Lelia Packer – författare

This is the first book to concentrate on Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals’s highly innovative approach to male portraiture.Frans Hals is one of the greatest portrait painters of all time and, together with Rembrandt, is one of the most eminent seventeenth-century Dutch artists. Published to coincide with the Wallace Collection’s exhibition of the same name, Frans Hals: The Male Portrait explores the artist’s highly innovative approach to male portraiture, from the beginning of his career in the 1610s until the end of his life in 1666.Through pose, expression and virtuosic painterly technique, Hals revolutionised the male portrait into something entirely new and fresh, capturing and revealing his sitters’ characters like no one else before him. This book includes the first in-depth study of Hals’s great masterpiece, The Laughing Cavalier, from 1624. The extravagantly dressed young man, confidently posed with his left arm akimbo in the extreme foreground of the picture and seemingly penetrating into the viewer’s space, has been charming audiences for over a century.Richly illustrated, Frans Hals: The Male Portrait situates The Laughing Cavalier within the artist’s larger oeuvre and demonstrates how, at a relatively early point in his career, Hals was able to achieve this great masterpiece.

A gorgeous celebration of the beauty of Venice as conveyed in the paintings of Canaletto and his followers.Among the renowned Old Master paintings at the Wallace Collection in London is an important group of 27 eighteenth-century views of Venice, known as vedute, by Canaletto and his followers, including Francesco Guardi. They hang together in a dedicated gallery known as the Canaletto Room, but until recently the majority had not been cleaned since the nineteenth century and their original beauty was obscured by multiple layers of discoloured varnish.The paintings have now been restored and rephotographed, following a multi-year conservation and research project that has also led to a reappraisal of them. This book presents these pictures in their renewed splendour. It features essays and commentaries by Charles Beddington, the global expert on vedute, and by Wallace Collection curator Lelia Packer. Together they provide fresh insights into the artists’ creative processes, the dating of pictures and their authorship.