Thames and Hudson Ltd – serie

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'A burst of springtime joy' Daily Telegraph'A springboard for ideas about art, space, time and light' The Times'Lavishly illustrated' GuardianDavid Hockney reflects upon life and art as he experiences lockdown in rural NormandyAn uplifting manifesto that affirms art’s capacity to divert and inspire, Spring Cannot be Cancelled draws on a wealth of conversations and correspondence between the late David Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford, in which the artist reflects upon life as he self-isolates in rural France. Their exchanges span nature, food, art, opera, fairy tales and more, and are illustrated by a selection of Hockney’s Normandy iPad drawings and paintings alongside works by other artists, including van Gogh, Monet and Bruegel. We see how Hockney is propelled ever forward by his infectious enthusiasms and sense of wonder, still utterly absorbed by the themes that have fascinated him for decades: light, colour, space, perception, water, trees. He has much to teach us, not only about how to see... but about how to live.

The most comprehensive book on David Hockney and his extraordinarily creative output over a rich and joyful career spanning more than sixty years: Hockney’s Pictures is essential reading for any fans of his work. 'A compelling narrative of the workings of a curious, intelligent, visually inventive mind at work' Art Quarterly'From between the covers springs all the brightness and energy of the prolific output of this most exuberant and yet sensitive artist' The TimesThe story of Hockney is one of passion: passion for seeing, passion for telling, passion for images. But to these should be added passion for life. Hockney's art is a celebration of what it is to be alive. All his pictures – sometimes tender, as when he drew close friends and family; sometimes playful, as in his paintings of lazy, carefree days by the pool; sometimes awe-inspiring, as with his monumental images of the Grand Canyon – convey what it means to be in the world, to see it, to move in it, to love it. This constant exploration of how to communicate such experiences and perceptions through art emerges with particular clarity in this visually dense volume, now updated with a new final chapter that focuses on his prolific recent work in series across various media, including the iPad. Charting almost sixty years of extraordinary creativity, the book is arranged thematically to show the evolution and diversity of Hockney’s prolific paintings, drawings, watercolours, prints and photography. It also features quotes from the artist that illuminate the passion and deep thought behind his work. Hockney's Pictures celebrates the artist's lifelong experiments in ways of looking, seeing and depicting.

‘A clarion call and a celebration of how green spaces can radically transform both people and the planet’ Sunday Times ‘It is hard to overstate the potent timeliness of Lottie Delamain’s book. Against a backdrop of unsustainable human activity and climate crisis, this is a well-researched and beautifully presented collection of 65 inspiring green worlds powered by hope and innovation’ Gardens Illustrated An exploration of the many ways in which green spaces can be the solution to some of our most pressing problems, from loneliness to climate change. With the world warming, prices soaring and crises all around, it’s easy to feel powerless in our everyday lives. But what if the solutions to many of these problems could be found simply by going outside? Bringing together the galvanizing stories of 65 projects that revolve around plants, Gardens that can Save the World reveals how small changes can have a big impact on you, your loved ones and the environment around us. Discover the myriad ways that green spaces can: • REPAIR the damage done to soil, water and biodiversity• EMPOWER communities struggling with conflict and hardship• NOURISH our bodies and our mind• HEAL stress, isolation and trauma through contact with nature• REIMAGINE neglected landscapes, and our world Whether you're a green-fingered garden aficionado or have yet to step outside your front room, award-winning garden designer Lottie Delamain’s uplifting book reveals how people from all walks of life are harnessing nature to right the planet’s wrongs. Packed with inspiration, it will encourage you to try out easy-to-replicate strategies in your own plant pot, balcony, or further afield.

AESME STUDIO offer a masterclass in designing naturalistic floral arrangements with a sense of place in a range of stunning settings, from the English countryside to Europe and beyond. Sisters Ally and Jess are the founders of leading London flower company AESME STUDIO and have created a unique naturalistic style that connects floral design back to nature. This, their first book, takes the reader on a journey through the seasons. The sisters visit twelve unique locations throughout the UK, Europe and beyond to gather flowers and create seasonal floral arrangements with a sense of place. Naturalistic floral design is about using local, wild and seasonal flowers to create beautiful, sustainable arrangements that are in harmony with their location. From English country houses to a garden in Provence, Jess and Ally have spent a year documenting their travels to provide a unique guide to how to create stunning – and often inexpensive – arrangements wherever you are. Each chapter tells the story of the sisters' discoveries along the way and explores a location through its regional flowers and scenery, offering plenty of ideas for styling flowers along with arrangement 'recipes' that show how each was designed and created. Whether you are interested in naturalistic floral design or just looking for tips and ideas to style flowers more sustainably at home, this journey through a year of floral arrangements will be a rich source of inspiration for anyone looking to decorate with seasonal flowers.

