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Another exquisite Thames & Hudson publication and a companion to In Search of a Masterpiece. What was Gauguin hinting at when he painted Milton's Paradise Lost into a portrait of a friend? Is it a girl or a boy who is denied control of the books in Renoir's Portraits d'enfants? How did a chance encounter with Sir John Lavery bring fame to the owner of a small red book? Was it true that no one ever saw Picasso with a book in his hands? Why were the Cumberland girls reading The Fashionable Lover in George Romney's commissioned portrait? Beginning with the question 'What is a book?', this companionable survey for art and book lovers alike explores the symbiotic relationship between the development of books and the emergence of our modern sense of the importance of the individual artist. It parades and interprets the work of many of the greatest artists in the last 500 years and explains how and why books became the single most ubiquitous feature of our cultural lives, an enlarged measure of our everyday existence. The book looks at courtly cultures and their undercurrents, reading matter, the painting of modern life, the word of God, 'book love' and the home, why artists love books, who invented the 'artist' and the pleasure of reading in multiple locations. In a wonderful gallery towards the end of the book there is a depiction in colour of a young man fashionably adopting the French look, reading love poems as the red carnation suggests. 'Books bound in old brown calf, which are lying on tables or on bookshelves', and there?s an exciting almost photographic looking 1879 painting The Bibliophile of old men stooping over a bookstall in old Seville, a pair of Victorian ladies in a train carriage, one reading one asleep, and Degas's 1885 pastel of Mary Cassatt at the Louvre, the seated figure with an indispensable guide book. Alma-Tadema paints a cornfield at Godstone, Surrey to show how a book allows complete privacy and pleasure in an English Arcadia. There is art from Karolina Max, Winslow Homer, Corot, and Munch with his Christmas In the 'Brothel' where Madame reads and her dressed-up girls talk beside the Christmas tree. Edward Hopper, J. M. W. Turner, Van Gogh, here are the Bloomsbury set and hundreds of gifted artists from collections around the world in these 165 colour illustrations with an erudite and witty text connecting gender differences, religious systems, symbols of all kinds, education, changing patterns of transport, social status, romance, the imagination of children, literary lives, sex, friendship, bathing, scientific discovery and books as aids to reflection. Books tell us all about ourselves. 256 large pages.