“The Turner Prize winner leads a visual tour through his life in six artworks – from college days to knighthood.” — Telegraph
Grayson Perry is one of Britain’s most celebrated contemporary artists and cultural figures. This book, which includes first sight of new and previously unpublished works, is published to accompany the largest-ever retrospective of Perry’s art. It offers a vibrant insight into his life and work, from his youth in rural Essex to sell-out stage shows at the Royal Albert Hall.
Grayson Perry vividly reflects on his art, life and career, remembering the sources of inspiration and influences along the way. Victoria Coren Mitchell’s thought-provoking contribution considers the role of humour in Perry’s art, highlighting the often-underestimated effort involved in being at once a serious artist and a lovable character. Patrick Elliott provides an illuminating biographical essay of the artist. The reader is also given a fascinating glimpse into the technique and process behind Perry’s prints, pots and tapestries.
Showcasing 75 exhibited works, the book covers the full range and breadth of his astonishing career.
“an excellent short book, which focusses in detail on a single work, a newly restored screen by William Bell Scott” — Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History, Volume 29, 2024-2025, p.128
William Bell Scott’s screen, The King’s Quair, was commissioned by James Leathart, an important collector of Pre-Raphaelite art. The beautifully decorated folding screen took as its inspiration The Kingis Quair, a 15th-century Scots poem attributed to James I of Scotland. Depicting key scenes from the king’s 18-year imprisonment in Windsor Castle, it is adorned by exquisite botanical details and gold leaf.
Split into three parts, this book reveals the history of the screen’s commission, details the remarkable imagery of the screen itself, and finally situates the screen in its historical context by explaining the fascinating personal relationships that were the backdrop to its creation, including Scott’s relationship with the artist and heiress Alice Boyd.
Drawing together the chivalric medieval tale of an imprisoned, love-struck king with the vibrancy of the Pre-Raphaelite social circles in which Scott moved, the reader is given a vivid picture of how this captivating artwork was created. Illustrated with new photography of the screen, this book is a vital new part of the story of British, as well as Scottish art.
In 1851 John Ruskin came to the defence of the young artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood by writing two letters to The Times, refuting widespread criticism of their paintings. Soon afterwards he published a pamphlet entitled Pre-Raphaelitism, beginning almost a decade of public support for the work of William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and their associates.
Already established as one of the leading writers on art, he took a personal risk in defending the Pre- Raphaelite cause, but saw a parallel in the hostile reaction to the paintings of his artistic idol J. M. W. Turner. In Millais especially, Ruskin hoped to nurture a worthy successor in landscape painting, arguing that the Pre-Raphaelites’ attention to truth and detail offered the opportunity to establish a “new and noble school” of British art.
This is the first compilation of all of Ruskin’s published writings relating to the Pre-Raphaelites, beginning with the celebrated passage in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843) exhorting young artists to “go to nature in all …. rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing,” later claimed by Hunt to have been an inspiration. As well as Pre- Raphaelitism (1851), rarely reprinted since, and the fourth of the 1853 Edinburgh lectures, it includes all the comments on paintings in the annual Academy Notes (1855-9) which pertain to Pre-Raphaelitism, underlining Ruskin’s significant contribution to the movement’s popular success and the widespread acceptance of its principles. From the period after 1860, when Ruskin was concentrating more on social issues, come the the little-known articles published in the Nineteenth Century magazine under the title The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism (1878), and a number of lectures, including the last of his Slade Lectures, The Art of England (1883), delivered just a few years before his mental faculties failed.
Edited with a commentary and preface by Stephen Wildman, Director of the Ruskin Library and Research Centre, University of Lancaster, and with an introduction by Robert Hewison, one of Ruskin’s successors as Slade Professor of Art at the University of Oxford.
