Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art – förlag

A definitive biography of the artist who, more than any other, has shaped our image of the Tudor court This landmark scholarly biography of Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497–1543), court painter to Henry VIII, breathes new life into Holbein’s story. From his early days in Augsburg and Basel to his lasting impact on British art and culture, this definitive account breathes new life into Holbein’s story, shedding light on the artist whose paintings would shape perceptions of the Tudor court for five hundred years. Written in accessible, engaging prose, the book explores Holbein’s famous portraits of Tudor figures—Henry VIII, his queens, would-be wives, and leading courtiers such as Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell—and examines iconic works, including The Ambassadors. Beyond biography, it situates Holbein’s art within the broader context of Tudor Britain, tracing the birth of collecting, connoisseurship, and art history itself. Beautifully illustrated, with rarely seen paintings from private collections, this volume weaves the latest research—including new archival discoveries and scientific analysis—into a fresh examination of Holbein’s life and work. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The first extended study of Frank Auerbach's remarkable portrait drawings reveals their complexity and ambition as works of graphic artThis book offers an original approach to one of Britain’s leading artists: Frank Auerbach (b. 1931). It looks in detail at his portrait drawings, which Auerbach has been making since the 1950s, and which he has always considered important, freestanding works of art. By turns eerie, shocking, enigmatic, and hauntingly tender, they demand fresh interpretation and investigation. Reproducing more than 130 examples of these portraits, some for the first time, and featuring new essays by curators, scholars, and critics, this book provides an unprecedented opportunity to explore and reassess these striking and sometimes unsettling works of graphic art. Frank Auerbach: Drawings of People includes texts by both the editors and the artist himself, and new essays by Kate Aspinall, James Finch, Alex Massouras, David Mellor, and Barnaby Wright.  Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

A highly original study of eccentric English garden-makers and their extraordinary gardens In his new book, English Garden Eccentrics, renowned landscape architect and historian Todd Longstaffe-Gowan reveals a series of obscure and eccentric English garden-makers who, between the early seventeenth and the early twentieth centuries, created intensely personal and idiosyncratic gardens. They include such fascinating characters as the superstitious antiquary William Stukeley and the animal- and bird-loving Lady Read, as well as the celebrated master of Vauxhall Gardens, Jonathan Tyers, who created at his home at Denbies one of the gloomiest and most perverse anti-pleasure gardens in Georgian England. Others built miniature mountains, shaped topiaries, displayed exotic animals, excavated caves and assembled architectural fragments and fossils to realise their gardens in a way that was often thought to be excessive.With quirky and compelling illustrations and chapters including 'Lady Broughton's "Miniature copy of the Swiss Glaciers"', 'Topiary on a Gargantuan Scale: The Clipped "Yew-trees" at Four Ancient London Churchyards' and 'The Burrowing Duke at Harcourt House', English Garden Eccentricsbrings together garden and landscape history with cultural history and biography. The book engagingly reveals what it is about the gardener and his or her creation that can be seen as eccentric and focusses on an area of garden history that has scarcely been previously explored: gardens seen as expressions of the singular character of their makers, and therefore functioning, in effect, as a form of autobiography. This lively and accessible book calls on gardeners today to learn from example and dare to be eccentric.

A comprehensive catalogue of Sargent’s charcoal portraits, capturing high society, professions, and the arts in an era of profound transformation  In comparison with his portraits in oil, John Singer Sargent’s charcoal portraits are relatively little known. In this authoritative new volume, Richard Ormond documents the nearly 700 drawings that make up this distinct strand of Sargent’s oeuvre. These portraits capture the essence of British and American high society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, portraying an elite clientele that includes aristocracy, royalty, politicians, artists, writers, actors, financiers, and philanthropists. Among Sargent’s subjects are such prominent figures as the Astors, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Du Ponts, the Prince and Princess of Wales, Ethel Barrymore, W. B. Yeats, and Winston Churchill.  Though renowned for his paintings of women, these charcoal portraits also reveal Sargent’s interest in depicting athletes across a variety of sports, from cricket and fencing to football and polo. This shift in subject matter from prewar to postwar, along with a sparser style characteristic of his charcoal work, casts new light on Sargent’s depictions of the period’s social landscape.  Surviving letters between Sargent and his patrons, reminiscences recorded in contemporary diaries, and David McKibbin’s extensive correspondence with sitters, both document the portraits and provide a vivid and human picture of the artist at work.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

