The image is an ontological paradox; it is made of dead matter, yet appears to be alive. For centuries, artists have created images of the living world – images that are static and yet possess the power to bring to life a frozen moment in time. While this tension has constituted a fundamental challenge for as long as theories on the nature of images have existed, recent scholarship has rekindled interest in the question of what images ‘do to us’. Despite the rational discourse of Modernity, we must acknowledge that we view images as half-living entities. Dead or Alive! addresses the perpetual relevance of images’ enigmatic life-likeness. Each of the twelve chapters, written by scholars of art history and visual culture, conveys how the materiality of images generates this powerful effect of animation. Covering a wide range of practices, from early paleolithic stone engravings, medieval tomb sculpture, renaissance death masks and baroque painting to modern fashion, park design, early cinema, robots and bio art, the book demonstrates that the ontological paradox of the image is not limited to a specific historical period or certain types of images, but can be seen throughout the history of images across different cultures.

The Crocker Art Museum has one of the finest and earliest German drawings collections in the United States. Featuring artists such as Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner, Anton Raphael Mengs and Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, The Splendor of Germany examines the major developments in German draughtsmanship over the course of the eighteenth century. Published to coincide with the collection’s 150th anniversary. In the 21st century, the collecting and study of 18th-century German drawings has become a major focus for American museums. One of the finest collections of them, however, has been in California for 150 years. The superb drawings at the Crocker Art Museum, from a Baroque altarpiece design by Johann Georg Bergmüller to a Neoclassical mythology by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, provide a panorama of German draughtsmen and draughtsmanship throughout the century. Many of the drawings are remarkable for their modernity. A self-portrait by Johann Gottlieb Prestel bypasses convention to achieve a direct, unmediated likeness. Well-placed slashes with brush and black ink define the features below his peruke outlined in black chalk. Other drawings encapsulate specific developments and styles, such as Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner’s Lazarus and the Rich Man, which shows the florid dynamism of the Augsburg Rococo. A full range of eighteenth-century German artists are represented here, from the satirizing moralists Johann Elias Ridinger and Daniel Chodowiecki to the Classicist and friend of the art theorist Johann Joachim Winkelmann, Anton Raphael Mengs. Landscape artists are especially well represented, such as the key figure Johann Georg Wille, printmaker to the French king Louis XV, and generations of artists he taught and influenced all the way to the early Romantic landscapists. The exhibition and catalogue gather together a variety of dynamic and sensitive portraits, charming scenes of daily life, and often humorous moralizing subjects, as well as narratives, both religious and mythological, from the late Baroque to Neoclassicism. In the realm of landscape, the depth of the collection allows the exhibition to trace schools and influences—in addition to Wille’s mentioned above—even in families such as that of Prestel, whose wife and daughter were both landscapists. It also allows it to demonstrate the great variety of works by single artists such as Christoph Nathe, represented by four landscapes in four different genres including a splendid scene near Görlitz. Some artists, in fact, work in several genres as in the case of Johann Christian Klengel, whose works include the scene of a family by candlelight, a farmstead landscape, and a sketchbook that he carried through the countryside to record picturesque views.This is a rare opportunity for the public and for drawings enthusiasts. Two-thirds of the drawings in the exhibition have not been shown before; most of the exceptions have not been seen since 1989. Because of the drawings’ 150-year history of limited exposure, the state of preservation of the collection is exceptional, as is the condition of the new acquisitions included in the exhibition.

This lavish catalogue presents sketches made en plein air between the end of the eighteenth century and late nineteenth century. It accompanies a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (USA), the Fondation Custodia (France) and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (UK). In the eighteenth century the tradition of open-air painting was based in Italy, Rome in particular. Artists came from all over Europe to study classical sculpture and architecture, as well as masterpieces of Renaissance and Baroque art. During their studies, groups of young painters visited the Italian countryside, training their eyes and their hands to transcribe the effects of light on a range of natural features. The practice became an essential aspect of art education, and spread throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. This exhibition focuses on the artists’ wish to convey the immediacy of nature observed at first hand. Around a hundred works, most of them unfamiliar to the general public, will be displayed. The artists represented include Thomas Jones, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Achille-Etna Michallon, Camille Corot, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Johan Thomas Lundbye, Vilhelm Kyhn, Carl Blechen, Johann Martin von Rohden, Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, Johann Jakob Frey, among others. The sketches demonstrate the skill and ingenuity with which each artist quickly translated these first-hand observations of atmospheric and topographical effects while the impression was still fresh. The exhibition and the catalogue will be organized thematically, reviewing, as contemporary artists did, motifs such as trees, rocks, water, volcanoes, and sky effects, and favourite topgraphical locations, such as Rome and Capri. The catalogue will present numerous unpublished plein air sketches, and contains original scholarship on this relatively young field of art history.