Through an extraordinary selection from the Beken Marine Photography Archive of the work of four generations of famous photographers (the Beken family), this book retraces the fundamental stages of the evolution of the unsurpassable ‘Beken style’, bringing together some of the most artistic images of sailboats ever shot. These wonderful and legendary pictures, accompanied by detailed texts and plentiful information, will lead the reader through time, to discover the wonderful world of yachting photography.
The Bekens began their love affair with marine photography in 1888, when Alfred Edward (1855–1915) moved from Canterbury (Kent) to the Isle of Wight with his son Frank (1880–1970). He purchased a pharmacy in Birmingham Road in the seaport of Cowes, a town that was already famous for international yacht racing and for the world’s oldest regular regatta, the renowned Cowes Week. Alfred and young Frank started shooting photographs to capture sailing yachts at their best, and racing yachts in action, a real challenge at that time as it still is today. These beautiful photographs started being sold in the pharmacy as souvenirs, and in the space of a few years they would have caught the attention of the world of yacht racing and sailing aficionados, earning the Beken family a large number of followers all over the world for the extraordinary quality of their images.
Queen Victoria, King George V, and most recently the Duke of Edinburgh awarded the company a Royal Warrant for excellence. Frank’s artistic inheritance was carried on by his son Keith (1914– 2007), who succeeded him in the creation of fantastic sailboats photographs. Today, Kenneth Beken (b. 1951, the fourth in the line of family photographers), together with yacht master Peter Mumford, is leading the way in the latest digital photography, and creating wonderful colour images: “Now that digital cameras and printers are as good as the traditional darkroom methods,” he says, “the company has gone totally digital.” Today the Beken Marine Photography Archive features more than 200,000 different photographs of incalculable value, from historical monochrome masterpieces to contemporary digital images of the highest quality and technical perfection.
A unique opportunity to see rare and beautiful drawings by some of the biggest names in European art.
Chatsworth House in Derbyshire holds one of the finest and most significant private collections of drawings in the world, but they are rarely seen and very little has been published on them.
This book showcases 47 drawings from this exceptional collection, including superb watercolours and drawings by famous German Renaissance artists Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein alongside the baroque splendour of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. It will reveal intimate insights into the artists’ practice and their ways of recording the world.
The captivating selection of drawings will be introduced and contextualised by Charles Noble, Curator of Fine Art at Chatsworth House. Each image will be explained and examined based on rigorous new research, offering new insights into the work of some of art’s biggest names.
During the 1890s and early 1900s Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) produced a body of work that combines intimate subject matter with abstract form through the simplification of pictorial elements and observation of decorative fabrics and wallpapers. Through these devices he developed an art that is unashamedly decorative and yet always replete with subtle suggestions of deeper meanings. In balancing form and content, psychological drama and abstraction, his pictures are about as close to poetry as any artist’s, and all the more brilliant for their understatement and the near imperceptibility of their craft.
Illustrating many rarely seen paintings from private collections, this book offers a fresh look at the early career of this much-loved artist. Introduced by Chris Stephens, director of the Holburne Museum, and with an original essay by Belinda Thompson.
This book accompanies a major exhibition in the Ashmolean Museum on the early work of internationally acclaimed German artist Anselm Kiefer. It focuses on his paintings, drawings, photographs and artist books created between 1969 and 1982, in the private collections of the Hall Art Foundation. Anselm Kiefer: Early Works is the first institutional show and publication in the UK dedicated to Kiefer’s early practice. The book introduces themes, subjects and styles that have become signature to Kiefer’s work, while providing a more intimate and complementary context for his large-scale installations that he is best known for today. The early works are accompanied by three recent paintings from the artist’s own collections and White Cube, chosen by the artist himself.
Art historians, artists, curators and experts of Kiefer’s art from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Britain and the US have contributed 46 original texts on individual works, organised in a chronological structure. An illustrated chronology at the end of the book compiled by Stephanie Biron from the Hall Art Foundation provides an overview of the artist’s early practice and life, to contextualise the works.