An exploration of Turner's final, vital years, including new readings of some of his most significant paintingsThe paintings and drawings Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) produced from 1835 to his death in 1851 are seen by many as his most audacious and compelling work, a typical example of "late style." In this study, Sam Smiles goes beyond late style, with its focus on formal qualities and assumptions about personal expression, as an explanatory framework for Turner's late works. Instead, he argues that Turner, in his final fifteen years, was an artist entirely engaged with his own times. Smiles examines the artist's critical reception in these years and scrutinizes accounts that presumed Turner's physical and mental health collapsed in his seventies, to see what can be reliably said about his work as he aged. Emerging from this study is an artist who used his final years to consolidate the principles that had motivated him throughout his career.

A deft interweaving of architectural and social historyFor aristocrats and gentry in 18th-century Ireland, the townhouses and country estates they resided in were carefully constructed to accommodate their cultivated lifestyles. Based on new research from Irish national collections and correspondence culled from papers in private keeping, this publication provides a vivid and engaging look at the various ways in which families tailored their homes to their personal needs and preferences. Halls were designed in order to simultaneously support a variety of activities, including dining, music, and games, while closed porches allowed visitors to arrive fully protected from the country’s harsh weather. These grand houses were arranged in accordance with their residents’ daily procedures, demonstrating a distinction between public and private spaces, and even keeping in mind the roles and arrangements of the servants in their purposeful layouts. With careful consideration given to both the practicality of everyday routine and the occasional special event, this book illustrates how the lives and residential structures of these aristocrats were inextricably woven together.  Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

An in-depth study of the expanding role of the moving image in British art over the past thirty yearsOver the past three decades the moving image has grown from a marginalized medium of British art into one of the nation’s most vital areas of artistic practice. How did we get here? Artists’ Moving Image in Britain Since 1989 seeks to provide answers, unfolding some of the narratives—disparate, entwined, and often colorful—that have come to define this field. Ambitious in scope, this anthology considers artists and artworks alongside the organizations, institutions, and economies in which they exist. Writings by scholars from both art history and film studies, curators from diverse backgrounds, and artists from across generations offer a provocative and multifaceted assessment of the evolving position of the moving image in the British art world and consider the effects of numerous technological, institutional, and creative developments.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art

A fascinating look at how Elizabethan England was transformed by its interactions with cultures from around the worldChallenging the myth of Elizabethan England as insular and xenophobic, this revelatory study sheds light on how the nation’s growing global encounters—from the Caribbean to Asia—created an interest and curiosity in the wider world that resonated deeply throughout society. Matthew Dimmock reconstructs an extraordinary housewarming party thrown at the newly built Cecil House in London in 1602 for Elizabeth I where a stunning display of Chinese porcelain served as a physical manifestation of how global trade and diplomacy had led to a new appreciation of foreign cultures. This party was also the likely inspiration for Elizabeth’s celebrated Rainbow Portrait, an image that Dimmock describes as a carefully orchestrated vision of England’s emerging ambitions for its engagements with the rest of the world. Bringing together an eclectic variety of sources including play texts, inventories, and artifacts, this extensively researched volume presents a picture of early modern England as an outward-looking nation intoxicated by what the world had to offer.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

An illuminating investigation of how aquatint travel books transformed the way Britons viewed the world and their place within itIn the late 18th century, British artists embraced the medium of aquatint for its ability to produce prints with rich and varied tones that became even more stunning with the addition of color. At the same time, the expanding purview of the British empire created a market for images of far-away places. Book publishers quickly seized on these two trends and began producing travel books illustrated with aquatint prints of Indian cave temples, Chinese waterways, African villages, and more. Offering a close analysis of three exceptional publications—Thomas and William Daniell’s Oriental Scenery (1795–1808), William Alexander’s Costume of China (1797–1805), and Samuel Daniell’s African Scenery and Animals (1804–5)—this volume examines how aquatint became a preferred medium for the visual representation of cultural difference, and how it subtly shaped the direction of Western modernism.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

A timely and original look at the role of the eyewitness account in the representation of slavery in British and European artGathering together over 160 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, this book offers an unprecedented examination of the shifting iconography of slavery in British and European art between 1760 and 1840. In addition to considering how the work of artists such as Agostino Brunias, James Hakewill, and Augustus Earle responded to abolitionist politics, Sarah Thomas examines the importance of the eyewitness account in endowing visual representations of transatlantic slavery with veracity. “Being there,” indeed, became significant not only because of the empirical opportunities to document slave life it afforded but also because the imagery of the eyewitness was more credible than sketches and paintings created by the “armchair traveler” at home. Full of original insights that cast a new light on these highly charged images, this volume reconsiders how slavery was depicted within a historical context in which truth was a deeply contested subject.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