'A book full of heart – frank and confessional – that presents Emin at the zenith of her powers, having survived near-fatal cancer and found new purpose and conviction ... this concise, elegant and beautifully illustrated study, with Gayford’s skilful and always apposite narrative, is as thought-provoking as it is readable, and I closed it with a greatly enriched understanding of the mysterious process by which life is transmuted into art' Ariane Bankes, The Spectator 'Gayford is an established confidant of painters, the artist-whisperer of Lucian Freud and David Hockney. He elicits a remarkable trove of information and opinion from Emin ... My Heart Is This is the story of how a dark stretch in her life led Emin to a new love and appreciation of paint and greater facility at the canvas. It will appeal to her many fans as well as the gallery crowd' Stephen Smith, Financial Times Tracey Emin talks about painting: what it is, why she does it, why it matters. Richly illustrated with photographs of the artist and her art, here is a vivid and intimate portrait of her life and work in her own words, in conversation with art critic Martin Gayford. Emin reflects on painting – how she approaches it, why it matters to her, and how it connects to her life – and how everything has changed since her cancer diagnosis. ‘Every image has first entered my mind, travelled through my heart, my blood – arriving at the end of my hand. Everything has come through me.’ Offering a uniquely personal insight into the artist’s extraordinary life and career, Emin expresses herself in her characteristically frank, confessional style that is so familiar to anyone who has seen her paintings. This is Tracey Emin on her own terms: on learning to paint, on living her life after cancer, and relearning why painting matters to her above everything else.

The debut monograph from the inimitable photographer, exploring the strangeness lurking behind the ordinary in everyday life.Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer is a curated collection of Brooke DiDonato’s singularly surreal photography. Evoking feelings of nostalgia or disorientation, DiDonato’s work teeters between the familiar and the fantastical. Inspired by family homes in Ohio, her compositions challenge expectations of how space can be occupied. Torsos, legs and arms contort into uncanny arrangements across sofas and ascend into attics. Ordinary surroundings often have a compelling presence – white picket fences, corn fields, deserts and sidewalks become sites of unexpected psychological encounters as figures are subsumed by their environments. Her pictures are playfully titled – Growing Upward Has Its Downside, What to Expect When You’re Expecting Nothing, and Went to Therapy but I’m Still in My Patterns – and poignantly touch upon contemporary anxieties and universal themes of love and loss.The most extensive collection of DiDonato’s work to date, Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer brings together her most well-known bodies of work, including A House is Not a Home, alongside new works published here in print for the first time. A short introduction from writer Eleanor Sutherland provides an overview of DiDonato’s practice, while an intimate conversation between Emmy award-winning filmmaker and writer Eve Van Dyke and Brooke’s father, Bob DiDonato, offers a personal glimpse into her evolution as an artist.A one-of-a-kind photographic experience, DiDonato’s first monograph invites us into her beguiling world, daring us to stare a little longer.

Lee Miller’s work for Vogue from 1941–1945 sets her apart as a photographer and writer of extraordinary ability. The quality of her photography from the period has long been recognized as outstanding, and its full range is shown here, accompanied by her brilliant despatches. Starting with her first report from a field hospital soon after D-Day, the despatches and nearly 160 photographs show war-ravaged cities, buildings and landscapes, but above all they portray the war-resilient people – soldiers, leaders, medics, evacuees, prisoners of war, the wounded, the villains and the heroes. There is the raw edge of combat portrayed at the siege of St Malo and in the bitterly fought Alsace campaign, and the disbelief and outrage Miller describes on witnessing the victims of Dachau. The war’s horror is relieved by the spirit of post-liberation Paris, where she inudulged in frivoluous fashions and recorded memorable conversations with Picasso, Cocteau, Eluard, Aragon and Colette. The book ends with Miller’s first-on-the-scene report giving a sardonic description of HItler’s abandoned house in Munich, and the looting and burning of his alpine fortress at Berchtesgaden, which marked a symbolic end to the war. David E. Scherman, the renowned war photojournalist who shared many of Miller’s assignments, contributes a foreword.

