Vincent Van Gogh was a revolutionary artist who changed the nature of draughtsmanship so thoroughly, brightened the palette for serious painting and infused his art with so much personal character, it was hard for his contemporaries to see the merits of his work. When he died at the age of 37 in 1890 he was not completely unrecognised, but it wasn't until the end of 1888 when his younger brother Theo entered three of his paintings in an Avant-Garde exhibition that a few major artists and writers began to give Van Gogh's work a serious look. In all the major cities he lived - The Hague, Amsterdam, Brussels, Antwerp, London and Paris - Van Gogh applied his keen eye and devilish intellect to all the art he could find. He frequented museums and declared 'It is good to love as much as one can' as he embraced life, especially art and literature, with passion. He studied Gustave Doré's work intensely, and tenderly called Millet 'Father Millet', and was devoted to the Old Masters and their influence on his work would always be profound. The works selected for this magnificent volume provide an opportunity to see the artists who were the predominant painters of the era, some famous some still not, and why they gave the world Van Gogh inhabited so much pleasure. There are several works by Jean-Francois Raffaëlli who shared Van Gogh's sensibility for the subject of the downtrodden and influenced for example Van Gogh's portrait 'Woman Rocking a Cradle', an image so important to him that he made five versions of it, focussing our attention on the working-class woman's rough hands just as Raffaëlli did. A painting by Jozef Israëls of a peasant family at a dinner table inspired Van Gogh's most famous early work 'The Potato Eaters'. Just as Rembrandt painted himself almost a hundred times, Van Gogh made more than 30 self portraits over a much shorter span of time. We watch Van Gogh experimenting with loose brushwork and bright colours as used by Manet, studying the pointillist dots used by Seurat and appreciating the work of Monet, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec, all positioned here side by side with images and for detailed comparison in the text by this bestselling author. With chapters arranged from Religion, Romanticism, The Barbizon School, English Art and The Graphic, Japanese Prints, The Female Sitter, Still Life, Impressionism, The Sea and more. An afterword on his legacy by Ann Dumas. Glossy white pages, hundreds of full page colour images. Tiny remainder mark. A magnificent tome of 409pp, 22.33 x 26cm.
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The Starry Night, Vincent's Bedroom with the yellow coverlet, 14 Sunflowers in a Vase, The Church at Auvers-sur-Oise, Garden with Flowers in that unmistakeable pointillism style with greenish sky and yellowed grasses and flowers are the five designs. There are four of each totalling 20 blank quality notecards for all occasions and 20 white envelopes. Colourful box.

One of Jane Austen's most charming youthful 'novels' in miniature, presented in a deluxe illustrated edition with Leon Steinmetz's gorgeous black and dark red illustrations. Most people think Jane Austen wrote only six novels, though very short ones, while still a young girl. She was only 12 or 13 when she wrote The Beautifull Cassandra, an irreverent and humorous little masterpiece. Weighing in at 465 occasionally misspelled words, it is a complete and perfect novel-in-miniature, made up of a dedication to her older sister Cassandra and 12 chapters, each consisting of a sentence or two. Narrating the slightly criminal adventures of the 16 year old title character, the novel gives us Austen's most irrepressible heroine, who, after stealing a hat, leaves her mother's shop to flounce around London, eating ice cream (without paying), taking coach rides (without paying), and encountering handsome young ladies and gentlemen (without speaking) - all to return home hours later with whispered joy: 'This is a day well spent.' Austen fans will love the strong-willed Cassandra who can eat six ice creams and then refuse to pay for them! Special import from Princeton University Press, 72 page landscape softback, illus.
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Great Britain and Ireland are particularly well endowed with cathedrals and abbeys and it is estimated that there were almost 1,000 built during the Middle Ages. When Cromwell closed the majority of them during the dissolution of the monasteries, many were left in ruins, plundered or survived because their local communities adopted them as parish churches. The outstanding example is St Albans which begins this beautifully illustrated collection. We go to Bath Abbey, Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Canterbury, Chelmsford, Chester, Chichester, Coventry, St Davids, Durham, Ely, Exeter, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Glastonbury, Gloucester, Hereford, Leicester, Lincoln, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Norwich, Oxford, St Patrick's Dublin, St Paul's, Peterborough, Rochester, Salisbury, Southwark, Southwell Minster, Tewkesbury Abbey, Truro, Wells, Westminster Abbey, Winchester, Worcester to York Minster with a bolt of lightning and walls of glass and it rebellious Yorkshireman. Discover tales of an English pope, a martyred archbishop, secrets and troublesome spies, stained glass wonders and castle-cathedrals, famous memorials and spectacular architectural feats in a rich heritage and fascinating collection. 144 well illustrated pages.

