Rose Wylie RA is the third artist to participate in an exhibition collaboration between the Royal Academy and The Gallery at Windsor, Vero Beach, Florida. This book accompanies her show and features an interview with the artist by Tim Marlow, Artistic Director at the Royal Academy, and an essay by the actor and art collector Russell Tovey.

The exhibition comprises new paintings and drawings – wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of visual representation itself. Using images as a prompt, Wylie often works from memory, and the associated works on a single subject offer an insight into her complex creative process.

Wylie’s work has been the subject of renewed critical attention in recent years, with major shows in Europe at venues including Turner Contemporary, Margate (2016), the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2017), Tate Modern, London (2018), and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga (2018).

The National Galleries Barberini and Corsini contain paintings and sculptures of exceptional historical and artistic value. Page after page, through the masterpieces of many of the greatest Italian artists from the Middle Ages to the 18th century (Angelico, Raphael, Piero di Cosimo, Bronzino, Lotto, Tintoretto, Cortona, Caravaggio, Bernini, Reni, Guercino, Batoni, Canaletto) the reader can follow the development of art history. The collections also include artwork by Holbein, Murille and Van Dyck, besides a few antique pieces. In addition to the 100 entries, there are descriptions of particularly important elements that are part of the palaces’ architecture, such as Borromini’s spiral staircase, Bernini’s main staircase and the huge ceiling frescoed by Pietro da Cortona.

This is the story of the Reeves Collection of botanical paintings, the result of one man’s single-minded dedication to commissioning pictures and gathering plants for the Horticultural Society of London. Reeves went to China in 1812 and immediately on arrival started sending back snippets of information about manufactures, plants and poetry, goods, gods and tea to Sir Joseph Banks. Slightly later, he also started collecting for the Society but despite years of work collecting, labelling and packing plants and organising a team of Chinese artists until he left China in 1831, Reeves never enjoyed the same degree of recognition as other naturalists in China. This was possibly because he had a demanding job as a tea inspector. Reeves himself never claimed to be a professional naturalist and the plant collecting and painting supervision were undertaken in his own time. Furthermore, fan qui (foreign devils) were restricted to the port area of Canton and to Macau, so that plant-hunting expeditions further afield were impossible. Furthermore, Reeves never published an account of his life in the country, unlike Clarke Abel and Robert Fortune, but he left us some letters, notebooks, drawings and maps. The Collection is held at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Library in Vincent Square, London. It is a magnificent achievement. Not only are the pictures accurate and richly coloured plant portraits of plants then unknown in the West, but they stand as a record of plants being cultivated in nineteenth-century Canton and Macau. In John Reeves: Pioneering Collector of Chinese Plants and Botanical Art, Kate Bailey reveals John Reeves’ life as an East India Company tea inspector in nineteenth-century China and shows how he managed to collect and document thousands of Chinese natural history drawings, far more than anyone else at the time.

Marriage a la Mode is the most famous of William Hogarth’s ‘progresses’ or series paintings, the story of a marriage de convenance and its unhappy consequences in fashionable 18th-century London. Contemporaries relished teasing out the meaning of all its rich detail, and the most extensive and popular of all the commentaries on the artist’s accomplishment: was that of the witty, many-sided German, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Brilliantly translated, thoroughly annotated, this text is accompanied by the earlier and less-known commentary by Hogarth’s friend, the French-Swiss enameller Jean-Andre Rouquet, and by a selection of Lichtenberg’s remarks (in letters to friends) on his purposes and problems in interpreting Hogarth’s work. Included also is another and very rare ‘explanation’ of the plates, an anonymous 1746 pamphlet titled Marriage A-la-Mode-An Humorous Tale, in Six Cantos. A foreword on Lichtenberg, and an historical essay on Hogarth’s work by Mr. Coley, supply necessary background on artist and commentary. Of Hogarth’s greatness there is little that need be said. But it is worth noting that, of his several ‘progresses’ or ‘modern moral subjects’, only Marriage a la Mode centres on the upper levels of British society – the aristocracy and the mercantile class.

