Julius Bryant – författare

Often described as the “English country house whisperer,” Alec Cobbe reveals the enduring design principles of venerable old estates that can inspire today’s homes.This book is essential reading for admirers of the historic English country house as well as anyone seeking to bring authentic British style into their own home. From his own distinguished residence, Hatchlands Park in Surrey, to some of Britain’s most iconic estates—including Castle Howard, Knole, Goodwood, and Petworth—Cobbe draws on more than fifty years of unparalleled knowledge and expertise in historical detail, conservation, and interior restoration. This book offers rare access to some of the most important homes in the United Kingdom and Ireland, illuminating the stories of the houses and the lives lived within them.  Cobbe shares never seen photographs alongside his own charming paintings and designs illustrating his schemes, which refresh, enliven, and reignite the hallowed interiors of these country houses. Here readers gain practical guidance on topics such as hanging and enhancing art collections, choosing historically sympathetic paint colors and window treatments, restoring architectural elements, and balancing centuries-old character with the demands of modern living.  More than a showcase of extraordinary rooms, this book serves both as a celebration of Cobbe’s remarkable legacy and a blueprint for decorators, restorers, and enthusiasts seeking to preserve heritage while creating livable, beautifully layered homes.

With a career spanning more than sixty years, Anthony Caro (b. 1924) is one of Britain's most acclaimed and best-known sculptors. Caro: Close Up accompanies the first survey exhibition of his work in an American museum since his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975. Although celebrated for his large, brightly painted abstract sculptures, Caro has also produced drawings and small-scale works of a more private nature throughout his career. The full range of his oeuvre includes works on paper, sculptures constructed in paper and cardboard, and abstract works of steel, bronze, and clay.Featuring new photography of more than sixty works drawn almost entirely from Caro's studio and family collections, this publication examines the critical responses that Caro's work has elicited from the 1950s to the present and considers his role in current artistic practice. The authors explore the ways the sculptor has used the physical properties of his materials, while Caro himself discusses his exhibition and installation practices.Published for the Yale Center for British ArtExhibition Schedule:Yale Center for British Art(10/18/12–12/30/12)

The story of the illustrated book from the earliest printed books to the present day, told through the collections of the V&A’s National Art Library. This is the story of the illustrated book, from the earliest printed examples to the present day, told through the collections of the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London – a library that was created to bring together examples of superlative book-making on almost every subject. Gathered here are some of the most influential, compelling and striking examples of the illustrated book, arranged thematically in chapters devoted to subjects such as art, literature, religion, architecture, natural history, fashion, and shopping. Brimming with innovative and beautiful examples, ranging from well-known titles, such as Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament and James Audubon’s Birds of America, to other wonderful but less familiar publications, this collection offers a fascinating overview of some of the finest illustrated books ever created – demonstrating their enduring appeal.

The building of the Victoria and Albert Museum, begun in 1857, is the most elaborately designed and decorated museum in Britain. This book is the first to consider the V&A as a work of art in itself, presenting drawings, watercolours and historic photographs relating to the museum’s 19th-century exteriors and interiors. Much of this visual material is previously unpublished and is outside the canon of Victorian art and design.The V&A’s first Director, Henry Cole, conceived the museum’s building as a showcase for leading Victorian artists to design and decorate. This book reveals for the first time the ways in which Cole’s expressed policy to ‘assemble a splendid collection of objects representing the application of Fine Arts to manufacture’ was applied to the fabric of the building, as he engaged leading painters such as Frederic Leighton, G.F. Watts and Edward Burne-Jones, as well as specialists in decoration such as Owen Jones and Morris and Company, to decorate and design for a building raised by engineers using innovatory materials and techniques.This book represents a fascinating, untold chapter in the history of British 19th-century art, design, architecture and museums, and provides an essential key to understanding the evolution of the museum’s early collections and identity.

