What ties western art together? This extended essay attempts to distill some of the basic ideas with which artists and observers of their art have grappled, ideas worthy of ongoing consideration and debate. The fostering of visual creativity as it has morphed from ancient Greece to the present day, the political and economic forces underpinning the commissioning and displacement of art, and the ways in which contemporary art relates to past periods of art history (and in particular, the Renaissance), are among the topics broached. Architecture, drawings, prints, films, painting, sculpture, and decorative arts from Europe and the US are considered and examined, often including nonstandard examples, occasionally including ones from the immediate surroundings of the author (who is based in New England). Although this book is primarily geared to those who would like a brief introduction to some basic aspects of a visual tradition spanning thousands of years, students of aesthetics might also discover useful benchmarks in this concise overview. The author places the emphasis on how art has been used and loved (or sometimes despised or ignored) more than on which works should be most famous.

In the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War, only the wealthiest Americans could afford to enjoy illustrated books and prints. But, by the end of the next century, it was commonplace for publishers to load their books with reproductions of fine art and beautiful new commissions from amateur and professional artists.

Georgia Brady Barnhill, an expert on the visual culture of this period, explains the costs and risks that publishers faced as they brought about the transition from a sparse visual culture to a rich one. Establishing new practices and investing in new technologies to enhance works of fiction and poetry, bookmakers worked closely with skilled draftsmen, engravers, and printers to reach an increasingly literate and discriminating American middle class. Barnhill argues that while scholars have largely overlooked the efforts of early American illustrators, the works of art that they produced impacted readers' understandings of the texts they encountered, and greatly enriched the nation's cultural life.

The Liefrinck family was a Netherlandish dynasty of printmakers that consisted of three generations and was active for over a century. From c. 1500 until the turn of the seventeenth century various family members were involved in printmaking and publishing, producing a highly diverse output. This fully illustrated, two-volume catalogue brings together almost 400 woodcuts, etchings and engravings, including dozens of undescribed prints, states and editions. Edited by Huigen Leeflang.

This book is the first illustrated study of the life and work of J. Alphege Brewer (1881-1946), the early 20th-century British artist who made his fame producing large, color etchings of European cathedrals and other historical buildings damaged or threatened during WWI. In both the United States and Great Britain, these etchings and reproductions were proudly hung on parlor walls in solidarity with the Allied cause and as a remembrance of the devastating cultural losses inflicted by the onslaught of war. Brewer's "à la poupée" technique, carried out in his studio workshop in Acton with the assistance of family members, required the plate to be painted entirely anew for each of the authorized 300-500 impressions. With the same "dab hand" at the end of his life, Brewer produced exquisite woodcuts of lakes, mountains, and other pastoral views. Chapters on Brewer's life story, techniques, and the artistic context for his war etchings are included, as well as a catalog of his known etchings. For more information and links to outlets where the book may be ordered, visit www.jalphegebrewer.info/etched-in-memory.

Gustave Doré and the Modern Biblical Imagination explores the role of biblical imagery in modernity through the lens of Gustave Doré (1832-83), whose work is among the most reproduced and adapted scriptural imagery in the history of Judeo-Christianity. First published in France in late 1865, Doré's Bible illustrations received widespread critical acclaim among both religious and lay audiences, and the next several decades saw unprecedented dissemination of the images on an international scale. In 1868, the Doré Gallery opened in London, featuring monumental religious paintings that drew 2.5 million visitors over the course of a quarter-century; when the gallery's holdings travelled to the United States in 1892, exhibitions at venues like the Art Institute of Chicago drew record crowds. The United States saw the most creative appropriations of Doré's images among a plethora of media, from prayer cards and magic lantern slides to massive stained-glass windows and the spectacular epic films of Cecile B. DeMille.

This book repositions biblical imagery at the center of modernity, an era that has often been defined through a process of secularization, and argues that Doré's biblical imagery negotiated the challenges of visualizing the Bible for modern audiences in both sacred and secular contexts. A set of texts whose veracity and authority were under unprecedented scrutiny in this period, the Bible was at the center of a range of historical, theological, and cultural debates. Gustave Doré is at the nexus of these narratives, as his work established the most pervasive visual language for biblical imagery in the past two and a half centuries, and constitutes the means by which the Bible has persistently been translated visually.

Film, like the printed imagery inaugurated during the Renaissance, spread ideas – not least the idea of the power of visual art – across not only geographical and political divides but also strata of class and gender. Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History examines the early flourishing of film, from the 1920s to the mid-1960s, as partly reprising the introduction of mass media in the Renaissance, allowing for innovation that reflected an art free of the control of a patron though required to attract a broad public. Rivalry between word and image, between the demands of narrative and those of visual composition, spurred new ways of addressing the compelling nature of the visual. The twentieth century also saw the development of the discipline of art history; transfusions between cinematic practice and art historical postulates are part of the story told here.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec remains one of the most popular French painters of the late 19th century, largely because his art has transmitted such a compelling image of fin-de-siècle Paris, particularly its entertainment district of Montmartre. Toulouse-Lautrec’s depictions of performers, clientele, or the anonymous figures who inhabited that nocturnal world permanently linked his name with the district’s dance halls, bars, cabarets, cafés-concerts, and bordellos. The catalog explores the work of Toulouse-Lautrec along with that of his contemporaries and the ways in which they depicted the decadent life of Montmartre in the 1890s. The more than 250 works of art included present a lively picture of the ambivalent glamour and the licit and illicit pleasures of Montmartre through use of many media, including paintings, drawings, posters, prints, and sculptures.