Welcome to the world of Edvard Munch and… You! Step into the studio and play with stencils, lines and patterns, and have fun drawing new characters and scenes while helping the artist finish his paintings. In this book you can discover places and motifs from Edvard Munch’s life and artwork, and bring the pages to life with your own wonderful creations. Have fun, and experiment just like Munch!

Titian (c. 1488-1576) was recognised very early on as the leading painter of his generation in Venice. Starting in the studio of the aged Giovanni Bellini, Titian, with his contemporary Giorgione, almost immediately started to expand the range of what was possible in painting, converting Bellini’s statuesque style into something far more impressionistic and romantic. This restless spirit of innovation and improvisation never left him, and during his long life he experimented with a number of different styles, the brushwork of his last great paintings showing a mysterious poetry that has never been equalled. This volume in the series Lives of the Artists collects the major writings about Titian by his contemporaries and near contemporaries. The centrepiece is the biography by Vasari, who as a Florentine found Titian’s very Venetian sense of colour and transient forms a challenge to his concept of art as design. The poet Ariosto and sparkling letter writer Aretino had a more nuanced view of their friend’s work, and Priscianese’s account of a dinner party with Titian, and the contributions by Speroni and Dolce, and the slightly later Tuscan critic Borghini, round out the picture of this hugely thoughtful, intellectual artist, whose paintings remain some of the most sensual and affecting in all of Western art. Mostly unavailable in any form for many years, these writings have been newly edited for this edition. They are introduced by the scholar Carlo Corsato, who places each in its artistic and literary context. Approximately 50 pages of colour illustrations cover the full range of Titian’s great oeuvre.

Wolfgang Beltracchi is a phenomenon of the international art world. His name is inextricably entwined with one of the greatest upheavals in the global art market. Emulating numerous world-famous artists, he developed and painted new paintings, continued their narrations and biography, and concluded them with a forged signature. His wife Helene Beltracchi then smuggled them onto the art market. Many experts were deceived by Beltracchi’s stupendous skill and auctioneers cast many doubts aside in the interests of insatiable market demand, selling the paintings as authentic works by the purported artists.

Reading the artistic handwriting of a painting requires an exceptional willingness and ability to be able to empathise and identify with the artist, until you “can feel what the other feels” (Wolfgang Beltracchi). Through extensive discussions with the painter and his wife, the psychoanalyst Jeannette Fischer explored this capability that is so pronounced for Beltracchi. In her new book, she places this in relation to the disappearance of Beltracchi’s own signature. As with her previous highly successful book about the performance artist Marina Abramović, Jeannette Fischer has created an exceptionally insightful portrait of a fascinating artist personality.

Aldo Mozzini. Casematte is the first major book on the work of Swiss artist Aldo Mozzini. It features his energetic art through more than 200 illustrations along with texts by distinguished Swiss curators. A conversation with the artist rounds off the volume, which highlights Mozzini’s contribution to the contemporary art scene in Switzerland.

Born in Locarno in 1956, Aldo Mozzini has lived and worked in Zurich since the 1980s. Galleries and museums in Switzerland, Italy, and France have shown his works in solo and group exhibitions, and he has won the Swiss Art Award twice, in 2012 and 2019. His oeuvre comprises drawing, painting, objects, photography, sculpture, and installation, moving restlessly from one form of expression to another.

The book reviews 40 years of Mozzini’s career and explores various aspects of his humorous and poetic art. The impressive body of his paintings and graphic works is closely linked to the sculptures and installations that remain Aldo Mozzini’s preferred media.

Text in English, German and Italian.

In this lavishly produced volume, authors Virginia and Lee McAlester explore outstanding landmark houses that exemplify America’s major architectural and interior design styles from Colonial times to the mid-20th century. These 25 houses are illustrated with more than 350 specially commissioned full-colour photographs of interior and exterior views, 125 black-and-white line drawings and floor plans, historical paintings, and vintage photographs.