Creating the V&A tells the definitive story of the formative years of London’s world-renowned Victoria and Albert Museum and the gathering of its early collections in the decade between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the death of Prince Albert in 1861.The story of the V&A’s genesis is often centred on the first director and first curator (Henry Cole and J. C. Robinson), and their competing agendas for design reform and connoisseurship. And yet there is an untold story of how the young royal couple for whom it is named were highly instrumental in the establishment of the museum, as public supporters and large-scale lenders before a permanent collection was in place. The book is also full of fascinating and colourful stories of the strategies deployed to harvest treasures on the market as the young museum sought to fill its rapidly expanding buildings and compete with the British Museum and the Crystal Palace.For anyone interested in the history of collecting and curating, and for all fans of this legendary London museum, Creating the V&A explains how the foundational collections established parameters which still inform the museum’s collecting policies, role and identity today.

By 1862, just adecade after its launch as a study collection for art and design, the Victoria and Albert Museum had become a reference resource for collectors, scholars andart-market experts.  Enriching theV&A, the final volume in a trilogy of books on the museum’s 19th-centuryhistory, describes how the young museum’s rapid growth in the followingdecades was driven more by collectors, agents and dealers, through loans,gifts and bequests, than by the combined expertise, acquisitions policies andbuying power of its directors and curators.The V&A soon became a collection ofcollections, embodying a new age of collecting that benefitted from thebreak-up of historic institutions and ancestral collections across Europe, and imperial expeditions in Asia and Africa. The industrialrevolution had created a new social class with the resources to buy from theexpanding art market, especially in the decorative arts. Many were touched bya new moral imperative to collect for the home, however humble, and to sharetheir specialist knowledge and enthusiasm by lending to the new publicmuseums.Enriching the V&A explores theformative influence on the museum, and on pioneering fields of scholarship,of the V&A’s leading Victorian and Edwardian benefactors. It also sharesuncomfortable truths about the sources of some objects from the age ofempires and shows how the meanings of things can change through thetransformation of private property into public museum collections.

The Great Exhibition of 1851, the first World's Fair, is generally thought of as a giant trade fair, a showcase for empires and industry. However, it was also conceived to address a deep-rooted problem with British taste, which favoured European art and design over British. Julius Bryant's richly illustrated new book, which draws on the vast visual resources of the V&A's collections, establishes the centrality of works of fine art amongst the objects on show at the Great Exhibition. It also highlights the ways in which contemporary artists were commissioned to depict and record the Exhibition’s building and displays for reproduction in commemorative publications. Through reproductions of period images from definitive official publications, commercial guides, souvenirs, music scores, poems and satirical periodicals, the book brings to life the 19th-century visitor’s experience of the first World’s Fair. It documents Prince Albert’s vision for the Exhibition alongside the planned and actual routes as recorded in official engravings, maps and guidebooks; the opening and closing ceremonies as depicted in prints; the official visual record of the Exhibition; and souvenirs, popular press and ephemera. It concludes by examining the legacy of the Great Exhibition, including the founding of an institution which shared the Exhibition's mission to educate the public about art, design and taste: the Victoria and Albert Museum.

This unique history brings together more than 150 spectacular objects from the National Art Library's collection of literature, prints, drawings and photographs. Housed within the V&A, the library was, from the beginning, an integral part of the Museum, formed by, and for, artists and designers as an essential element of the educational and museological project of Prince Albert and Henry Cole after the Great Exhibition of 1851. Word & Image shows how the distinct character of the NAL was formed, and how its collections created a new kind of bibliographical resource. From a fifteenth-century book of hours to William Morris's specimen pages for Jean Froissart's The Chronicles of Fraunce, Inglande, and Other Places Adjoynynge; from George Cruikshank's studies of Fagin for Oliver Twist to an Yves Saint Laurent design for the House of Dior; and from Bill Brandt's photographs to the Book of Nails by Floating Concrete Octopus, Word & Image explores some of the finest examples of 'book art' in existence.

In 1925 Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh bought Kenwood, the magnificent 18th-century mansion of the 6th Earl of Mansfield on Hampstead Heath. The empty house was just what Iveagh needed to provide a gallery for the best of the art collection he had formed between 1887 and 1891 for his palatial home in Mayfair. Through the Iveagh Bequest Act of 1929 he left his collection to the nation, where it remains on display at Kenwood. This catalogue reproduces in glorious full colour Lord Iveagh's bequest of paintings, discusses each work, and in addition discusses the wider collection on display at Kenwood, the spectacular white villa of Hampstead Heath.