city of his birth with portraits including Walter Raleigh, Lord Howard of Effingham and James I. Essays by leading scholars in the field of South West arts and the Tudor period edited by Professor Sam Smiles. Susan Flavin discusses developments in the decorative arts of the 16th century based on archival research, Sam Smiles writes on education and learning, Stephanie Pratt on exploration and Karen Hearn on Nicholas Hilliard.

Accompanying a landmark exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, this book examines the remarkable drawings made by Dürer as a young man from 1490 to 1495, especially those made during his journeyman years, or Wanderjahre – considered the final part of a craftsman’s training – and a second shorter trip which immediately followed and seems to have brought the artist to Italy. These trips form the framework for the book, which focuses on the young artist’s figure studies and has at its heart the Courtauld Gallery’s double-sided drawing of a Wise Virgin and Two studies of the artist’s left leg. This superbly ambitious work serves as a springboard to explore in depth the role of drawing at this stage of Dürer’s career. It allows us to address a series of crucial questions: how Dürer formed ‘his hand’, how he responded to artistic challenges presented by contemporary and earlier art (both on a stylistic and an iconographic level), how his pursuit of professional success was linked with the quest for an individual artistic identity, and how the strategy of recording his own creative achievements in drawings dovetails with his claim for a new status for the artist in his city.The scholarly and beautifully illustrated catalogue is introduced with five essays by distinguished experts. Stephanie Buck examines the documentary evidence and attempts to reconstruct the motivations and activities of Dürer’s travels as a young man. David Freedberg discusses Dürer’s obsessive observation and recording of himself in portraits and in studies of his limbs. These represent the first critical steps in the artist’s developing understanding of the body, and of the ways in which its movements could not just show emotion, but rouse the equivalent sense of torsion, tension and pathos in the bodies and minds of his viewers. Stephanie Porras looks at Dürer’s copies of drawings or prints circulating in Nuremberg workshops or acquired during the Wanderjahre, which were used as a means of seeking inspiration, of challenging himself to draw more sophisticated figures and dynamic compositions. Michael Roth asks the question of how the three strands of the art of the line – drawing, engraving and woodcut – structurally correspond in Dürer’s work and, consequently, how drawing merges with certain manual aspects of printing. A final essay presents new technical research on Dürer’s early drawings undertakencollaboratively in a number of leading collections of the artist’s work, and aims to enrich our understanding of the young Dürer’s approach to the medium of drawing.

The Hamburg banker’s son Aby Warburg (1866–1929) was one of the most influential art historians and cultural theorists of the 20th century. His life’s work was devoted to tracing antique formulas of representation in the depiction of human passions in Renaissance art. For this epoch-spanning relationship, he developed the term ‘pathos formula’ (Pathosformel). In a lecture given in 1905 in the Konzerthaus in Hamburg, focusing on the young Albrecht Dürer’s Death of Orpheus, Warburg outlined his thoughts in front of the original drawing, which he had borrowed from the rich holdings of the Kunsthalle in order to better illustrate his idea. This drawing, pivotal in the young artist’s development as an ambitious response to classical antiquity, was displayed during the lecture alongside a group of engravings and woodcuts which included not only some of Dürer’s own seminal later prints, such as Melencolia I, but also engravings by Andrea Mantegna which Dürer copied in 1494, the same year he drew the Death of Orpheus. Warburg’s ‘pop-up exhibition’ of eleven works has here been reconstructed and analyzed, using his fascinating lecture notes, sketches and slide lists. First developed by the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 2011, subsequently on view in Cologne in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum and now at The Courtauld Gallery, each institution has interpreted the material slightly differently, while retaining the core Warburg group. Aby Warburg aimed at unlocking the meaning of an art work by excavating its roots in its cultural context. By restaging his legendary display of 1905 with Dürer’s Death of Orpheus at its heart, the exhibition and accompanying book present some of the most skillful and ambitious works on paper ever produced and also seek to introduce into Warburg’s rich intellectual universe to a broader public, hoping thereby to offer both sheer enjoyment and food for thought.