The most talked-about art book of the year Sunday TimesIt will change our views of Western painting London Review of BooksHockney has utterly transformed the scope and basis of the debate… He is making us look at things afresh Martin Kemp, University of OxfordHockney is a superb communicator, his prose as lithe and vivid as his own pencil line GuardianSparkling, brilliantly analysed treatise on the use of optics in art and one of the most important books on painting published in the last 100 years State magazine Secret Knowledge created a sensation when it was first published. David Hockney’s enthralling story of how some of the great works of Western art were created with the help of mirrors and lenses and how the optical look came to dominate painting attracted major media attention around the world and generated intense debate in the fields of science and art history. Now in this expanded edition, Hockney takes his thesis even further, revealing for the first time new and exciting discoveries. Hockney's voyage of discovery began when he became gripped by a desire to find out how the artists of the past had managed to depict the world around them so accurately and vividly. As a painter faced with similar technical problems, he asked himself: 'How did they do this?' For the next two years, he sacrificed his own time as an artist to follow this mystery trail, obsessively tracking down the hidden secrets of the Old Masters. As news of his controversial investigations spread, he enlisted the support of scientists and art historians worldwide. In Secret Knowledge, Hockney recounts the story of his quest as it unfolded. He explains how he uncovered piece after piece of scientific and visual evidence, each one yielding further revelations about the past. With the benefit of his painter's eye, he examines the major works of art history and reveals the truth of how artists such as Caravaggio, Velazquez, van Eyck, Holbein and Ingres used mirrors and lenses to help them create their famous masterpieces. For this new edition, Hockney demonstrates, with the aid of drawings, paintings and photographs of his own experiments, how Renaissance artists used mirrors and lenses to develop perspective and chiaroscuro - radically challenging our view of how these two foundations of Western art were established. Hundreds of paintings and drawings - among them the best-known and best-loved works in the history of Western art - are reproduced and accompanied by Hockney's infectious and enthusiastic descriptions. His own photographs and drawings illustrate the various methods used by past artists to capture accurate likenesses, and present the results they would have achieved. In addition, extracts from the many historical and modern documents that he uncovered offer further intriguing evidence, while correspondence between himself and an array of international experts provides an exciting account of the remarkable story as it happened. Secret Knowledge is not just about the lost techniques of the Old Masters. It is also about how we see, treat and make images in an age of computer manipulation. Taking nothing for granted, questioning received ideas and practice, Hockney opens our eyes to the way we perceive and represent the world – a privileged insight into the history of art by an outstandingly prolific and original artist.

A sweeping new history of the city of Rome, told through its emperors and the monuments they built to make their mark on one of the great capitals of the classical world. ‘What is worse than Nero? What is better than Nero’s Baths?’ – so wrote the poet Martial in the first century AD, demonstrating the power that buildings have on public consciousness. In ancient Rome, who built a monument and why mattered as much as its physical structure. Over centuries and under many different emperors, a small village in Italy was transformed into the crowning glory of an empire. Seeking out the personalities behind the great building projects is key to understanding them. With this firmly in mind, Paul Roberts takes the reader on a tour of ancient Rome, vividly evoking the sights and sounds of the city: from the roar of the crowds at the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum, to the dazzling gleam of the marble- and mosaic-covered baths of Caracalla and Diocletian. He tells this story emperor by emperor, drawing out the political, social and cultural backdrop to the monuments and ultimately the very human motivations that gave rise to their construction – and destruction. These fascinating buildings are further brought to life with reconstructions that show how the ancients themselves would have experienced them. When and why were these monuments built? What did they add to the lives of the people who used them? What impact did they have on the shape of the city? Roberts expertly weaves together the latest archaeological research with social and cultural history, to tell the story of the Eternal City, always in some way rising, falling and being rebuilt.