A radical, lively departure from received notions about art of the Romantic periodFor many, the term “neoclassicism” has come to imply discipline, order, restraint, and a certain myopia. Leaving the term behind, this book radically challenges enduring assumptions about the art produced from the late 18th century to the early Victorian period, casting new light on appropriations of the classical body by British artists. It is the first to foreground the intersections of gender, race, and class in discussions of British visual classicism, laying bare artists’ alternately politicizing and emphatically sensual engagements with Greco-Roman art. Rather than rely exclusively on subsequent scholarship, the book takes up the poet John Keats (1795–1821) as a theoretical framework. Eschewing the “Golden Age” narrative, which sees J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) as the pinnacle of the period’s artistic achievement, the book examines overlooked artists, such as Henry Howard (1769–1847) and John Graham Lough (1798–1876). The result is a fresh account of underappreciated works of British painting and sculpture.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

A fresh look at the Eastern origins of Christopher Wren’s architectureIn this revelatory study of one of the great architects in British history, Vaughan Hart considers Christopher Wren’s (1632–1723) interest in Eastern antiquity and Ottoman architecture, an interest that would animate much of his theory and practice. As the early modern understanding of antiquity broadened to include new discoveries at Palmyra and Persepolis, Wren disputed common assumptions about the European origins of Classical and Gothic architecture, tracing these building traditions not to the Greeks or Germans but to the stonemasons of the biblical East. In a deft analysis, Hart contextualizes Wren’s use of classical elements—columns, domes, and cross plans—within his enthusiasm for the East and the broader Anglican interest in the Eastern church. A careful study of diary records reappraises Wren’s working relationship with Robert Hooke (1635–1703), who shared in many of Wren’s theoretical commitments. The result is a new, deepened understanding of Wren’s work.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

An exciting new account of Irish high crosses  This landmark study of Irish high crosses focuses on the carvings of an unnamed artist, the “Muiredach Master,” whose monuments—completed in the early years of the 10th century—deserve a place alongside the Book of Kells as great works of their time. Drawing on a wealth of recent research, Roger Stalley describes in vivid detail how the crosses were made, where they were carved, and how they were lifted into place. His lively prose situates the works in their context, identifying patrons and exploring their motives, as well as venturing to understand what the crosses may have meant to those who gazed at them a millennium ago. In doing so, Stalley rejects preconceived notions about the imagery of the crosses, including the extent to which they were inspired by images from abroad.  Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

A groundbreaking and extensively researched account of the 1960s London art sceneIn the 1960s, London became a vibrant hub of artistic production. Postwar reconstruction, jet air travel, television arts programs, new color supplements, a generation of young artists, dealers, and curators, the influx of international film companies, the projection of “creative Britain” as a national brand—all nurtured and promoted the emergence of London as “a new capital of art.” Extensively illustrated and researched, this book offers an unprecedented, rich account of the social field that constituted the lively London scene of the 1960s. In clear, fluent prose, Tickner presents an innovative sequence of critical case studies, each of which explores a particular institution or event in the cultural life of London between 1962 and 1968. The result is a kaleidoscopic view of an exuberant decade in the history of British art.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

An exceptionally thoughtful and well-written biography of one of the most influential studio potters in BritainWidely recognized as the father of studio pottery, Bernard Leach (1887–1979) played a pioneering role in creating an identity for artist potters in Britain and around the world. Born in the East (Hong Kong) and educated in the West (England), throughout his life Leach perceived himself as a courier between the disparate cultures. His exquisite pots reflect the inspiration he drew from East and West as well as his response to the basic tenets of modernism—truth to materials, the importance of function to form, and simplicity of decoration. This outstanding biography provides for the first time a vivid and detailed account of Leach’s life and its relation to his art.Emmanuel Cooper, himself a potter of international reputation, explores Leach’s working methods, the seams of his pottery, his writings and philosophy, his recognition in Japan and Britain, and his continuing legacy, bringing into sharp focus a complex man who captured in his work as a potter the “still center” that always eluded him in his tumultuous personal life.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