Russia: A World Apart is a haunting evocation of the ruined country estates of the Russian aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries. Revolution, civil war, invasion, anarchy and casual indifference have conspired against many of the grand buildings of Russia’s rich and complex past. The architectural riches of Moscow and St Petersburg still exist for everyone to see, but when the photographer Simon Marsden and author Duncan McLaren entered the Russian countryside, away from the obvious tourist trails, they encountered a very different world. McLaren relates how “The further from Moscow and St Petersburg, the more desolate and derelict the landscape became. Endless pot-holed roads pass through one dead or dying village after another whose vandalized churches are now the refuge of owls and pigeons. This is the plight of modern-day Russia where the countryside is dying and its population declining while the big cities are thriving. Hidden away within all this desolation and chaos, many devastated country estates can be found. The statuary and formal gardens gone forever, replaced by an overgrown wilderness where stray dogs forage amongst the crumbling outhouses, garbage and rotting tyres.”This book, the result of four trips undertaken by Marsden and McLaren, illustrates a diverse mix of pre-revolutionary buildings and memorials, manor houses, palaces, churches, statuary and tombs, interspersed with more recent monuments from Soviet times. Each picture tells its own tale. In the newly found freedom and optimism of the post-communist era, some of these estates are being restored by individuals and organizations whose immense dedication to rescuing their past is nothing short of inspiring. Others will simply crumble to dust in the face of indifference from the majority of the population making Russia: A World Apart a beautiful and melancholy testament to the glories and grandeur of the past few centuries.

As an American living in England, a conscious Jew who utilized Christian symbols, a skillful modeler who introduced direct carving into England, and a modernist who eventually came to dislike abstraction for its own sake, Epstein did not fit neatly into the artistic categories of his time. Apart from his still widely admired naturalistic bronze portraits, Epstein’s oeuvre remains poorly understood and his reputation is dominated by his famous Rock Drill from before World War I. As this book shows, Epstein remained an avant-garde artist throughout his life, even if he ignored modernist dogma as well as man-in-the-street prudery. Gilboa’s text reveals the man in all his genius, interpreting many works in the light of Epstein’s personal circumstances.In an atmosphere of polarized attitudes to art and polite anti-Semitism at the end of the 1920s growing rather less polite thereafter, the outsider Jew Epstein deliberately became estranged from London’s art world. He responded to society’s attitude towards him in a series of bold projects – the monumental Genesis (1930) and Primeval Gods (1931–32); the smaller carvings Chimera and Elemental (1932); Behold the Man (1934–35); Consummatum Est (1938–39); Adam (1938) and Jacob and the Angel (1940); the bronze Lucifer (1944–45) and again a carving, Lazarus (1947). One cannot ignore the symbolic names of these sculptures. The discussion in this book will reveal that in each case the name has a definite relation to the sculpture’s theme and essence, as well as to the personal concerns of the sculptor.Almost all of these sculptures that Epstein produced from the 1930s aroused a public outcry, causing one critic to state that “a new carving by Mr. Epstein – good, bad or indifferent – can still steal the headlines when criminal assault, private or political, is out of season”. It was only during the 1950s, following the trauma and emotional shock of World War II, that new requirements for the expression of ideas and emotions rather than for mere forms with which to play renewed the demand for ‘an Epstein’ and his kind of ‘content’ sculpture, mainly in public commissions. Epstein, by then in his seventies, was flooded with work, and his sculpture – which employed Christian imagery to convey universal ideas of consolation and hope to a war-weary England – became newly relevant, gaining him the status of grand old master of English sculpture.

Inspired by the recent identification of a third autograph version of Gainsborough’s masterpiece The Cottage Door, this book examines the significance of the multiple versions of designs that the artist produced during the 1780s. It demonstrates that without the pressure of exhibiting his work annually at the Academy and without a string of sitters waiting for their finished portraits, Gainsborough’s work became more personal, more thoughtful. This study of the last phase of the artist’s work is a totally fresh interpretation of not only The Cottage Door but other key works such as Mrs Sheridan and Diana and Acteon. Gainsborough’s creative energies changed around 1780. He became restless and wanted to promote his landscape painting more effectively. He started to paint coastal scenes using an innovative painting technique to depict the water and he embarked on a series of ‘fancy’ pictures that he would position him as a descendant of an Old Master tradition. He was never happy with the constraints of the Royal Academy and he was at odds with the dictatorial opinions promoted by its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Removing himself from the Academy enabled him finally to do what he wanted.He began to turn to portrait compositions that he had developed and refined over a number of years. With subtle alterations they could be made suitable for a variety of sitters. The subtlety of his skilled observation was less easy to accommodate in standard-sized full-length canvases and in these portraits he sometimes resorted to rhetoric gesture that fought against the closely observed likenesses in his best portraits. The margin between ‘fancy’ pictures and portraits became blurred and the categorization of some of these paintings changed while they were on the easel. Always finding composition difficult, rather than begin something new he often revisited earlier designs that had pleased him. He would paint them again and make slight changes of tone and emphasis that would radically change the concept and intention of the design. The subject matter in some of his late paintings veers towards the autobiographical and shows a certain rift between him and his family.