The text not only discusses the houses architectural innovations and design elements but also profiles the architects and their clients. The featured houses were built by many of the country’s leading architects – from Alexander Jackson Davis, Richard Morris Hunt, Henry Hobson Richardson, and McKim, Mead and White to Frank Lloyd Wright, the Greene brothers, and Walter Gropius – and owned by some of its most celebrated citizens, including Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Jay Gould, the Guggenheim’s, the Phippses’, and the Vanderbilt’s. As a result, the book is as much a cultural history as it is an architectural study. The authors also include an informative discussion of each style as it can be seen in vernacular versions around the country.

Located all over the United States, most of the featured houses are open to the public, and the book provides their addresses and other helpful information for visitors. Great American Houses and Their Architectural Styles will be irresistible to all house lovers, architects, and designers, and will give readers a deeper understanding and appreciation of our rich architectural heritage

“This beautifully produced book will be inspiring to botanical artists and all those who are captivated by the orchid.” — Leisure Painter

“Through these paintings, stories of high stakes orchid breeding and exhibiting are explored, with a cast of characters who helped shape the horticultural world we know today, alongside the dedicated artists who still support their endeavours.” — Lovely Books

Orchids have long held a place of esteem and fascination in the horticultural world. In the 19th century, orchid collecting reached new fanatical heights, with explorers dispatched to every corner of the globe in search of new varieties that could be auctioned at extravagant prices, and orchids are still one of the most popular flowers to breed and buy to this day. These beautiful, diverse flowers are one of the two largest families of flowering plants, with over 30,000 species and over 181,500 hybrids and cultivars.

The RHS Orchid Committee have commissioned watercolours of over 7,000 award-winning hybrids that demonstrate particular value in their fabulous array of colours, patterns, sizes and shapes. Through these paintings, stories of high stakes orchid breeding and exhibiting are explored, with a cast of characters who helped shape the horticultural world we know today, alongside the dedicated artists who still support their endeavours.

Larry Poons (b. 1937) shot to fame while still in his twenties, on the strength of his “dot paintings,” in which dots or ellipses were meticulously arranged on brightly coloured fields, creating a rhythmic, pulsating effect. But within a few years, Poons first loosened the hard-edged precision of the dot paintings and then abandoned them entirely for an organic mode of abstraction based on vertical drips of flung paint. This marked the beginning of an uncompromising five-decade evolution that has finally led the artist back to a more intimate mode of painting with brushes — and his own hands. At every stage, Poons’s career has compelled the attention of critics and, in particular, other artists.

This handsome volume, the first full-length biocritical monograph on Poons, reproduces more than 140 of his most important works in full colour, some as spectacular gatefolds. The incisive text — a collaboration between four leading critics and historians — traces the development of the artist’s extraordinary career. Larry Poons is a necessary addition to the library of anyone with an interest in American art.

More than other painters, the Impressionists wanted to shake off the dust of the studio, and swarmed the noisy streets of Paris, filling the cafés and living in garrets and humble little dwellings on the hill of Montmartre, which still seemed like the countryside at the time, its slopes covered with vineyards and vegetable gardens. Nor did they limit themselves to the city, planting their easels in the clearings of the forest of Fontainebleau, on the coast of Normandy, in the rustic villages in the Oise Valley and in Bougival and Argenteuil on the banks of the Seine. Like their Naturalist friends Zola and Maupassant, they liked to mix with the locals so they could experience the places directly, painting everywhere, even on a boat, like the one where Monet had his floating studio.

Our Vasily Kandinsky (Wassily) Composition 8 QuickNotes notecard box holds 20 full colour cards and 20 classic white envelopes. 4 notecard styles of four different paintings including Composition 8 which coordinates with our Composition 8 Small Bullet Journal.

Our QuickNotes boxed notecards are full colour, collectable greeting/notecards that are blank inside and can be used to convey personal greetings, thank-yous and invitations.

• 20 127 x 101mm. notecards and envelopes
• 5 cards each of 4 images
• Full color fine art reproductions
• Packaged in a keepsake box with magnetic lid
• Measures 139 x 127 x 38mm.