A revelatory study of one of the 18th century’s greatest artists, which places him in relation to the darker side of the English EnlightenmentJoseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797), though conventionally known as a ‘painter of light’, returned repeatedly to nocturnal images. His essential preoccupations were dark and melancholy, and he had an enduring concern with death, ruin, old age, loss of innocence, isolation and tragedy.In this long-awaited book, Matthew Craske adopts a fresh approach to Wright, which takes seriously contemporary reports of his melancholia and nervous disposition, and goes on to question accepted understandings of the artist. Long seen as a quintessentially modern and progressive figure – one of the artistic icons of the English Enlightenment – Craske overturns this traditional view of the artist. He demonstrates the extent to which Wright, rather than being a spokesman for scientific progress, was actually a melancholic and sceptical outsider, who increasingly retreated into a solitary, rural world of philosophical and poetic reflection, and whose artistic vision was correspondingly dark and meditative.Craske offers a succession of new and powerful interpretations of the artist’s paintings, including some of his most famous masterpieces. In doing so, he recovers Wright’s deep engagement with the landscape, with the pleasures and sufferings of solitude, and with the themes of time, history and mortality.In this book, Joseph Wright of Derby emerges not only as one of Britain’s most ambitious and innovative artists, but also as one of its most profound.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

An investigation of the outsized influence of the Mod subculture on key figures of the 1960s London art sceneBonding over matters of taste and style, the ‘Mods’ of late 1950s London recognised in one another shared affinities for Italian-style suits, tidy haircuts, espresso bars, Vespa scooters and the latest American jazz. In this groundbreaking book, leading art historian Thomas Crow argues that the figure of the Mod exerted an influence beyond its assumed social boundaries by exemplifying the postwar metropolis in all of its excitement and complexity. Crow examines the works of key figures in the London art scene of the 1960s, including Robyn Denny, David Hockney, Pauline Boty, Bridget Riley and Bruce McLean, who shared and heightened aspects of this new and youthful urbanity. The triumphant arrival of the international counterculture forced both young Mods and established artists to reassess and regroup in novel, revealing formations. Understanding the London Mod brings with it a needed, up-to-date reckoning with the legacies of Situationism, Social Art History and Cultural Studies.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

A thought-provoking look at Aesthetic painting and its relationship to the changing technological landscapeIn the 19th century, the Aesthetic movement exalted taste, the pursuit of beauty, and self-expression over moral expectations and restrictive conformity.  This illuminating publication examines the production and circulation of artworks made during this unique historical moment. Looking at how specific works of art in this style were created, collected, and exchanged, the book pushes beyond the notion of Aesthetic painting and design as being merely decorative. Instead, work by James McNeill Whistler, Edward Burne-Jones, Albert Moore, and others is shown to have offered their makers and viewers a means of further engaging with the rapidly changing world around them. This multifaceted and thought-provoking study provides a radical new perspective on a mode of artistic production, linking it to the era’s expanding visual culture and the technological advancements that contributed to it. In a period marked by increasing connectivity, this book shows how art of the Aesthetic movement on both sides of the Atlantic figured into growing global networks.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Exploring the myths and realities of the origins of the “modern artist” in BritainThe artist has been a privileged figure in the modern age, embodying ideals of personal and political freedom and self-fulfillment. Does it matter who gets to be an artist? And do our deeply held beliefs stand up to scrutiny? Making the Modern Artist gets to the root of these questions by exploring the historical genesis of the figure of the artist. Based on an unprecedented biographical survey of almost 1,800 students at the Royal Academy of Arts in London between 1769 and 1830, the book reveals hidden stories about family origins, personal networks, and patterns of opportunity and social mobility. Locating the emergence of the “modern artist” in the crucible of Romantic Britain, rather than in 19th-century Paris or 20th-century New York, it reconnects the story of art with the advance of capitalism and demonstrates surprising continuities between liberal individualism and state formation, our dreams of personal freedom, and the social suffering characteristic of the modern era.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