The book begins with Kiefer’s iconic Occupations and Heroische Sinnbilder series, created in 1969 and 1970, which Kiefer views as his first serious works. Kiefer was among the first generation of German post-war artists to directly confront the country’s troubled past and identity. Full of complex references to German socio-political history but also to culture, literature and his personal life, Kiefer’s early works carry a unique iconography, linking classic ideas of great art with a distinctive understanding of concrete artistic materiality. The landscapes in his watercolours are historically charged; hand-written words on paintings are closely linked with poetry well known to most German viewers; motifs and symbols point at Nazi ideologies and a collective feeling of guilt.
What connects Samuel Maverick, Mary Dowling, Cornelis Melyn, and Burebista to whisky? Which distillery was the birthplace of the IRA’s rebellion? Why should you not mix up bottled-in-bond with bottle-in-box? Which dynamic distillery proudly claims, “If it gets someone drunk, we’ll make it” as their team motto? What led to the murder of skilled distiller William Johnston by the enchanting Lou Parris? Which whisky was packaged in a tin can that needed to be opened like sardines, using a key? And exactly how much whisky is in a ‘tot’ and a ‘sniffer’? If these questions have piqued your curiosity, the answers (and many more) await you in this book’s 63 1/2 surprising and often humorous whisky anecdotes. The author, drawing on his extensive experience as a travel and whisky journalist, shares these stories in his signature tongue-in-cheek style. Readers of his previous works will recognise the unpredictability of each story. This book pairs perfectly with a fine whisky.
James VI & I, the only child of Mary, Queen of Scots, has often been overshadowed by the dramatic lives of his mother and son, Charles I. This book seeks to redress the balance by centering the first monarch to reign over both Scotland and England and uncovering the artistic treasures created during his extraordinary reign.
The cultural riches of James’s court are showcased, revealing his diverse roles as ruler, scholar, politician, father and patron of the arts. His court’s passion for jewellery and fine clothes is illustrated in the vivid portraits and miniatures by John de Critz and Nicholas Hilliard – just two of many artists and craftspeople who thrived in its artistic and intellectual climate.
Five richly illustrated chapters demonstrate James’s impact on early modern Britain, while reconsidering the reputation of a king traditionally presented as preferring hunting and drinking to the duties of daily governance. Packed with exquisite art works and sumptuous objects, this book brings James’s court vividly to life.
“Words and ideas are as one – and at war – in Finlay’s witty, elegant work…” — The Guardian
In celebration of the centenary of artist, poet and landscape designer Ian Hamilton Finlay’s birth, Fragments draws together 100 of his artworks. With each piece accompanied by a short text, either by the artist or by a noted writer on Finlay’s work, this book accompanies a series of eight exhibitions taking place in Basel, Brescia, Edinburgh, Hamburg, Palma de Mallorca, London, New York and Vienna in May 2025.
Best known for his Little Sparta – a seven-acre site at Stonypath farm in Scotland that has attained almost-mythical status – and for his installed guillotines, A View to the Temple, at Documenta Kassel 1987, Finlay’s large body of work can be found in museums, parks and gardens worldwide. His artistic creations also incorporate short stories, poems and concrete poetry, many of which have been published by his own publishing house Wild Hawthorn Press, and which, with a mixture of wit and beauty, engage with the relationship between violence and civilisation.
“Agriculture and the arts meet in a pioneering new book that highlights the power of regenerative practices.” – Waitrose Weekend
“From Northern Irish handkerchief-makers to Scilly Isles fisherman who know when to let stocks replenish, a new book showcases radical solutions to our environmental problems” – The Guardian
“This book treats us all to a glimpse through the lens of a movement for change that is gathering pace … there is hope here” – Dan Saladino, BBC Journalist, author of Eating to Extinction
We Feed The UK is an acclaimed storytelling campaign, pairing photographers and poets with the UK’s most inspiring custodians of soil, sea, and seed.