We choose the best images from well-known classic and contemporary fine artists, plus talented emerging illustrators and designers from around the globe. Vasily Kandinsky is recognised worldwide for his use of dynamic lines and colour to express ideas in a nonobjective, abstract style. His paintings have been collected by every major museum nationally and around the world.

The tale of the shepherd girl Radha and the Hindu god Krishna is probably the most famous love story in India. Written by Jayadeva at the end of the twelfth century, the Gitagovinda narrates the highs and lows of Radha and Krishna’s relationship. As a vivid metaphor for the human yearning for god, the work is today closely associated in India with the religiosity of Krishna. In the eighteenth century, in the former princely residence of Guler, the artist family of Nainsuhk and Manaku created the outstanding picture series of the second Guler Gitagovinda of 1775/80, which recounts the love story with an unparalleled elegance. This book retells the story using selected pieces from this series (printed in original size) and whisks the reader off into the atmospheric world of Indian miniature painting and poetry. This book accompanies an exhibition at Museum Rietberg, Zurich, 24 October 2019 – 16 February 2020.

Text in English and German.

Painting and graphic prints are the preferred mediums of the Norwegian artist Hanne Borchgrevink (b.1951), who over the course of time has focused her attention on the house as the leitmotif of her work. She reduces it to its elemental forms, which forever encounter new constellations. At the intersection of figuration and abstraction, of the verbal and non-verbal, the artist explores in her reduced language of forms colour, surface and perception in a methodical and analytical way. Borchgrevink has long occupied a prominent position in the contemporary art of Norway, for in the repetition of her painterly and motivic vocabulary she always manages to find ever new and surprising as well as provocative answers.

Text in English and Norwegian.

The Norwegian painter Bjørn Ransve (b. 1944) is one of the best-known contemporary Scandinavian artists. Very few painters indeed express themselves so brilliantly in two dimensions, thematically, technically and formally. The third volume of the catalogue raisonné is devoted to Ransve ‘s graphic oeuvre: in over 1,300 illustrations it documents prints and multiples, created from the 1960s to 2013. This book is not only an indispensable standard reference for all scholars, art dealers and collectors, it also provides insights in the complex interrelations between prints, paintings and drawings in Ransve ‘s artistic work. The accompanying text by Lars Eisenlöffel investigates the changing and recurrent groups of motifs and places the works in their art historical context.

Since each page of the book has been designed individually in close collaboration between Ransve and the graphic artist and book designer Silke Nalbach, Bjørn Ransve ‘s development as an artist can be traced in a way that is particularly illuminating.

Text in Norwegian.

The Norwegian painter Bjørn Ransve (b. 1944) is one of the best-known contemporary Scandinavian artists. Very few painters indeed express themselves so brilliantly in two dimensions, thematically, technically and formally.

The third volume of the catalogue raisonné is devoted to Ransve’s graphic oeuvre: in over 1,300 illustrations it documents prints and multiples, created from the 1960s to 2013. This book is not only an indispensable standard reference for all scholars, art dealers and collectors, it also provides insights in the complex interrelations between prints, paintings and drawings in Ransve’s artistic work. The accompanying text by Lars Eisenlöffel investigates the changing and recurrent groups of motifs and places the works in their art historical context. Since each page of the book has been designed individually in close collaboration between Ransve and the graphic artist and book designer Silke Nalbach, Bjørn Ransve’s development as an artist can be traced in a way that is particularly illuminating.

Francis Bacon is considered one of the most important painters of the twentieth century. A major exhibition of his paintings at the Royal Academy of Arts, planned for 2020 but postponed because of the pandemic, explores the role of animals in his work – not least the human animal.

Having often painted dogs and horses, in 1969 Bacon first depicted bullfights. In this powerful series of works, the interaction between man and beast is dangerous and cruel, but also disturbingly intimate. Both are contorted in their anguished struggle, and the erotic lurks not far away: ‘Bullfighting is like boxing,’ Bacon once said. ‘A marvellous aperitif to sex.’ Twenty-two years later, a lone bull was to be the subject of his final painting.