A darkly evocative compendium of images exploring natural, constructed, imaginary and subconscious underworlds, curated by renowned image collector and social media figure Stephen Ellcock. From the burrows and secret bunkers beneath our feet to imagined hellscapes and surrealist dreamscapes, the disquieting, alarming and wonderful visuals span natural and constructed subterranea and imagined and subconscious worlds. A personal introduction by Stephen together with contextual chapter introductions establish the key themes, while supplementary texts elucidate essential concepts, historical events and figures. Thought-provoking literary, philosophical and spiritual quotations punctuate the intriguing images. Together, the images and authoritative text highlight the interplay between the real and the imagined, revealing how the real has fed our fears and hopes and informed our imagination – and conversely, how our imagination has depicted the esoteric, the abject and the unknown.

One hundred of the most outstanding photographs taken by photographer, model and Surrealist muse Lee Miller, published in anticipation of the November 2023 release of the film Lee, starring Kate Winslet as Lee Miller Photojournalist, war correspondent, model and Surrealist muse, Lee Miller was one of the most important women photographers of the twentieth century, working in the fields of photojournalism, fashion, portraiture and advertising. This book presents 100 of Miller’s finest works in a single volume. Introduced to photography at an early age, Lee Miller honed her craft in Paris, where she associated with the Surrealists and avant-garde artists including Jean Cocteau and Picasso. Together with Man Ray she accidentally discovered the distinctive technique of solarization to create mesmerizing halo effects. After establishing her own photographic studio in New York, where she became a prominent commercial photographer, she then moved to the Middle East and Europe before becoming the official war photographer for Vogue, a period during which she took many of her most iconic photographs. This evocative book collects Lee Miller’s most famous documentary, fashion, and war works, as well as photographs of Miller, all carefully compiled by her son the photographer Antony Penrose, with a foreword by actress Kate Winslet, who will star as Miller in the film Lee.

Every blot's an inspirationEvery line is freeUnlock your imaginationDraw what you seeHirameki - 'brainwave' or 'flash of inspiration' in Japanese - is where doodling and imagination come together. Simply put, it's the art of turning a random blot into something amazing, just by adding a few dots and lines. If it's true that you can find happiness in little things, this book should keep your eyes, hand and brain entertained for hours.

Published to mark the 250th anniversary of Caspar David Friedrich’s birth, the most thorough Friedrich retrospective in many years. Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) is renowned as the Romantic painter par excellence, his works icons of an age of major social upheaval. His landscape paintings and drawings broke with traditional patterns of representation, and paved new ways of both experiencing and reflecting on the ambivalent relationship between humankind and nature. Accompanying the most comprehensive Friedrich retrospective in many years, this catalogue re-examines the artist’s groundbreaking work in light of the urgent challenges in a time of climate crisis and postcolonial reflection. It centres on more than sixty paintings, among them many major iconic works, and about 100 drawings. Selected works by Friedrich’s colleagues, notably August Heinrich, Georg Friedrich Kersting, Ernst Ferdinand Oehme and Johann Alexander Thiele are also featured. The second part of the book focuses on the contemporary reception of his work. In contributions ranging from video and photography to installations, some twenty artists working across a variety of genres and media explore the Romantic era, its attitude to nature and the art of Caspar David Friedrich. The participants include Alex Grein, Swaantje Güntzel, Jochen Hein, Johanna Karlsson, Hiroyuki Masuyama, Loudmila Milanova, Mariele Neudecker, Ulrike Rosenbach, Susan Schuppli, Santeri Tuori and Kehinde Wiley.

An authoritative and concise history of witchcraft from the ancient world up to the present day. Witchcraft has always been a fluid and intriguing belief system that has enchanted and sometimes terrified humanity. For over forty years, A History of Witchcraft has provided the authoritative history of witchery and the occult. Beginning with magic in the ancient world, Jeffrey Russell explores the definition of witchcraft in its many diverse forms, from the worship of the Greek goddess of magic, Hecate, through the witch-crazes of the 15th and 16th centuries to the development of modern witchcraft by Aleister Crowley and Gerald Gardner in the early 20th century. Brooks Alexander analyses the development of witchcraft and neopaganism in the present day, charting the dissemination of modern witchcraft through modern media and the tensions that arise when a secretive cult becomes an open and recognized religion. This updated edition features a new chapter exploring the challenges that witchcraft has faced in the past decade, including the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok, the coronavirus pandemic and new neopagan groups.