This landmark publication brings together over 40 collaborators from the environment and arts sectors to share ten deeply human stories from every corner of the UK – from Black-led community gardens in the heart of London, to all-women worker cooperatives in Edinburgh, and traditional fishing practices off the southern coast. Each chapter pairs striking visual narratives with evocative poetry, capturing a landscape not only of geography, but of care, resistance, and renewal.
The ten powerful stories in this book prove a future is possible where nature-friendly farming has a positive impact on our climate, wildlife, and communities. We Feed The UK is a call to attention. It captures a moment of transformation, led not by policymakers or corporations, but by everyday people planting the seeds of change with their own hands. These are the stories we need now: rooted in hope, grown in resistance, and harvested for a liveable future.
Running and Returning is the first comprehensive monograph of internationally acclaimed artist Jyll Bradley, whose diverse practice spans over four decades and encompasses photography, film, writing, performance, sculpture and large-scale public installations. A pioneer of adopting commercial lightbox technology in art, Bradley is renowned for her use of minimalist, industrial forms as spaces for exploring identity, spirituality and community. Her ambitious public realm artworks, such as Green/Light (for M.R.) (Folkestone Triennial), Dutch/Light (Turner Contemporary) and The Hop (Hayward Gallery), reflect her innovative approach to sculpture as a potent gathering place of people and ideas.
This richly illustrated book features some of the most exciting voices in contemporary art and literature exploring every aspect of Bradley’s multifaceted practice. Running and Returning will provide a vital resource for those familiar with Bradley’s work, while introducing her to new audiences in an accessible, engaging and imaginative way.
With authoritative texts and a wide array of illustrations, this handsome monograph charts Barbara Rae’s long and successful career as a redoubtable travelling artist. From her native Scotland, particularly the Lammermuirs, to Spain, Ireland, and the polar regions, Rae’s painterly abstraction brings together her fascinations with landscape and travel. Her sketchbooks feature here, too, revealing her process as she uses them to conceive the larger works she makes in her studio.
Tradition and precedent inspire invention, architectural drawing, and media practice. This issue presents a series of encounters with printed drawings, leading to their transformation and re-imagination in a series of new works. Archival media from the John Nichols Printmakers Archive, located at the a83 gallery in New York City, is the foundation for these new inventions by contemporary architects.
International contributors extend the discourse on architectural representation and its evolution through print media, offering critical reflections on specific pieces. The project and exhibition from which this issue stems concerns questions of the archive; modes through which archival materials may become activated; situated approaches to intricate material objects that allow them to be read in non-normative ways; media transformations; and issues of disciplinary indebtedness and influence. The writers have been invited to address and/or extend these concerns in their consideration of specific works.
About the Weather accompanied Canan Tolon’s second solo exhibition at Dirimart (23 November–24 December 2023) with the same title. The bilingual publication gathers Tolon’s large-scale works in rust and acrylic on canvas, created in 2023, alongside earlier pieces in the same technique. Her abstract compositions emerge through a process that embraces chance: metal fragments placed on canvas interact with water, air, and weather, generating unpredictable rust forms shaped by conditions beyond the artist’s control—humidity, pollution, temperature shifts, or wind. These works register environmental processes, functioning as both material traces and invitations to free association, constantly renewed in dialogue with the viewer. The volume also includes essays by art historian Berin Gölönü and curator Kevser Güler, who reflect on Tolon’s practice and the exhibition’s ironic title, which alludes to our tendency to avoid urgent concerns—such as the climate crisis—by resorting to “small talk” about the weather.
Text in English and Turkish.
The Mediterranean coast of France and Catalonia witnessed the rise and development of modern art over a century, from Cézanne in the 1860s to Matisse, Picasso and Klein in the 1950s and 1960s. These artists and the many more featured here discovered an inexhaustible source of inspiration in this storied region, whose glittering, languid sea stretches out towards the far horizon beneath brilliant azure skies. Indelibly associated with the classical past, this magical land of eternal spring and spiritual renewal came to signify a state of mind, and avant-garde artists sought to convey the vitality and élan it inspired in them through new paradigms of modernist invention.
