What is more inviting that a sunny garden, full of wonderful colours and the scent of flowers and who captured this better than the Impressionists with their canvasses full of colour and light? This warm Konemann publication explores the rich history and striking evolution of Impressionist garden paintings. By the 1860s, gardens were highly popular in France; the introduction and cross-breeding of new plant and flower species and the opening to the public of the former royal parks had stimulated a great horticultural movement. With their delight in colour, plein-air effects and modern-life themes, the Impressionists and their followers naturally turned to gardens for artistic inspiration. This book follows the spread of the Impressionist garden in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and illustrates not only masterpieces of Impressionism by Monet, Manet, Rousseau, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, Morisot, Hanna Pauli, Caillebotte, Cezanne and others, but also works by such forebears as Delacroix, Corot, Courbet and later figures like Van Gogh, Gauguin, Klimt and Sargent and Max Liebermann and Seurat. Plus dappled and inviting tea parties by Pompeo Mariani, pointillism in the Orchard by Theo van Rysselberghe, the lady in red leaning on a lamppost by Jean-Louis Forain. Spectacular illustrations and accessible, engaging text, for the art lover or gardening enthusiast. 28.96 x 26.92cm. Hundreds of colour illustrations, many double page. 260 heavyweight with colour pages, amazing value for money for a glorious art book.
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Lovers of Spanish art will know all about this famous museum. If you cannot travel to Madrid, this is the very next best thing. The Museo del Prado not only houses the largest collection of Spanish painting spanning the 15th to the 19th century, but also represents an entire history of the classical art of Western Europe and treasures from the royal collections, featuring a wide variety of Masters, regions, styles and genres with its 8,000 paintings, 5,000 drawings, 2,000 prints, 700 sculptures and 2,000 other works of art. The Monastery of El Escorial under Philip II collected 1,150 mostly religious paintings and the El Pardo 'Hunting Lodge' 117 paintings, mainly portraits. Blonde plaited hair, Doña Margarita of Austria in long black silk hooded robe is pictured in oil on canvas, 1665, and the Emperor Charles V with a dog on the following page, and portraits by Goya, Velázquez and Anguissola (1530-1626). Spanish painting from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the Golden Age, Neo-Classicism to Modernity, Northern European painting and Italian painting are selected and expertly covered in this exquisitely produced gallery. 280pp in large softback, colour plates on every page plus photos and introduction. 8¼" x 9½".

The capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900 Vienna consisted of some 15 nations and drew in many artists and intellectuals in a creative melting pot. In rapid succession Historicism, Art Nouveau and Expressionism developed as the dominant art styles and these emerged from typical Viennese themes. One of the first images in this sumptuous volume is of Gustav Klimt's Auditorium of the Opera House and Theatre followed by colour photographs of modern Viennese architecture, sepia postcards before this magnificent gallery of portraits by artists like Hans Makart of a beautiful female pianist and singer, a Caught Ball, idyllic family scenes with children, Leopold Carl Müller's Camel Market in Cairo, the sensuous Woman in Yellow by Max Kurzweil and his romantic A Walk in the Garden, the stunning gold iconography of Klimt, his Yearning for Happiness, poster art, Garden with Sunflowers, A Church in Cassone, his graphic Sitting Male nude and Two Girlfriends, self-portraits and nudes by Egon Schiele, nude male studies by Koloman Moser and much more architectural legacies photographed in colour, plus interiors and design, greetings cards, fashion and more. The turn of the 20th century was a fascinating period in Vienna, as Austria-Hungary's capital on the Danube became a leading centre of modernism, defined by styles of Art Nouveau, historicism and Expressionism, all with a touch of typical Viennese morbidity. Artists like Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann dreamed of forging a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total artistic expression, in which not just design, architecture and crafts were combined, but also art and life itself. In this sumptuously illustrated album, art historian Janina Nentwig explores such major movements in Vienna as the Vienna Secession, themes of sex and Eros and death in painting, the construction of the Ring Road, ornamentation and architecture, and objects of everyday beauty from the Wiener Werkstätte. Oozing with hundreds of colour photos. 320 pages, softback, 21 x 24cm.
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Exquisitely curated and designed with hundreds of colour and other illustrations and artworks, we are invited to see Dr Sloane's curiosities and the beginnings of the British Museum, described by Virginia Woolf as 'One solid immense mound, very pale, very sleek in the rain', once a jumbled store in large damp chambers from which knowledge was organised to create an understanding of the world and of humanity's place within it. On 15th January 1759, following the passing of an Act of Parliament six years previously, a new museum opened its doors in a house in Bloomsbury. It held and displayed the collections of three men and their families - the physician and entrepreneur Sir Hans Sloane, who donated 71,000 books, dried plants, minerals and antiquities to the nation; the manuscript collection of the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton, including the Lindisfarne Gospels and two copies of Magna Carta; and the 8,000 volume library of the politician and bibliophile Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford. James Hamilton recounts the remarkable 250 year history of the British Museum, a world renowned public institution whose collections of more than eight million objects and artifacts are explored in the cultural context in which the Museum came into being, its subsequent expansion and diversification, controversies and the legacies and influence nationally and globally. Colour illus. 208pp, pagemarker.

Now rare 2014 first edition, a 96 glossy paged colour tribute to artist Tessa Newcomb. The book explores her enchantment with Paris in words and paint portraying the city's flâneurs, chic ladies walking their no less elegantly coiffured dogs, expectant lovers, children playing on carousels in the Tuileries, dainty eaters of patisseries, stall holders selling mushrooms, haute cuisine of delicious artistry and simple little restaurants with Lapin à La Cocotte on the menu, mobile phone users outside cafés, butchers cleaning up and chess players sequestered under trees in the Luxembourg Gardens. These vignettes are layered with the flavour of Tessa's own eclectic reading of writers inspired by Paris including Verlaine, Colette, Jean Rhys and François Sagan. Approximately 100 oils and watercolour drawings are reproduced in this wonderfully intimate visual record of her wanderings in both historic and hidden parts of Paris. Colour.