A journey through the great mass-extinction events that have shaped our Earth: 'Deeply informed and readable' Nature In this vast sweep of our Earth’s history, Michael Benton brings the deep past to life as never before. Deploying the cutting-edge tools in biology, chemistry, physics and geology that are transforming our understanding of previous environmental cataclysms – including the incredible new discovery of a hitherto unknown extinction event – he uncovers not only their lethal effects but also the processes that brought about such large-scale destruction. Beginning with the oldest extinction, Benton investigates the Late Ordovician, which set the evolution of the first animals on an entirely new course; the late Devonian, brought on by global warming; the cataclysmic End-Permian, which wiped out over 90 per cent of all life on Earth; and, book-ending the age of the dinosaurs, the newly discovered Carnian Pluvial Event and the End-Cretaceous asteroid. He examines how global warming, acid rain, ocean acidification, erupting volcanoes and meteorite impact have affected conditions on Earth, the drastic consequences for global ecology, and how life in turn survived, adapted and evolved. This expert retelling of scientific breakthroughs allows us to link long-ago upheavals to our modern crises. As today’s climate scientists and political leaders grapple to understand these processes and our planet enters the sixth great extinction, these insights from the past may hold the key to survival.

A visually compelling and panoramic analysis of the eclectic culture of shamanism. Entering trance states, healing body and soul, invoking animals as spirit guides and journeying to incorporeal realms – these skills have been central to shamanism over thousands of years and across much of the world, from the Evenki shamans of northern and central Asia to contemporary Neo-Shamans of the West. Join cultural and social anthropologist Max Carocci as he explores an eclectic array of shamanic artefacts and images, decoding the symbolism and explaining their extraordinary shamanic ritual practices. Marvel at the adornments of a Siberian shaman’s coat; examine the prehistoric rock art that depicts mystical transformations of shamans into animals; and discover the psychotropic plants that open our minds to interdimensional journeys of healing and wisdom. Carocci makes the manifold meanings encoded in the forms, colours and purposes of shamanic images and objects clear, painting a vibrant and in-depth picture of shamanic cultures past and present.

A unique re-interpretation of the city of ancient Rome and its empire, using the tools offered by the latest information technology and graphic design. Packed with cleverly designed graphics, charts and diagrams, Ancient Rome: Infographics uses data visualization to tell the epic tale of the city of Rome and its empire. Every aspect of the Roman world is explored, from the birth of the Republic to the imperial dynasties, from the political and legal system to Rome’s military might. Drawing on international sources, this complex history is made clear and comprehensible to modern readers, while offering the insights and rigour that historians demand. Original, accessible and fascinating, Ancient Rome: Infographics will delight history buffs, graphic design aficionados, and everyone seeking an overview of a civilization that shaped the world.

A dramatic collection of photographs revealing the world’s most beautiful climbing locations, from Tsaranoro in Madagascar and Teplicke in the Czech Republic to Mount Huashan in China. The popularity of rock climbing is burgeoning across the globe, with dedicated communities practising everything from bouldering to sport climbing, top-roping to free soloing, in beautiful locations around the world. This stunning collection of climbing photography reveals the beauty of the sport from behind the lens, where patterned rock faces, vertical spires, honeycomb holds and sweeping landscapes of ochre, slate and snow all provide breath-taking visual drama. Capturing the beauty, theatre and emotions of a climb in a single shuttered moment invites the viewer to reflect, and meditative texts, written by the world’s premier climbers and focusing on themes from intensity to environment, lines to roofs, trace the experience of being out on the rock face. A reference section includes practical details such as a glossary, grading table and list of selected routes. From the beauty of movement to the bounds of human endeavour, the splendour of landscapes and the allure of otherworldly formations, the art of rock climbing is shown in all its glories.