We build fountains — those vibrant symbols of life and physical embodiments of beauty — to mark and celebrate our favoured places. This act is an honour to all, and like listening to music, it is understood on an intuitive level. We also build fountains to commemorate life. Water is the basis for, and the symbol of, life. Many fountains are articulated to recognise some person, institution, or idea. Those particular recognitions are fused with water’s deeper symbolism to convey everlastingness to the identities being celebrated.
Fountain Safari places on the shelf a sharply focused, comprehensive, useful, entertaining, and hopefully lasting survey aimed to provide a panoramic portrait of the fountain class of artistic endeavour. The material attends especially to the aesthetics of water expression by examining numerous esteemed examples. In the process, a sketch is roughed out of the evolution of fountains over some two millennia and across several cultures. Ultimately, the work attempts to deepen the understanding and appreciation of water features by identifying and clarifying their most essential aesthetic qualities.
Fountain Safari is written for design professionals, architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, students of the arts or the built environment—and everyone else interested in the engaging, one-of-a-kind subject of fountains.
In Search for Meaning is the first published book by artist-photographer Felisa Tan. This striking collection covers most of her major work for the past 15 years, many of which were never published before. Consisting of 72 photographs exquisitely made and sequenced by Felisa herself, unveiling spellbinding and strange mundane subjects from her extensive travels and light experimentations at home, she has created a record of the way she experiences the world after undergoing more than a decade of evolution as an artist and human being.
Felisa’s photographs reflect honest, clear observation, and an intricate and layered way of seeing, as she watches life unfold itself before her eyes. Her exceptionally loaded ways of looking at the world are reflected in her handling of space, composition, synchronised colours, shapes, and framing, and rather imperfect subjects and places. Common things — graffiti, carnivals, twilight, lonely scenes, and empty spaces — are all transformed by her subtle luminous vision into an extraordinary teacher, filled with ageless Presence and wisdom. The consistency of her proclivity towards certain kinds of places and moments of time, and deep insightful rendering of these moments, present us with an extension of her present tense, reading of meaning, and judgment of what might be of timeless importance to the readers in every phase of their lives. Furthermore, with her ability to grasp the little details that come her way as both an individual and a representative of a larger human and universal context, this rich compendium of images in both natural and human settings transport the viewer into the heart of childlike wonder and a lush infinite Universe.
From the dramatic cliffs of Positano to the lemon terraces of Amalfi – A Taste of the Amalfi Coast is an invitation to immerse yourself in the spirit of the South. Christine Countess von der Pahlen portrays authentic restaurants, vibrant markets and the people who cook, savour and live here with passion. Accompanied by the award-winning photography of Mayk Wendt, the book opens glimpses into lively kitchens, colourful gardens and fragrant lemon groves. Each chapter captures the magic of the dolce far niente and, through exclusive recipes, stories and travel tips, brings the sunshine, ease and flavour of the Amalfi Coast straight into your home.
These pages tell the story without words of a journey through Spain in which the author, the photographer Fernando Manso, visited unknown and hidden corners and captured them on the plates of his large-format camera. From the remotest parts of Galicia to those of Almería, he passed through coasts, deserts and mountains, stopping at old churches, ghostly castles or majestic cathedrals, in forests and gorges, at natural pools and salt mines, and at cemeteries, Arab baths and hermitages carved out of the rock.
Fernando has made the light of these places into the leading figure of his journey. His is a different light, as he has relinquished blue skies and brilliant sunshine, often the stuff of clichés, to make way for visions of places that appear to us with such intimate truth that even if we know them, we can barely recognise them. This is thanks to his technique, his art and the patience with which he waits for the light.