Ambitious engineering, brilliant colour from new forms of stained glass, murals and sculpture, the architects whose work is included here range from Basil Spence and Edward Maufe, designers of major cathedrals, to the radical Gillespie, Kidd and Coia whose brutalist seminary lies abandoned near Dumbarton. This superbly well produced Batsford publication has one or more colour photographs on every page together with architect, location, year completed, denomination and whether grade 1, 2 or A listed. Each church or chapel has been built in the UK since 1914, in a period in which concrete and steel gave a new freedom to construction while new ideas about congregations changed assumptions about traditional layouts, bringing celebrants and people closer together. The book provides biographies of major designers, articles on glass, fittings, and on the synagogues, mosques and temples that play an intrinsic part in worship in Britain today. Leading architectural historians give a fine brief description for each such as the 'massive brick piers supporting the ring beam, light spilling down a flared concrete funnel from a lantern into a regular space...as a result of divine laws of geometry, mechanics and proportion, timeless laws' about Abbey Church of Our Lady Help of Christians in Worth, Sussex. Clifton Cathedral in Bristol is a hexagonal space, superbly lit by roof lights and rising to the three-part thrusting spire, presumably symbolic of the Trinity. It was built in 1973 to a remarkably low budget of £600,000. Organised by date 1914-29, 1930-45, 1946-59, 1960-69 and 1970 and after and with special chapters on stained glass, art and artefacts. With useful glossary, 208pp, 19.6 x 25.5cm, packed with colour photos.

SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR it is an enthralling journey around the Britain we have created since 1980. Wimpey homes, Millennium monuments, riverside flats, wind farms, spectacular skyscrapers, city centre apartments, out-of-town malls. Here are the horrors and delights, triumphs and failures from space age tower blocks to suburban business parks, and from postmodernist exuberance to Passivhaus eco-efficiency. Iconicon is at once a revelatory architectural grand tour, and an endlessly witty and engaging piece of social history. Encyclopaedic, funny and often cutting, Grindrod has written a love letter to contemporary buildings in his punchy polemic about our accidental urban landscape. Thrown together entirely for financial or political gain without any thought for aesthetic or social value, here are the visions of a few top architects, and a larger generation of young architects who wish to improve life for whole communities, not just the rich and powerful. It really makes us look at those big shiny funny shaped public buildings with a new eye and Grindrod's chirpy prose style is full of pop references as he chronicles the accelerating decline of the UK since 1980, the sprawl and the disaster of the Grenfell fire. The book is perfectly aimed at those in power. 486 big chunky pages, some illus. Signed by the Author and stickered.

A magnificent Thames & Hudson heavyweight quality 496 page softback packed with 273 colour illustrations, a personal selection of paintings admired from public collections during the course of Christopher Lloyd's career in art, here are highlights and unexpected treasures. If you find yourself in Hull, Cork or Dundee, what paintings should you go and look at? Many masterpieces are waiting for you, sometimes neglected, in our galleries and museums and here the distinguished broadcaster and critic Lloyd identifies over 265 masterpieces from the National Gallery to The Burrell Collection in Glasgow around England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Admire The Dice Players from 1650 at Preston Hall Museum Stockton-on-Tees, children using pebbles to play Knucklebones on the beach in Philip Wilson Steer's canvas found in Ipswich, masterpieces by Sir Alfred Munnings depicting his wife and horse and himself from 1935 in Dedham, Vuillard, Augustus John, Alma-Tadema, Titian all found at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the strikingly graphic The Butcher's Shop of 1583 by Carracci and a Virgin and Child and Three Angels from 1475, a Lady with Book and a Pissarro landscape, Holman Hunt all found at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Mother and Child by the Sea is a particularly atmospheric, dark and brooding image of a calm and peaceful night with the moon half hidden by clouds over the sea, the child pointing expectantly suggesting his father is onboard the sailing ship in the near distance. This is on page 267 and immediately before the colourful Jockeys Before the Race by Degas, both of which together with Gainsborough and the Travelling Companions by Egg, the Music Lesson and The Rest on the Flight to Egypt by Orazio Gentileschi all to be seen at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Page after page of well and lesser known masterpieces, beautifully curated with an unobtrusively erudite detailed text, a model of art-historical writing and a sustained pleasure to read. 496pp, 273 colour illus. 21 x 16cm, softback.