Since early discoveries of so-called Celtic Art during the 19th century, archaeologists have mused on the origins of this major art tradition, which emerged in Europe around 500 BC. Classical influence has often been cited as the main impetus for this new and distinctive way of decorating, but although Classical and Celtic Art share certain motifs, many of the design principles behind the two styles differ fundamentally. Instead, the idea that Celtic Art shares its essential forms and themes of transformation and animism with Iron Age art from across northern Eurasia has recently gained currency, partly thanks to a move away from the study of motifs in prehistoric art and towards considerations of the contexts in which they appear. This volume explores Iron Age art at different scales and specifically considers the long-distance connections, mutual influences and shared ‘ways of seeing’ that link Celtic Art to other art traditions across northern Eurasia. It brings together 13 papers on varied subjects such as animal and human imagery, technologies of production and the design theory behind Iron Age art, balancing pan-Eurasian scale commentary with regional and site scale studies and detailed analyses of individual objects, as well as introductory and summary papers. This multi-scalar approach allows connections to be made across wide geographical areas, whilst maintaining the detail required to carry out sensitive studies of objects.

In Knowing and Seeing, muralist Douglas Cooper reflects on his long career as a muralist in various cities around the world. Part memoir and part an examination of his art, Cooper looks back on his half-century career from two points of view. First, through personal anecdotes on site sketches and finished works, and secondly, on the intellectual roots of the works. Though the core ideas of his work began in Pittsburgh, Cooper has exhibited work and produced murals, up to 200 feet long, in Cologne, Rome, San Francisco, Seattle, Qatar, Frankfurt, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington DC. Memory has been a recurring theme in his art. All of Cooper’s works are driven by a desire to combine his conception of place with his perception of it—knowing and seeing. Knowing and Seeing features personal essays and more than 240 color images, including early Christian and Renaissance paintings as well as contemporary murals and other illustrations of Cooper’s unique work.

Motivated by the inexorable rise of urban-industrial development and the subsequent deterioration of our planet, artists confront the contemporary vulnerability of our natural world, and illustrate the continued relevance of ecology and nature conservation to contemporary artistic practice, and global climate change. In Fragile Earth: The Naturalist Impulse in Contemporary Art, leading artists Jennifer Angus, Mark Dion, Courtney Mattison, and James Prosek make natural elements their medium conceptually and literally. From prints created with eel bodies and moth wings, to ceramic sculpture mimicking coral bleaching, cabinets filled with colorful plastic collected from oceans and rivers, and walls covered with shockingly beautiful, preserved insects, the artwork reflects an artist’s perspective to natural science, these essays and written conversations showcase the persuasive role artists can play in advocating for the preservation of earth.

For the first time, Craigie Aitchison and the Beaux Arts Generation tells the story of Craigie Aitchison’s role amongst the bright young figurative painters of post-war London. Along with Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Euan Uglow, Aitchison belonged to ‘the Beaux Arts generation’: a set of highly talented painters first shown at the Beaux Arts Gallery by Helen Lessore. Under her discerning gaze, the early careers of these five artists were launched and close friendships formed, even as a wild divergence of artistic styles took place. By the time of its closure in 1965, Lessore’s gallery had laid the foundations for the next five decades of British art. The book accompanies Piano Nobile’s exhibition of the same title. A memoir by Susan Campbell provides a first-hand insight into the student days of Aitchison, Andrews and Uglow. Herself a student at the Slade School of Fine Art and an erstwhile visitor to the Beaux Arts Gallery, Campbell contributes a vivid account of these artists and their early careers. The book further includes three definitive texts by Aitchison, Andrews and Auerbach. First published in 1959 and 1960 by the literary arts magazine X: A Quarterly Review, these short essays provide a cogent insight into the three artists’ thinking. The book also comprises a fully-illustrated catalogue of forty-eight works. A first section presents a significant group of works by Aitchison, followed by a second section with paintings, watercolours and drawings by Andrews, Auerbach, Kossoff and Uglow. Many works are drawn from private collections and have not previously been published.