The Harold Samuel Collection Art Collection of Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century pictures is one of the finest groups of Old Master paintings assembled in Britain over the past hundred years, but one of the least known. Sir Harold Samuel, 1st and last Lord Samuel of Wych Cross (1912–1987) bequeathed the collection to the City of London to hang at Mansion House. Now in the care of the Guildhall Museum and Art Gallery, the collection of 84 paintings can be viewed at Mansion House on organized tours or by appointment. Built between 1732 and 1754, the House is the home, office and center of entertaining for the Lord Mayor of the City of London and the Corporation. This guide will enable visitors to take a tour through Mansion House and discover the artists and their subjects – landscapes, still lifes and genre scenes – the development of styles, forms, materials and techniques, and the history of the collection. Highlights include works by Frans Hals, Aelbert Cuyp, Jan van Goyen, Jacob van Ruisdael and Pieter de Hooch. Lively and insightful entries accompany beautiful reproductions of every painting and are introduced by an essay about the creation of the collection and the history of artistic taste in relation to Dutch art. Michael Hall gained his PhD, on collecting Old Master paintings in the nineteenth century, from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2005. For the past twenty-five years he has been curator of the Rothschild family collections at Exbury in Hampshire. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angekes and was J. Clawson Mills Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He has catalogued the collection of gold boxes at the Huntington Art Gallery in San Marino, California, and writes on French decorative arts and on collecting Old Master paintings. Clare Gifford is a doctor of science and medicine. She has over recent years become greatly interested in the history and culture of 'the City that made the world'. Her husband Roger was elected Lord Mayor of London for 2012–13. The Harold Samuel Collection is a unique collection of 17th-century paintings from Holland's Golden Age. Bequeathed to the City of London in 1987 by Sir Harold Samuel of Wych Cross (1912–1987), a wealthy property developer and philanthropist, this remarkable collection of 84 works – the finest collection of Dutch and Flemish art assembled privately in the UK in the last hundred years – enriches the splendour of the interior of the Mansion House, residence of the Lord Mayor of London. This book marks the 25th anniversary of the bequest. Proceeds from the sale of the book will go towards the Lord Mayor's Appeal which primarily supports the City Music Foundation, and the Harold Samuel Collection Fund, recently set up for the conservation and maintenance of the paintings. This publication, introduced by an essay of the Collection and the history of artistic taste in relation to Dutch art, has lively and insightful entries accompanying beautiful reproductions of each painting. The Merry Lute Player by Frans Hals (1582/3–1666) is perhaps the best known picture in the Collection, the first painting to be bought via a transatlantic telephone bid, but Samuel also gathered outstanding examples of genre painting, indeed several of the finest workds in existence by Nicolaes Maes, Jacob Ochtervelt, Adriaen van Ostade and Jan Steen.

The Courtauld Gallery holds the most important collection of works in the United Kingdom by the Post-impressionist master Paul Gauguin (1841–1903). Assembled by the pioneering collector Samuel Courtauld (1876–1947), it includes major paintings and works on paper as well as one of the only two marble sculptures ever created by the artist. This special Summer display presents the complete collection together with the loan of two important works by Gauguin formerly in Courtauld's private collection: Martinique Landscape (Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh), and Bathers at Tahiti (The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham). Today, Gauguin is widely celebrated as one of the most important and popular artists of the 19th century. Collecting Gauguin offers an opportunity to consider the contribution of Samuel Courtauld in developing the artist’s reputation in this country. In 1910, the critic Roger Fry organised his ground-breaking exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, a major step in generating awareness of Gauguin in Britain. Fry included 37 works by Gauguin (more than by any other artist) and also chose a work by him for the poster, a rare surviving copy of which will be included in the display. Inspired by this exhibition, over the following decade the educationalist Michael Sadler (1861–1943) established the first substantial collection of works by Gauguin in this country. A small number of other individuals acquired single paintings, but Courtauld was the only other early collector to assemble a major group of works by Gauguin. Collecting Gauguin is the first of a new series of special Summer displays which will showcase aspects of The Courtauld’s outstanding permanent collection.