A beautifully illustrated exploration of opulent tastes and the power of patronage in 18th-century BritainThe central decades of the eighteenth century in Britain were crucial to the history of European taste and design. One of the period’s most important campaigns of patronage and collecting was that of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland: Sir Hugh Smithson (1712–86) and Lady Elizabeth Seymour Percy (1716–76). This book examines four houses they refurbished in eclectic architectural styles—Stanwick Hall, Northumberland House, Syon House, and Alnwick Castle—alongside the innumerable objects they collected, their funerary monuments, and their persistent engagement in Georgian London’s public sphere. Over the years, their commissions embraced or pioneered styles as varied as Palladianism, rococo, neoclassicism, and Gothic revival. Patrons of many artists and architects, they are revealed, particularly, as the greatest supporters of Robert Adam.  In every instance, minute details contributed to large-scale projects expressing the Northumberlands’ various aesthetic and cultural allegiances. Their development sheds light on the eclectic taste of Georgian Britain, the emergence of neoclassicism and historicism, and the cultures of the Grand Tour and the Enlightenment.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The story of an innovative designer and farsighted art entrepreneur and the important role he played in the dissemination of 19th-century AestheticismThis book follows the phenomenal rise of Daniel Cottier (1838–1891) from an apprentice coach painter in Glasgow to the founder of Cottier & Co., a fine and decorative arts business with branches in London, New York, Sydney and Melbourne. This gifted designer and brilliant art entrepreneur keenly spotted one of the key aspects of late nineteenth-century bourgeois culture – its focus on family, home and church – and seized the artistic and commercial opportunities of the building and decorating boom that it brought about. Cottier was a proponent of the Aesthetic movement, an international trend in the history of culture, art and design from the mid-1860s to the late 1890s: he understood the era’s desire for beauty and realised the economic possibilities of its commoditisation. Beyond biography, therefore, this book illuminates a significant event of late nineteenth-century cultural history – Aestheticism’s cult of beauty meeting with the bourgeoisie’s financial ability to possess it.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The life and art of the 18th-century naturalist Mark Catesby, and his pioneering work depicting the flora and fauna of North America, are explored in vibrant detailThis book explores the life and work of the celebrated eighteenth-century English naturalist, explorer, artist and author Mark Catesby (1683–1749). During Catesby’s lifetime, science was poised to shift from a world of amateur virtuosi to one of professional experts. Working against a backdrop of global travel that incorporated collecting and direct observation of nature, Catesby spent two prolonged periods in the New World – in Virginia (1712–19) and South Carolina and the Bahamas (1722–6). In his majestic two-volume Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731–43), esteemed by his contemporary John Bartram as ‘an ornament for the finest library in the world’, he reflected the excitement, drama and beauty of the natural world. Interweaving elements of art history, history of science, natural history illustration, painting materials, book history, paper studies, garden history and colonial history, this meticulously researched volume brings together a wealth of unpublished images as well as newly discovered letters by Catesby, which, with their first-hand accounts of his collecting and encounters in the wild, bring the story of this extraordinary pioneer naturalist vividly to life.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

An in-depth examination of William Blake’s glorious and acclaimed series of twelve monoprintsAmong William Blake’s (1757–1827) most widely recognized and highly regarded works as an artist are twelve color printed drawings, or monoprints, conceived and executed in 1795. This book investigates these masterworks, explaining Blake’s technique—one he essentially reinvented, unaware of 17th-century precursors—to show that these works were produced as paintings, and played a crucial role in Blake’s development as a painter. Using material and historical analyses, Joseph Viscomi argues that the monoprints were created as autonomous paintings rather than as illustrations for Blake’s books with an intended viewing order. Enlivened with bountiful illustrations, the text approaches the works within the context of their time, not divorced from ideas expressed in Blake’s writings but not illustrative of or determined by those writings.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The first reference work to cover all engravers working on copper in Britain and Ireland 1714–1820This biographical dictionary of engravers working on copper encompasses both those who produced fine art prints, and also those who engraved book illustrations for medical, technical and literary works, all of which played a more important part than is usually realised in spreading information in the age of Enlightenment. Some 3,000 biographical entries draw on much unpublished information, researched over four decades, notably records of apprenticeship, genealogy, insurance and bankruptcy as well as newspaper advertisements and contemporary accounts.  This is the first reference work to cover all engravers working on copper in Britain and Ireland 1714–1820. Many biographical entries describe celebrated engravers producing “fine art” prints of paintings, which spread knowledge about living and dead artists. However, this book also builds up a more complex picture of the occupation of printmaking and includes engravers, many previously unresearched, who engraved ephemeral material, such as trade cards, bank notes, and satirical prints as well as the images that spread knowledge across literary, geographical, historical, topographical, medical and technical fields.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The first comprehensive dictionary of everyone of importance in the creation of English architecture during the Elizabethan and Jacobean agesThis long-awaited work of scholarship provides a comprehensive dictionary of everyone of importance in the creation of English architecture in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. With characteristically deft prose, Mark Girouard draws on a lifetime of experience in the study of architectural history to assess the impact of some six hundred master craftsmen, surveyors, designers and patrons at work between 1540 and 1640. Surveying a period not covered by other dictionaries, this book is a key text for students and scholars of British architecture and its allied arts between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Mark Girouard’s lively comments and felicitous style also make it an enjoyable browse for anyone interested in the magnificent buildings that formed the background to the music of Dowland, Wilbye and Byrd; the fascinating political intrigues of the Tudor court; and the writings of Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Campion and Jonson.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