Traces a key turning point in the history of photography: the young Joel Meyerowitz's early experiments in colour photography. An early advocate of colour photography, Joel Meyerowitz has impacted and influenced generations of artists. For fifty-eight years, the master photographer has documented the US’s ever-changing social landscape.For a while, during the late 1960s, Meyerowitz carried two cameras: one loaded with monochrome stock, the other with colour. Just how, when and why US fine-art photographers switched from black-and-white image-making, which was prized within the gallery system, to colour photography, once seen as the preserve of the holiday snapper, has been the cause of much debate.In this book, Meyerowitz tells the story of his early days as a photographer when he was told that serious photographers took black & white pictures. 'But why?' he asked, 'when the world is in colour?' He proceed to buy a colour camera and various rolls of films and to read manuals and experiment with colour techniques: a passion he continued to pursue all his life...

A career-to-date retrospective of a unique creative talent. Hyperborea presents unforgettable visual tales of life in the Siberian Arctic that photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva knew when she was growing up in Tiksi, a town on the shore of the Laptev Sea in the Republic of Yakutia. Her work discloses both the fragility and beautiful desolation of the land and those who inhabit it, and her rigorously composed photographs glow with rich otherworldly colour, bristle with the raw vibrancy of the climate and exhibit the quiet intensity of lives borne out in seclusion and extremes. This beautifully produced photobook contains a decade of work, with photographs selected from across the full range of Arbugaeva’s series and extensive travels across the Russian Arctic coast and to connect with people living in these remote and inhospitable places. The photographs that she brings back from her long-term visits convey a world where everything seems connected: humans and nature, the sky and the land. An elemental space of deep solitude and slower pace of life. Her images invite us to contemplate a territory that has been a place of longing and imagination for many, which is now under existential threat from a multitude of environmental changes. With an introduction by Piers Vitebsky, four texts by Arbugaeva to supplement the images, and a specially commissioned map to provide a sense of where Arbugaeva’s work is located, Hyperborea is a future collectible for all photobook fans and an introduction to a global audience of a very special talent in the world of photography.

The Middle East: The Cradle of Civilization synthesizes the latest research and information from a range of disciplines to tell the compelling story, from the Neolithic period through to the Arab conquest, of how a group of linguistically disparate, nomadic tribes responded to specific social, economic and environmental factors to form the world’s first complex societies. This is an authoritative, detailed and accessible story, divided into six easily navigable parts arranged chronologically, and then into chapters exploring the history, religion, political and social organization, art, science and architecture of the peoples of the region. The text is illustrated with more than 500 superb full colour images – artifacts, artworks, statues, reliefs, buildings and landscapes – as well as six detailed maps, which bring the region’s dramatic past vividly to life.

'A breathtaking glimpse at the margins of space history' Tim Peake 'A cosmic treasure trove' Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock 'A wonderful celebration of the creative power of spaceflight to transform the impossible into the infinitely possible' Nicole Stott A celebration of space exploration told through the visual imagination of great dreamers from the sixteenth century to the present day. The universe is alluring and mysterious. A place of wonder and terror. We know it’s under no obligation to make sense to us, and yet . . . Space Journal is a visual celebration of our perception of the cosmos, and our efforts to reach it, from the seventeenth century to the present day. Dallas Campbell weaves together priceless archival memorabilia, revolutionary experiments and spectacular scenes to map both real and potential encounters with our celestial backyard. From Galileo’s shopping list to speeches annotated in President John F. Kennedy’s own hand, from The War of the Worlds to Space Invaders, Campbell sets out the radical thinkers and doers who have launched us towards the final frontier.

An entirely fresh and accessible approach to reading ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs by a proven expert, this step-by-step introduction assumes no previous knowledge of grammar or ancient languages, but guides readers through the inscriptions, from simple to more complex, supported by full explanations and translations. Readers' will see their knowledge and skills grow as Bill Manley clearly explains the mysteries of hieroglyphs without jargon or technical terms, guiding the reader step by step through 27 real-life, unaltered texts from stelae, tombs and portable objects. Specially commissioned line drawings present engaging texts clearly and elegantly, while fact boxes bring to life images of monuments of high officials and kings, giving glimpses of ancient Egyptian society and beliefs. This guide is essential reading for anyone interested in Ancient Egypt, hieroglyphs or ancient languages and contains all the knowledge you need in order to start deciphering hieroglyphic texts for yourself.

