A vibrant, colourful and beautiful book that introduces readers to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. It explains the difference between the two movements and the main artists associated with each. Illustrations are drawn from the renowned and outstanding collection of French art held by the National Galleries of Scotland and they include a number of rarely seen works.
This book tells the fascinating stories of how key paintings and drawings found their way into the collection.
Artists include Monet, Millet, Gauguin, Bastien-Lepage, Charles Jacque, Troyon, Corot, Degas, Seurat, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Vuillard, Bonnard, Derain, Matisse, Legros and Rodin.
“…the structure of G. E. Kidder Smith Builds, which traces his career first through books and then with exhibitions, means the book is more bibliographical than biographical… it illuminates many aspects of his life not widely known.” — Archidose
“His life’s work captures an evolutionary era in world history and—as a result—G.E. Kidder Smith Builds is, simply, a book to savor.”— More to Come
George Everard Kidder Smith (1913–1997) was a multidimensional figure within the wide-ranging field of North American architectural professionals in the second half of the twentieth century. Although he trained as an architect, he chose not to practice within the conventional strictures of an architecture office. Instead, Kidder Smith “designed,” researched, wrote, and photographed a remarkably diverse collection of books about architecture and the built environment. His work and life were deeply interwoven and punctuated by travel related to the research, writing, and promotion of books that sought to reveal the genius loci of the countries whose built environments he admired and wished to share with a broader audience. From the early 1940s to the late 1950s his interest in architecture led him to describe visually the architectural and historical identity of many European countries. After his far-flung travels over the decades, with his wife Dorothea, Kidder Smith focused on his own country and produced a series of ambitious books focused on the United States. Kidder Smith’s vision and narrative betray the gaze of the traveller, the scholar, and the architect.
The discovery of silver cannot be pinpointed; humans have mined it far back into antiquity. Our fascination with this malleable metal and the beautiful works of art that can be shaped from it continues to this day.
This book brings together two expansive collections of silver objects, the ‘Lion’ collection and the ‘Hamme’ collection. The ‘Lion’ collection provides a broad overview of beautiful silver objects made by a great variety of contemporary British silversmiths. It is divided between holloware, caddy spoons and napkin rings. Part of the collection revolves around the theme of lions, because the lion image bears a resemblance to the collector’s family history. The Hamme collection is a spectacular array of ‘hero’ pieces and commissions that demonstrate some of the best of each silversmith’s work. With more than 500 images, Contemporary British Silver Designers shares some of the finest work crafted by 21st-century silversmiths.
Interviews with numerous modern silversmiths – Jane Short, Kevin Grey, Miriam Hanid, Nan Nan Liu, Phil Jordan, Ray Walton, Rod Kelly, Tamar de Vries Winter, Wayne Meeten, Yusuke Yamamoto, Zoe Watts, Fred Rich, Michael Lloyd and Wally Gilbert – offer insight into the silversmiths’ process and inspirations. Brief biographies are also included on numerous other silversmiths whose work is featured in this book: Phil Barnes, James Dougall, Ryan McClean, Stuart Jenkins, Martin Baker, Martin Keane, Sarah Wilson, Don Porritt, Martyn Pugh, Maureen Edgar, Alistair McCallum, Colette Bishop, Adi Toch, Malcolm Appleby, Adrian Hope, Jen Ricketts, Cara Murphy, Graham Stewart, Kathryn Hinton, Brett Payne, Clive Burr, Rauni Higson, Angus McFadyen, Kyosun Jung, Karina Gill, Stella Campion, Angela Cork, Abigail Brown, Jessica Jue, Ndidi Ekubia, Elizabeth Auriol Peers and Katie Watson, among others.
This extensively illustrated volume focuses on William Morris (1834–1896), placing his wallpaper designs within the context of the radical changes in taste witnessed during the Victorian era. Against a backdrop of the fanciful, naturalistic patterns that typified fashionable papers in Morris’s youth, the impact of the Reform Movement of the mid-19th century is underscored, particularly the reformers’ crusade against such multi-coloured ornamental decoration. Instead, the insistence on the concepts of honesty and propriety as promoted by A. W. N. Pugin and Owen Jones, are demonstrated as influences on Morris. The role of imported Japanese wallpapers is also explored, giving insight into a seldom-discussed cultural exchange evidenced within the story of Morris & Co, which produced wallpapers from 1864 until 1940 and, after a post-war hiatus, from the 1960s to the present.
Amplifying Morris’s role in the creation of an influential and lasting style, his work is set within a selection by other designers, including Christopher Dresser and C. F. A. Voysey. Also introduced are firms of significance including Jeffrey & Co. and Arthur Sanderson & Sons, both of whom block-printed the Morris wallpapers. In a highly visual presentation, what is revealed are influences across time and within a global context, as pertinent to the creation of wallpaper art in the 19th century as it is today.
The Lammermuir Hills have been an important trade route between Scotland and England for generations, as well as an effective barrier when necessary.
Drawn by the long history of south-eastern Scotland and the many conflicting elements in play in its natural environment – among them wind farms, pylons, forestry plantations, grouse moors and sheep – the distinguished Scottish painter and printmaker Barbara Rae CBE RA has made numerous studies of these wild expanses.
This handsome volume reproduces a wide selection of her intensely colourful images with accompanying photographs and maps, and texts by the art critic Duncan Macmillan, Emeritus Professor of the History of Scottish Art at the University of Edinburgh, and Maureen Barrie, who worked for many years at National Museums Scotland.
Filled with photographs of unpopulated studios, Paul Winstanley’s exploration of British art schools highlights their importance at a time when the art school system’s existence is more fraught than ever.
For this series, Winstanley (b.1954) photographed undergraduate studio spaces in more than 50 art colleges across the United Kingdom over the summers of 2011 and 2012. These rough-and-ready, nearly neutral spaces are photographed as found; empty in the period between school years.
Collectively, the works highlight the abstraction of the interiors with their temporary white walls, paint stains, neutral floors and open spaces. Photographed in this manner, their sterile nature is juxtaposed with their intended purpose of fostering intense creativity for a future generation of artists.
Over 200 full-colour illustrations – which combine images from various schools to form their own abstract space – are accompanied by writings from two professors of fine art: a text by Jon Thompson and an interview with the artist by Maria Fusco.
To commemorate the publication, Winstanley created a limited-edition digital print from the Art School series. Each edition is hand-finished by the artist and contained within a custom-made slipcase containing a signed copy of the book.
“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 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.
Visions of Paradise: American Wilderness is a singular, timeless publication — a photographic tour de force celebrating the extraordinary majesty and rich legacy of America’s wild places, as seen through the eyes of one of the country’s foremost wilderness photographers, Jon Ortner, and conveyed through the transcendent medium of black-and-white film. Ortner has always been fascinated with the natural world, particularly as an avid hiker in the American wilderness. This luxurious book collects in a large format his inspiring landscape images, forming a passionate tribute to the American wilderness. In this sensational portfolio of 200 black-and-white images, Ortner has rediscovered and reinterpreted the compelling beauty of many of his most cherished wilderness locations with remarkable portrayals of their sublime, dramatic, tranquil, and transcendent aspects. Join Ortner as he guides us through his visions of paradise.
Signed, numbered special edition, slip cased, with signed landscape print (measuring 28 x 23 mm), and limited to 200 copies.
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.