A reconstruction of the ‘Strand palaces’, where England’s early‑modern and post‑Reformation elites jostled to build and furnish new, secular cathedralsThis book reconstructs the so-called "Strand palaces"—eleven great houses that once stood along the Strand in London. Between 1550 and 1650, this was the capital’s "Golden Mile": home to a unique concentration of patrons and artists, and where England’s early-modern and post-Reformation elites jostled to establish themselves by building and furnishing new, secular cathedrals. Their inventive, eclectic, and yet carefully-crafted mix of vernacular and continental features not only shaped some of the greatest country houses of the day, but also the image of English power on the world stage. It also gave rise to a distinctly English style, which was to become the symbol of a unique architectural period. The product of almost two decades of research, and benefitting from close archival investigation, this book brings together an incredible array of unpublished sources that sheds new light on one of the most important chapters in London’s architectural history, and on English architecture more broadly.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

A study of how artists and photographers shaped imperial visions of war and peace in the Victorian periodIn an era that saw the birth of photography (c. 1839) and the rise of the illustrated press (c. 1842), the British experience of their empire became increasingly defined by the processes and products of image-making.  Examining moments of military and diplomatic crisis, this book considers how artists and photographers operating "in the field" helped to define British visions of war and peace. The Victorians increasingly turned to visual spectacle to help them compose imperial sovereignty. The British Empire was thus rendered into a spectacle of "peace," from world’s fairs to staged diplomatic rituals. Yet this occurred against a backdrop of incessant colonial war—campaigns which, far from being ignored, were in fact unprecedentedly visible within the cultural forms of Victorian society. Visual media thus shaped the contours of imperial statecraft and established many of the aesthetic and ethical frames within which the colonial violence was confronted.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The Survey of London returns to the East End to chronicle Whitechapel, shedding new light on this widely misunderstood districtIn these volumes, the Survey of London returns to the East End to chronicle Whitechapel, covering Aldgate to Mile End Green, and Brick Lane to Wellclose Square. The name Whitechapel—one of London’s best known—is highly evocative, carrying dark, even mythic associations. These are set aside to present new histories of all the area’s sites and buildings, those standing and many that have gone, in districts that have been repeatedly rebuilt.  Abutting the City of London, Whitechapel has, since medieval times, housed commerce and many varied industries. Enriched by centuries of immigration, this area has been “global” for as long as that word has denoted the world and, amidst widespread poverty, some of London’s great institutions have been founded here. In the midst of these landmarks, Whitechapel has seen recent transformation. These volumes bear historical witness with hundreds of superb new photographs and meticulous architectural drawings illustrating detailed accounts of topographical development in accessible prose. They will be an invaluable resource for historians, planners, residents, and the wider public.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

A bold reassessment of nineteenth-century British painter and decorative artist Edward Burne-Jones, elucidating his fundamentally radical defiance of the Victorian ageChallenging the dominant characterization of Edward Burne-Jones as an escapist who withdrew from the modern world into imaginary realms of his own creation, this groundbreaking book argues that he was engaged in a fundamentally radical defiance of the age, protesting against imperial aggression, capitalist economic inequality, and environmental destruction in the wake of the industrial revolution.  Harnessing the utopian power of embodied aesthetic encounters, Burne-Jones drew inspiration from the medieval concept of dreams as visionary states of transformation. Therefore, his art functioned not as a retreat, but as a vehicle for revolutionary awakening. Often characterized as a painter, this book re-centers Burne-Jones’s practice in the decorative arts, demonstrating that he consistently interrogated the boundaries of artistic media, in keeping with wider debates over the role of the arts in the nineteenth century.  The first scholarly monograph solely devoted to Burne-Jones since 1973, The Radical Vision of Edward Burne-Jones offers a thorough re-examination of his work, illuminating his radical defiance of the artistic, social, and political hierarchies of nineteenth-century Britain.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art