Art Nouveau was a phenomenon with many faces. Between 1890 and 1910, artists developed a variety of styles from the plant-like forms of the Belgian-French Art Nouveau to the ornamentation of the Viennese Secession. For a fruitful period between the 1880s and WWI, European and North American culture deferred to nature. With a symphony of flowing lines and organic shapes, Art Nouveau influenced architecture, design, painting, graphic work, applied arts and illustration. Turning to vine tendrils, flowering buds, and bird feathers as ornamental reference, artists pursued not only a linear freedom but also liberation from the weight of artistic tradition and expectation. Highlights include beautiful Tiffany and Gallé vases, the Paris Métro, train stations, department stores, door handles, furniture, dining rooms, cartoons, posters, chairs, porcelainware, Macintosh's Art-Lovers House design, the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Austrian glassware and more. Ther are exquisite multi-coloured glass domes, leaded glass windows like Grasset's Le Printemps, a double page colour spread of Maurice Denis' Palting Badminton with your ladies in white flowing dresses in woodlands to stylised functional and beautiful interiors and Aubrey Beardsley's Arthurian lithographs. This edition considers the style's wider artistic, economic, and political circumstances, as well as its particular flavour in such hubs as Vienna, Glasgow, Munich, Weimar, Brussels, Nancy, Barcelona, Darmstadt, Helsinki and Chicago. Outstanding proponents such as Victor Horta, Antoni Gaudí, Alphonse Mucha, Gustav Klimt, Maximilian Liebenwein, Walter Crane and Charles Rennie Mackintosh are featured in connection with the cities of their greatest activity plus unusual works by the Belgian symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff. Oozing with hundreds of colour photos. 264 pages, softback. 21 x 24cm.
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With his graphic style, figural distortion, and defiance of conventional standards of beauty, Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was a pioneer of Austrian Expressionism. Mentored by Gustav Klimt, Schiele dabbled in a glittering Art Nouveau style before developing his own confrontational aesthetic of sharp lines, lurid shades, and mannered, elongated figures, favouring erotic or unsettling poses and thrust their genitalia into the foreground. His models are at times skeletal and sickly, at other times strong and sensual. In 1912, the artist was briefly imprisoned for obscenity. Of special interest to us are the striking 'Crucifixion with Darkened Sun', 'Four Trees', Sunflower II, Agony, The Embrace (Lovers II), Double Self-Portrait and Triest Harbour with its lapiz lazuli colours and watery perfection. Concise biography, over 100 illus in colour. 288 pages, 18cm square.

Man Ray (1890-1976) was a polymath modernist working in painting, sculpture, film, printmaking, and poetry but it was his work in photography, with nude studies, fashion work and portraiture that saw him pioneering a new chapter in the history of camerawork and art. With a wide-ranging collection of both his famous and lesser-known works, this monograph gives a vivid overview of Man Ray's multifaceted practice and photographic legacy. See the rosebud lips of Kiki de Montparnasse 1929 and also one of her semi naked in 1922, Lee Miller in fashionable clothing 1930, Meret Oppenheimer and Nancy Cunard with dozens of huge bangles. It traces Ray from his artistic beginnings in New York through to his central role in the Parisian avant-garde, where he featured in the first Surrealist exhibition with Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso (some of whom are photographed in this collection) and produced such now iconic works as the tied up nude Blanc et Noire and Le Violon d'Ingres with the naked back of a woman decorated with the violin shapes and the tear drops on the mascara eye in close up Les Larmes. Through numerous examples of still life, portraiture, and beyond, we see how Ray constantly experimented with new techniques, pushing photography out of its documentary domain into ethereal, poetic expressions through multiple exposure, solarization, and the particular brand of photograms he wittily termed "rayography." 14 x 19.5cm, 192 pages. New from Taschen.

Gleaned from thousands of images, this book offers the best of American print advertising in the age of the "Big Idea." From the height of American consumerism, bold and colourful campaigns paint a fascinating portrait of the 1950s and '60s, as concerns about the Cold War gave way to the carefree booze-and-cigarettes capitalism of the Mad Men era. Digitally remastered for optimum reproduction quality, the ads burst with crisp fonts and colours, as well as a sexy sense of possibility, beguiling their audience to buy everything from guns to Biflex bras and girdles, cars to toothpaste, air travel to home appliances, telephones in all colours and shapes, Knoll modern furniture, HiFs, cigarettes advertised by smoking poodles, Marlboro by babies Marilyn in Playboy, glamous fqshion, cosmetics like Cutex and Neet, Yellow Pages, Martini and alcohol, Hot Oatmeal is Cool, Boy mints Girl and the youth market, Mobil - we want you to live. At turns startling, amusing and inspiring, this panorama of mid-century marketing is at once an evocative period piece and a showcase of design innovation and advertising wit. 15.6 x 21.7 cm, 512 pages. Text in English, French and German. New from Taschen.

Dissolve and blend when brushed with water, these premium quality pencils are in the following rainbow colours: yellow, fluorescent orange, pink, red, bright green, dark green, marine blue, navy blue, purple, brown, dark brown and black. There is a simple gold band at the top end, full length, ready sharpened. All watercolourists can touch up and experiment, particularly at this bargain price, with blending and creating the tones and colours required. In a nice simple recycled manilla card carton.