A fresh perspective on British landscape drawing in the Victorian and Modern eras. The attempts by artists of the Victorian and early Modern period to convey not merely the physical properties of a landscape but also its emotional and spiritual impact – landscape as ‘places of the mind’, as the critic Geoffrey Grigson put it – is the focus of this fascinating new study of British watercolours produced between 1850 and 1950. Drawing on the British Museum’s impressive collection, this book explores artists’ spiritual quests to capture the essence of landscape and convey a sense of place. Artists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on earlier traditions but developed and extended the genre through their imaginative, personal responses to the artistic, cultural and social upheavals of the time. The book includes works by Victorian artists Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Poynter and by many well known twentieth-century artists, such as John and Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore, some of which have never previously been published.

A visual compendium of botanical sketches, many specially photographed, providing a revealing insight into the immediate responses of artists encountering the glories of the plant world. While highly finished drawings and paintings frequently feature in histories of botanical art, the preparatory sketches, first impressions and creative thoughts on paper behind them are rarely seen and have often remained hidden and locked away. Botanical Sketchbooks brings these personal and vividly spontaneous records gloriously back into the light. In a series of biographical portraits organized thematically into four sections, the book illuminates a range of intriguing characters, from many different countries and cultures, including Germany, France, Italy, America, Australia, Japan and China. Sketchbooks proper are joined by notebooks, journals, albums, loose pieces of paper, works on vellum, manuscripts, letters, herbarium sheets and marginalia – even one drawing on the back of an envelope. Turning the pages of this book will be an invitation to relive extraordinary experiences, imagine lost worlds, and be immersed in the endeavours, observations and motivations of the makers of such beautiful and enchanting art.

'One of the best books ever written by one painter about another' John Russell, The New York Times Lucian Freud (1922-2011) was exceptional among 20th-century artists. His vigorous and innovative paintings are works of consistent richness and force, often disturbing and haunting. This book, in which Freud took a large part, is exceptional in itself: he chose, grouped and presented the large selection of paintings and drawings. The text is by Sir Lawrence Gowing, who was a painter himself and was a long-standing friend of Freud's.

The first book to consider Kiefer’s photography and use of photographs in his wider artistic practice. Known for his monumental painting and installations, the internationally celebrated artist Anselm Kiefer's works are marked by a constant questioning of history and collective memory. Born in Germany two months before the Nazi capitulation in 1945, Kiefer's reflections on post-war identity, loss, and shared experience, nourished by myths and literature, create an unparalleled breadth of imagery. The use of photography as both practice and source material is a little-known aspect of Kiefer’s art that has played a central role throughout his career. This book presents over 130 works charting the artist's relationship with photography, and his investigations into what images reveal.

Join beloved picture-book creator Beatrice Alemagna on a messy, magical adventure of self-discovery! Annoyed by her big brother and her own bad temper, Yuki throws her house keys down a manhole. When she goes after them, she arrives in a strange underground world, ruled by the mighty Mud Princess. In a place where lost things are found and anger tastes delicious, Yuki finds new friends and learns that she's not the only person living with difficult feelings...

A Radio 4 Book of the Week 'A marvellous book' Ali Smith Shaped by the cycle of the natural world, a fresh look at the life and work of John Constable to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth in 2026. As exhilarating as a lungful of oxygen: that’s how some of his contemporaries felt about John Constable’s paintings. Others, though, were baffled by his uncompromisingly fresh and realistic treatment of the natural world. Susan Owens follows Constable through the seasons, tracing the rhythms and resonances of the artist’s year to offer a vivid, unconventional perspective on this beloved figure. Whether in London in May, preparing pictures for exhibition and longing for the Suffolk spring, or painting boat-builders and waiting to be married in a particularly gloomy September, Constable’s life and work were unusually shaped by the yearly cycles of weather and agriculture, as well as by the often competing demands of the art world. Raised in Suffolk and trained to manage his father's land, his rural background had an enduring impact on his painting. His was the approach of one who knew the laneways, ploughs and millponds he painted intimately, and who understood the countryside as a place of both labour and natural phenomena. Though today he is often considered a traditional artist, in truth John Constable was a radical. His sketchbooks and paintings reject second-hand, slip-shod versions of nature, instead subjecting the land, its people and industry to intense scrutiny; developing a new kind of painting to fit the landscape he saw with his farmer’s eye and felt beneath the soles of his boots.