The city of Venice holds a special place in the global imagination. This book explores the creation of one of its largest surviving depictions, which has remained almost unknown to the wider public since its creation exactly four centuries ago.

The Virgin Mary rises up like a giant Tower of Babel in a close-up view, separated from us by a slender railing along which runs the painter's signature. The Virgin appears to be sitting on a marble slab, slightly raised, and her right shoulder is thrust forward to show us her nude son. Madonna and Child, also known as 'Dudley Madonna', was painted in c. 1508 by Giovanni Bellini (Venice, c. 1430–1516), one of the most celebrated of Italian artists. This book tells the story of the painting, its painter and its provenance – the journey from Bellini's 16th-century Venice to Dudley's 19th-century London – and the context in which it was created, and later collected. The painting was probably acquired in Bologna by John William Ward (1781–1833), who in 1827 became the 1st Earl of Dudley. He was described by his contemporaries as a cultured and educated man, but also, especially in his later years, tending to madness. The Dudley collection was one of the most outstanding in 19th-century England. The years 1505–10 were crucial ones in Giovanni Bellini's career, and this book examines anew the part he played in Venetian High Renaissance painting – his influence upon and response to the upcoming Giorgione, Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo; it looks in particular at the importance of the visit to the Venice of the Florentine Fra Bartolommeo in 1508. Antonio Mazzotta was Pidem Curatorial Assistant at the National Gallery, London, between 2008 and 2010, and he curated the exhibition, Titian's First Masterpiece: The Flight into Egypt, at the National Gallery, London, 4 April – 19 August 2012.

Sir Peter Lely (1618-1680) was Charles II’s Principal Painter and the outstanding artistic figure of Restoration England. When Lely arrived in England in the early 1640s his ambition was to be a painter of narrative scenes and not to work as a portraitist. However, the ‘subject pictures’ did not find favor with many English patrons and he produced less than thirty. As Lely’s friend Richard Lovelace explained, all they wanted was “their own dull counterfeits” or portraits of their mistresses. Thus, Lely was obliged to turn to portraiture to make a living. Yet, his poetic pictures of figures in idyllic landscapes are among the most beautiful paintings made in 17th-century England and this catalog will be the first in-depth look at this important chapter of this major painter’s career.Lely was born in Westphalia and received his artistic training in Haarlem with Frans Pietersz. De Grebber. He came to England around 1643. Few painters had stayed in London following the move of the Royal Court to Oxford, and Lely was therefore free to establish his reputation in the city. By 1650 he had settled at a house on Covent Garden Plaza (a five-minute walk from Somerset House) where he remained for the rest of his life. His major patrons were the ‘Puritan Earls’, a group of cultivated noblemen including the Duke of Northumberland and the Earls of Pembroke and Salisbury, as well as the circle surrounding the Countess of Dysart at Ham House.Lely never met Van Dyck (who had died in London in 1641), but he had the opportunity to study his paintings and those of the great Venetian 16th-century artists Giorgione and Titian in the houses of these wealthy aristocratic patrons. He began to buy these works himself and by the end of his life had amassed one of Europe’s richest collections of 16th- and 17th-century Italian paintings and drawings. It was probably in response to the pictures of Van Dyck and the Venetian Renaissance that he made his most ambitious works, including The Concert (The Courtauld Gallery) and Nymphs by a Fountain (Dulwich Picture Gallery, London). This group of enigmatic paintings are massive in scale and united by strong lighting, idealized landscape settings and a sense of theatricality and sensuality. Unlike many painters, Lely did not rely on classical mythology, but was able to create his own, highly personal dramas. For instance, it is likely that the man playing the viola da gamba in the center of The Concert is the painter himself.The exhibition Peter Lely: A Lyrical Vision at The Courtauld Gallery, London, is on view from 11 October 2012 to 13 January 2013.