Revolutionary artist Mary Rogers Williams (1857−1907), baker’s daughter from Hartford, Connecticut, biked and hiked from the Arctic Circle to Naples, exhibited from Paris to Indianapolis, trained at the Art Students League, chafed against art world rules that favored men, wrote thousands of pages about her travels and work, taught at Smith College for nearly two decades, but sadly ended up almost totally obscure. In 2012, her confessional letters and hundreds of her paintings and sketches turned up in storage at a Connecticut family’s home. Her first biography reveals her as feisty, funny, self-deprecating, caustically critical of mainstream art, and observant of everything from soldiers’ epaulettes to colorful produce layered on delivery trucks. She was determined to paint portraits and landscapes in her distinctive style. The book reproduces her unpublished artworks.

This lavishly illustrated book celebrates one of the most comprehensive and meticulously assembled private collections of Chinese export porcelain from the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644) made at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province. The Lurie Collection, comprising about 170 porcelain pieces, contains examples that are exceptional not only for their aesthetic beauty and quality but also for their rarity or historical importance. This book makes a significant contribution to several fields of study, most notably those related to the production, design and trade of Jingdezhen export porcelain in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. An introduction places the diverse porcelains of the Lurie Collection in their historical context. It offers new insight into the European expansion to Asia in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, via both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, which ultimately led to an unprecedented large-scale trade, transport and consumption of various types of Jingdezhen export porcelain throughout the world until the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644. The core of the book is the catalogue section, which is composed of 127 entries with comprehensive discussions and images of a selection of the Lurie porcelains. Whenever possible they are accompanied by images of excavated shards that originally formed part of similar porcelain pieces, establishing direct links to the Jingdezhen kilns where such pieces were produced. Multiple sources of evidence (textual, material and visual) shed light on the trading networks through which these Jingdezhen porcelains circulated, as well as the way in which they were acquired, used and appreciated by the different societies in Europe, the New World, Asia and the Middle East. Highlights include six kraak plates made during the Wanli reign (1573–1620) with the egret mark, which is found on a small number of pieces usually of very high quality, and the only known kraak armorial specifically ordered for the Spanish market in the 16th century. This finely potted plate, also dating to the Wanli reign, bears the impaled arms of García Hurtado de Mendoza, 4th Marquis of Cañete, and his wife, Teresa de Castro y de la Cueva. It was most probably ordered via Manila during the time Hurtado de Mendoza was Viceroy of Peru, between 1589 and 1596. This plate, together with a kraak plate bearing a pseudo-armorial, and a few pieces decorated in the so-called Transitional style and one other recovered from the Hatcher Junk (c.1643) made after European shapes, attest to the influence that the European merchants exerted on the porcelain production at Jingdezhen at the time.

Ambrose McEvoy was one of the most modern and daring English society portrait painters of the early 20th century. His quick, confident style of painting drew the attention of many leading society figures, from Winston Churchill to Lady Diana Cooper, and in particular subjects who craved something beyond a simple ‘likeness’ in paint. Despite his success, when McEvoy died unexpectedly at the peak of his career in 1927, his name was soon forgotten. Divine People is the first major written study of McEvoy’s life and work and aims to firmly place this long-neglected artist back into the canon of 20th-century British art. Ambrose McEvoy (1877–1927) was a household name by 1915, with prominent socialites and debutantes vying for sittings in his Grosvenor Road studio. His patrons – typically young, well-known beauties – were dazzled not only by his remarkable ability to capture their character, but also his working methods, which one spectator described as an ‘awe-inspiring sight’. McEvoy would illuminate his subject using electric lights, switching between different coloured bulbs until he reached the level and colour of light he desired. This ‘Hollywood’ look, with his glamourous subjects lit from below as if caught mid-speech on stage, is what he soon became best known for.McEvoy had studied at the Slade School of Fine Art on the recommendation of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and soon after established himself as a talented painter of portraits and interior scenes. He exhibited his first work at the New English Art Club in 1901 and subsequently attracted the attention of wealthy patrons and collectors. His first major commission came in 1906, for two large religious pictures for the Long Tower Church in Londonderry, where they remain to this day. After a period spent in Dieppe with Walter Sickert in 1909 McEvoy’s style began to change and his handling became looser and more confident with bolder use of colour.In 1915 he firmly established his position as a portrait painter following the exhibition of his work Madame at the National Portrait Society. ‘[Madame] holds you spellbound from the moment you enter the gallery,’ wrote one critic. Two of his earliest admirers were Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough and Lady Diana Cooper, who sat for their portraits in 1917 and 1918 respectively. In the early 1920s McEvoy also made several trips to New York, where the famous art dealer and tastemaker Joseph Duveen was busy promoting his work. It was during these years he painted some of his best-known works including remarkable watercolours of ‘wild-child’ Lois Sturt and a portrait of James Ramsay MacDonald. In 1927, at the very peak of his career, McEvoy was tragically struck down with pneumonia and died on 4 January. Many of McEvoy’s friends and contemporaries including Augustus and Gwen John, William Rothenstein and William Orpen have become familiar names to British art enthusiasts, but McEvoy has remained on the side-lines. This is partly due to the fact that many of his most accomplished works have remained tucked away in private collections or left languishing in museum stores, however, it is also due to the absence of any reliable literature on his life and work. This publication hopes to restore him to his rightful place.Written in the early 1970s by Erik Akers-Douglas, 3rd Viscount Chilston (1910–1986), the original manuscript – of which only one copy was produced – was lost soon after it was submitted to a publisher in 1975. After several years of legal wrangling, Chilston decided to type a second copy and it was resubmitted to his agent. Chilston died the following month and the manuscript was never published. It was recently rediscovered by Philip Mould& Company and edited by Lawrence Hendra.