Fernando’s luxury is being able to use all the time in the world to draw us into an artistic heritage that is sometimes secret and hard to reach, and which the viewer has to know how to see. He reveals these places, often in danger of disappearing, after detailed investigation. Both architecture and landscape – for he knows that natural scenery is also a major patrimony that has to be affectionately preserved and protected from speculation – belong to all of us, and we are responsible for their care. We must be aware of this.
The result of that trip is this publication, with beautiful images in reproductions of exceptional quality that present us with a vision of Spain in a different light.
In this collection of photographs taken in over 36 countries, Christer Löfgren explores the international art of graffiti and wall paintings. From his base in Stockholm, Sweden, Löfgren travels to places where street art can be found, including places like the Antarctic, Greenland, and Svalbard, where you may not expect to see it. The book addresses the current duality of opinion about street art: it is still viewed as a criminal act in many places, and yet at the same time it is accepted as a valid and important art form. It crosses boundaries to unite communities all around the world. Organised in two sections, the first section of this book explores the methods and motivations behind the work, while the second section focuses on street art in specific countries around the world.
With this new guide in your bag, you’re set to go out and discover the best and most fun places in hotspot Miami: 500 addresses that many tourists don’t know, a bit off the beaten track, but always loved by the locals and worth a visit. The 500 Hidden Secrets of Miami will take you to all the places that make Miami the lively and unique city it is, also known as the ‘Gateway to the Caribbean’, such as: the 5 nicest water views, 5 stunning Mediterranean revival buildings, 5 renowned Miami-based fashion designers, the 5 coolest hotel pools, and 5 wonderful parks, playgrounds, and museums to visit with your kids. It even includes some unusual experiences, such as swimming in a freshwater Venetian pool, or day trips to the Everglades and the Keys.
“If you really want to get under the skin of a city, the 500 Hidden Secrets series, which covers a number of cities from Chicago to Ghent, all written by people who know the cities inside out, is ideal. It’s an innovative and refreshing take on the traditional travel guide.”- The Independent
What are the 5 restaurants for new Flemish cooking? Where would you find the 5 best antique shops? Where can you find the most unexpected view of Ghent? Where are the cool coffee bars that play the best music? And if you wanted to find the most mysterious places in the Citadelpark, where are they? The 500 Hidden Secrets of Ghent is a wonderfully eclectic guide to this multifaceted city. An insider’s view of Ghent featuring little known facts and snippets of useful information, presenting the quirky and the off-beat, and sharing the whereabouts of some of the city’s wonderful hidden gems like the Hotel d’Hane-Steenhuyse and the Gruut City Brewery.
The 500 Hidden Secrets of Ghent offers a practical guide to Ghent’s finest places, and Derek Blyth covers all bases to ensure no visitor to the city is ever anything short of captivated. Packed with accessible, easy-to-read information summarised in handy lists, maps, itineraries, sections on food & drink, accommodation, green spaces, museums, galleries and shops; this guide is an essential resource for the inquisitive traveller.
Also available: The 500 Hidden Secrets of London, The 500 Hidden Secrets of Dublin, The 500 Hidden Secrets of Paris, The 500 Hidden Secrets of Lisbon, and many more. Discover the series at the500hiddensecrets.com
This book is about architecture, but not about formal architectural images. It is about the people who inhabit and use buildings and places. It is about the people who have made and will make buildings and places. It is a book about subjects and themes that directly impact the lives of the people who will utilize these efforts.
All these issues open the door to the systematic investigation of the question of value, of what works and what does not, of what is good and bad. Inside the academy, it questions the accepted dogma of subjectivity and neutrality in traditional teaching, particularly as it applies to subjects of taste and perception in architecture. Outside the academy, it requires a willingness to engage with the community in ways much different from traditional detached observation and recordation. The result is a much different and much more sensitive relationship between architects and their clients, teachers and their students, and even between students and their peers.
Effectively, it points to the need of a seminal change in the way we look at the production of architecture as a whole today. Nothing is lost: not beauty, not individuality, nor the eagerness to experiment with form. The wonder of it all is that there is everything to gain.