Accompanying a major exhibition at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, this book examines the innate human desire to transcend the limitations of physiology and gravity – and to fly. Through an intriguing combination of paintings, sculpture, photographs, drawings, prints and video, including works by Leonardo da Vinci, José Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Paul Nash, Peter Lanyon and Hiraki Sawa, the reader will be provided with a unique overview of artists' creative responses to flight, from the earliest imaginings to an era in which space travel has allowed us to glimpse other worlds. For centuries before the modern era people imagined how to go beyond the boundaries imposed by physiology and gravity and take to the air. Myths in every culture have described the overcoming of these physical restrictions as supernatural events because the upper air was the realm of the gods. For the same reason, humans who attempted to trespass on that domain were cast down; only those chosen by the divine will would stay aloft. Flying was thus associated with the sublime because it transcended the limitations of earthly existence. In the modern era, however, flying has become an everyday occurrence and the sense of mystery has been largely forgotten. But once humans finally got airborne, and before flying became a routine phenomenon of mass transit, there was a time when the development of aviation and the experience of flight had a significant impact on artistic practice. Arguably, the same tropes of triumph and disaster that animated the ancient myths of human flight inform the creative responses to the conquest of the air, celebrating pioneers from Bleriot to Gargarin whose exploits conquered gravity and similarly mourning those who dared but died in the attempt. Beyond the artistic response to aviation history lies the artist's use of flight as a creative resource. Probably the most profound aspect of this was the recalibration of space in painting, with the ground plane, the horizon and perspective itself all thrown into doubt when representing the aerial world. Likewise, the familiar terrains that had been the stock in trade of landscape for hundreds of years were reconstituted to offer entirely new vistas when seen from above.

Silver, porcelain and ruby glass seem unlikely bedfellows, yet the objects in the Zilkha Collection are all united by the medium of silver or luxury metalwork. The objects were also made, for the most part, over about a century and a half. All of them tell a fascinating story of the particular circumstances that produced them: a maker, a workshop, a patron. They also tell the wider story of the society that made them necessary or desirable; the science that made them possible; and of their survival down the centuries.

Few realise that gold can be found in Great Britain, and that attempts to exploit native sources have drawn prospectors from ancient Rome to Elizabethan adventurers and current commercial projects in Ireland Scotland and Wales. In Gold: Power and Allure, eleven essays by distinguished specialists tell of the rich and previously untold story of Britain and its relationship with gold, demonstrating the country's unique golden heritage. Essays include: 'The Gold of Antiquity' by Kevin Leahy from the Portable Antiquities Scheme; 'London – the World's Gold Market' by Timothy Green; and 'Gold, golden, gilded: precious metal on the dining table' by Philippa Glanville. The editor and one of the authors of the book, historian Dr Helen Clifford, explains that "the challenge has been to draw together the many strands that make a single precious metal so special and central to human society. With the focus on Britain it has been possible to assemble a story that goes far back into geological time and forward to the most cutting edge goldworking, where this country excels. It reveals a story of the continuity of man's fascination with gold, from the Bronze Age to modern city finance, via a breathtaking range of more than four thousand years of work. In essence it is a story of global connections and one where the familiar is transmuted into the iconic, via the power of gold."Easily mistaken for a bar of solid gold, this generously illustrated book features objects from the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; the Louvre, Paris; British Museum, London; and Victoria and Albert Museum, amongst others.

The goldsmith and mineralogist Johann Christian Neuber (1736–1808) was one of the greatest masters of the gold objet – gold boxes, watch cases, chatelaines, etc. – which he in particular decorated to splendid effect with semiprecious stones – agate, jasper, carnelian and a host of others. In 1769 he became director of the Grünes Gewölbe, the magnificent State Treasury in Dresden, and in 1775 court jeweler to the court of Saxony. Neuber’s work features enchanting landscapes, intricate floral designs and complex geometric patterns made out of tiny cut stones, incorporating also Meissen porcelain plaques, cameos and miniatures. These one-of-a-kind objects are treasured in public and private collections all over the world today, but have never been brought together.This book is the first comprehensive introduction to this master craftsman’s oeuvre, presenting boxes and other decorative objects from the Grünes Gewölbe, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum and public and private collections in Germany, France and New York. One of its highlights is the ‘Breteuil Table’, still owned by the family for which is was made as a diplomatic gift nearly 250 years ago. It accompanies a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition, at the Grünes Gewölbe, Dresden, March–May 2012; at the Frick Collection, New York, May–August; at the Galerie J. Kugel, Paris, Autumn 2012.Beautiful photographs of all Neuber’s creations adorn this extraordinary book – well over 500 in number. The context and history of the growing interest in mineralogy and its celebration in these works of art are fully investigated. Its distinguished authors include Dr Jutta Kappel, of the Grünes Gewölbe; the specialists Sophie Mouquin and Philippe Poindront; the Marquis de Breteuil, Henri-François Le Tonnelier; and the editor of the volume, Alexis Kugel, of the famous Parisian gallery.