George Stubbs: ‘all done from Nature’ presents the first significant overview of Stubbs’s work in Britain for more than 30 years and brings together 80 paintings, drawings and publications from the National Gallery’s Whistlejacket to pieces never previously seen in public. Stubbs produced exceptional images of animals and people throughout his career. These were a product of his keen scientific eye and uncommon sense of compassion. Rather than trust to history and the untested example of his precursors, he championed doing as a way of thinking and deployed picture-making in pursuit of reality. On the title page of The Anatomy of the Horse, his groundbreaking publication that rewrote our understanding of equine biology, Stubbs confirmed that everything that followed was ‘all done from Nature’ – meaning that it all derived from his own painstaking analysis of the subject in front of him. George Stubbs: ‘all done from Nature’ accompanies the major exhibition at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes and the Mauritshuis in The Hague and includes new writing on the artist by Nicholas Clee, Martin Myrone, Martin Postle, Roger Robinson, Jenny Uglow and Alison E. Wright.

Accompanying an exhibition at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts - only the second exhibition ever devoted to the artist - this noteworthy publication considers De Beer’s work and career, working methods, and traces the history of De Beer’s paintings in British collections. The Antwerp painter Jan de Beer (c.1475-1527/28) was highly esteemed in his lifetime and still famous a couple of generations after his death, but then fell into oblivion until the early twentieth century. Only recently have his achievements been fully recognized and documented. The artist’s known oeuvre consists of forty works, mainly devotional paintings and triptychs but also a dozen drawings and a stained glass window, after a lost design. De Beer’s stylish and elegant art appealed to patrons and collectors, churches abroad, and copyists. His work is typically associated with that of the Antwerp Mannerists, a prominent group of mostly anonymous painters active in the city during his lifetime. This publication will accompany an exhibition at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham (25 October 2019 to 19 January 2020) that focuses on one of its and De Beer’s acknowledged masterpieces: the double-sided Joseph and the Suitors/ The Nativity. This is the only surviving fragment from what must have been a major altarpiece. It will be accompanied by a half-dozen key loans of paintings and drawings by De Beer and his workshop including all the attributed paintings in UK collections. These will provide both an instructive context for the Barber painting and for De Beer’s art more generally, with the whole chronological range of his career represented. It will be only the second ever exhibition devoted to De Beer, and the first to show the broad range of his work. The fully-illustrated catalogue will feature extended entries for all the exhibited works and three essays exploring the core themes of the show, written by Robert Wenley, Head of Collections at the Barber Institute and the lead curator of the exhibition, and two leading De Beer specialists. Professor Dan Ewing (Barry University, Miami Shores, Florida) will consider De Beer’s work and career; while Peter van den Brink (Director, Suermondt-Aachen Museum) will explore De Beer’s working methods, in particular as revealed by the underdrawings of his pictures. Robert Wenley’s essay will survey the history of De Beer’s paintings in British collections.