In this fascinating publication – a significant addition to the literature on Bacon – expert authors discuss Bacon’s approach to animals and identify his varied sources of inspiration, which included wildlife photography and the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge. They contend that, by considering animals in states of vulnerability, anger and unease, Bacon was able to lay bare the role of instinctual behaviour in the human condition.

Images below, left to right:
Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1950. Oil and cotton wool on canvas, 140 x 108.5 cm. Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Photo Hugo Maertens
Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Study for Portrait (with Two Owls), 1963. Oil on canvas, 198.1 x 144.8 cm. Private collection. Photo Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Man with Dog, 1953. Oil on canvas, 152 x 117 cm. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gift of Seymour H. Knox Jr, 1955, inv. K1955:3. Photo Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
All images © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2020.

Although Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610) painted on an almost miniature scale and died very young from, it was said, the overwork that resulted from the intensity of his methods, his paintings remain some of the most strangely poetical in the history of Western art. They were also extremely influential: Elsheimer’s often recondite subject matter, his astonishing ability to render night scenes, his uniquely lyrical use of landscape deeply affected generations of artists; one of the first to fall under his spell was Rubens. Most of what we know about Elsheimer’s life and sadly curtailed career comes from the biographies reprinted in this volume, which also includes personal reminiscences by friends and other painters. Unavailable for many years, these writings bring Elsheimer’s extraordinary art to life. A new introduction by Claire Pace sets the paintings and these writings into the context of their times.

Luca Giordano (Naples, 1634–1705) was one of Italy’s most celebrated Baroque painters when he travelled to Florence, where his art was already appreciated and collected. He received many commissions, but certainly the most prestigious was that for the decoration of the vault of the new wing of Palazzo Medici Riccardi, the ancient house of Lorenzo the Magnificent which was then owned by the Marquis Francesco Riccardi. The Riccardi family was strictly connected to the Medicis and the decorative program of the great hall, known as Gallery of Mirrors, was centred upon the Apotheosis of the Medicis and several mythological scenes which illustrate the progress of humanity. The exhibition and its catalogue document this masterpiece through the ten painted sketches by Giordano (exhibited under the very frescoes) and circa 30 other paintings from his Florentine period (1682–1685) by the aptly named Luca “fa presto” (fare presto = to be fast).

In her paintings, the Swiss artist Regula Syz (b. 1946) opens up a space for contradiction. They depict blossoming life, but also foreboding and destruction. To this end, the artist works with elementary manifestations of the life cycle, which she links to humankind’s internal and external struggles. Regula Syz’s oeuvre, which spans more than fifty years, is characterised by a turning point in 1999: a studio residency in Genoa marked her transition from precise watercolour techniques to large-format acrylic paintings; beauty and harmony were followed by expressiveness and movement. Red Raven – Black Poppy focuses on this second phase of her work, though it also features earlier works and excerpts from her sketchbooks, allowing for a comprehensive exploration of Syz’s artistic practice.

Text in English and German.

The Addison Gallery of American Art, located at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, is internationally recognised for its outstanding collection of paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, and photography. When its founder, Thomas Cochran, opened the Addison to the public in 1931, it was one of the few museums in this country devoted solely to American art. Cochran initially donated four hundred significant works of art, commissioned a building, and provided generous endowments. Today the holdings total over 12,000 objects that span the history of American art from the seventeenth century to the present.

Among the some 240 notable examples from the collection included in this tiny tour are paintings from the eighteenth century by Gilbert Stuart and John Singleton Copley; from the nineteenth century by Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and F. Childe Hassam; and from the early twentieth century by John Sloan, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Andrew Wyeth; and contemporary works by Frank Stella, Sol Lewitt, and Brice Marden. Also featured here are images from such masters of photography as Walker Evans, Eadward Muybridge, Berenice Abbott, and Robert Frank. In addition, there are outstanding works of sculpture from Paul Manship and Elie Nadelman to Alexander Calder and Martin Puryear.