Since the 1940s, printmaker Warrington Colescott has trained his brilliant artistic eye on the fashions and foibles of human behavior. A satirist in the tradition of William Hogarth, Francisco Goya, Honoré Daumier, and George Grosz, Colescott utilizes his sharp wit and vivid imagination to interpret contemporary and historical events, from the personal to the public, the local to the international. He is especially noted for his exceptional command of complex printmaking techniques and for his innovative approach to intaglio printing.

The Prints of Warrington Colescott: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1948-2008 is the first fully illustrated catalogue to document Colescott's extensive and varied graphic career. Author and curator Mary Weaver Chapin has worked closely with Colescott, interviewed him at length, and had unique access to his private papers and archives. She documents his personal and artistic life in a detailed biographic sketch, and her extensive essay "Research Printmaker and Mad-Dog Attack Artist" examines the evolution of his printmaking career, focusing on his technique, iconography, and his place in American printmaking. The catalogue documents and depicts all 359 of Colescott's editioned prints, providing title, date, media, dimensions, and selected exhibition history and collections for each print, along with comments and anecdotes by Chapin and Colescott.

Hardcover, 352 pages

This exhibition and its accompany catalogue offer the first comprehensive examination of the American Grand Tour to Venice in the late nineteenth century, considering the impact of Murano’s glass furnaces and their new creative boom as a vibrant facet of the city’s allure for American artists and collectors.

Though the Venetian island of Murano has been a leading center of glass-making since the middle ages, today’s thriving industry stems from a burst in production between 1860 and 1915. In this era, Murano glassmakers began specializing in delicate and complex hand-blown vessels, dazzling the world with brilliant colors and virtuoso sculptural flourishes. This glass revival coincided with a surge in Venice’s popularity as a destination for tourists, leading to frequent depictions of Italian glassmakers and glass objects by artists from abroad. American painters, printmakers, and their patrons visited the glass furnaces, and many collected ornate goblets and vases decorated with flowers, dragons, and sea creatures. Venetian glass vessels, and also glass mosaics, quickly became more than souvenirs—these were esteemed as museum-quality works of fine art.

Moreover, the inventions of Murano’s master glassmakers established Venice as a center for artistic experimentation. Sojourns in Venice were turning points for John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and scores of artists who followed in their footsteps, often referencing the glass industry in their works. This book examines fine Venetian glass in conversation with paintings, watercolors, and prints by the many talented American artists who found inspiration in Venice. This juxtaposition reveals the impact of Italian glass on American art, literature, design theory, and science education, as well as ideas at the time about gender, labor, and class relations.

In addition to works by Sargent and Whistler, the essays in this volume consider paintings and prints by Frank Duveneck, Robert Frederick Blum, Thomas Moran, Maurice Prendergast, Maxfield Parrish, James McBey, Ellen Day Hale, and others. These artists are studied alongside Venetian glass mosaic portraits and glass cups, vases, and urns by the leading glassmakers of Murano, including members of the legendary Seguso, Barovier, and Moretti families. This peer-reviewed catalogue will thus serve as a new resource on this era and a bridge between the fine and decorative arts.

This richly illustrated publication reproduces and describes effectively every early modern German colour print held at the British Museum. It is one of the world’s most significant collections of these rare milestones of cultural heritage and technology. New photography reveals 150 impressions in jaw-dropping detail, most life-size. Some have never been seen in public or reproduced. It is the first major study of the first wave of German colour printing. It spans medieval printing in the late 1400s through the Renaissance and Reformation of the 1500s.

Early Colour Printing features masterpieces by leading figures like Erhard Ratdolt, Lucas Cranach, Hans Baldung Grien, and Hans Burgkmair, as well as unfairly overlooked entrepreneurs and innovators like Erasmus Loy (and his daughter Anna). Their breakthroughs reproduced artworks and simplified astronomical calculations. They created trends in interior design and signalled ‘red-letter days’. They helped musicians sight-read and they colour-coded metals for goldsmiths. These diverse new functions and markets might seem unrelated. But they are connected, and they cannot be understood in isolation. From artworks to missals, icons to wallpapers, this book breaks new ground by revealing the fascinating underlying technologies that enabled the production of these colour-printed objects.

The many inventions of colour printing in the German-speaking lands began with medieval novel solutions. They were devised long before colour printing inks could be formulated. Then, colour printing techniques transformed how printed material could be used during the technological and cultural revolutions of the sixteenth century. Later designers and artists around Europe celebrated these techniques’ heritage for centuries, from the ‘Dürer Renaissance’ until chromolithography revolutionised the print market in the nineteenth century. Early Colour Printing captures this story in rich detail. It sets the stage for second wave of German colour woodcut, which was triggered by the Expressionist revival at the turn of the twentieth century. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, this collection guide will be a standard reference on German graphic art, early modern visual culture, and the history of printing itself.

Early Colour Printing: German Renaissance Woodcuts at the British Museum offers significant new research, including previously unidentified examples of early modern colour-printing. Some are believed to be unique in the world; others were made decades before the landmark invention of colourful chiaroscuro woodcut in Italy in 1516. By modelling a printer- and technology-based approach to the history of printing, it contributes to scholarship by pinpointing attributions to printers—not just to artists or designers. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for a new understanding of the history of print, one that encompasses all forms of printed material. This publication derives from an exhibition at the British Museum curated by Elizabeth Savage.