Accompanying an exhibition of drawings by Guercino from the collection of the Morgan Library & Museum, Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman offers an overview of the artist’s graphic work, ranging from his early genre studies and caricatures, to the dense and dynamic preparatory studies for his paintings, and on to highly finished chalk drawings and landscapes that were ends in themselves. Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Guercino (1591-1666), was arguably the most interesting and diverse draftsman of the Italian Baroque era, a natural virtuoso who created brilliant drawings in a broad range of media. The Morgan owns more than twenty-five works by the artist, and these are the subject of a focused exhibition, supplemented by a handful of loans from public and private New York collections, to be held at the Morgan in the autumn of 2019. This volume accompanies that exhibition. It includes an introductory essay on Guercino’s work as a draftsman followed by entries on the Guercino drawings in the Morgan’s collection. These include sheets from all moments of the artist’s career. His early awareness of the work of the Carracci in Bologna is documented by figures drawn from everyday life as well as brilliant caricatures; two drawings for Guercino’s own drawing manual are further testament to his interest in questions of academic practice. Following his career, a range of preparatory drawings includes studies made in connection with his earliest altarpieces as well as his mature masterpieces, including multiple studies for several projects, allowing the visitor to see Guercino’s mind at work as he reconsidered his ideas. The Morgan’s holdings also include studies for engravings as well as highly finished landscape and figure drawings that were independent works. Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman continues a series of exhibition catalogues focused on highlights from the Morgan’s collection. Previous volumes include Power and Grace: Drawings by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens and Thomas Gainsborough: Experiments in Drawing, also published by Paul Holberton. While some of the Morgan’s Guercino drawings are well known, they have never been exhibited or published as a group, and the selection includes a number of new acquisitions.

Recently discovered documents show that Giambologna, the great sculptor at the court of the Medici whose bronzes delighted all Europe, made six large garden sculptures for King Henri IV of France, otherwise unknown. This book describes the garden project and discusses three bronzes identified as from the project, in particular a hitherto unknown Venus. Ferdinando I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Florence, built up his relationship with the French crown with numerous diplomatic gifts, including the creation of new gardens at St-German-en-Laye laid out for the King of France by the engineer and designer Tommaso Francini, who had designed and built Ferdinando’s own Pratolino gardens, and sculptures by Giambologna that would adorn them. This was in the years 1597–1600, and preparatory to the marriage of his daughter Maria to Henri IV in 1600 in the most spectacular wedding celebrations ever seen in Europe. Blanca Troyols describes the nature of Henri IV’s beauitiful gardens – in the latest Mannerist style, using a host of materials (stone, shell, crystal) and rare plants, the extravagant water features in which Francini was a specialist, and an array of statuary. She places this important garden in context and also discusses the diplomatic manoeuvring between the respectively larger and poorer and smaller and richer states of France and Tuscany. Alexander Rudigier examines the surviving works by Giambologna associated with the gardens, including a hitherto unknown Venus in a private collection that has been the object of some controversy. He compares this to the Mercury in the Louvre and the Triton in the Metropolitan Museum in New York also originally for the gardens, as well as with Giambologna’s work as a whole. He shows that probably Giambologna’s pupil Hans Reichle was his major assistant, and traces the career of the German founder, Gerhard Meyer, working in Florence, who signed the Venus. This leads to an important discussion of Gimabologna’s late work in general. Lars Olof Larson provides a technical report on the new Venus. The distinguished bronze specialist Bertrand Jestaz provides an introduction and overview.

This handsome catalogue is the second of a three-volume set exploring the McCarthy collection, arguably the largest and most important private collection of illuminated cuttings, miniatures, and leaves in the world. Volume I (published 2018) presented Italian and Byzantine entries; Volume III (forthcoming 2020) will be devoted to French entries. The present volume is dedicated to the holdings of single leaves and cuttings from Spanish, English, Flemish and Central European manuscripts from the 12th to late 15th centuries. Richly detailed with plentiful illustrations, it is a notable contribution to medieval scholarship.

Acknowledged as the journal of record in its field, American Furniture presents new research on furniture design, use, production, and appreciation. Begun in 1993, this award-winning annual provides a comprehensive forum on furniture history, technology, connoisseurship, and conservation by the foremost scholars in the field. It is the only interdisciplinary journal devoted exclusively to furniture made or used in the Americas from the seventeenth century to the present.