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.

A stunning collection, accumulated over many years, of paintings, drawings and calligraphy of the highest quality mostly created for albums from the Safavid, Uzbek, Ottoman and Mughal Empires from the 16th to early 19th century. Lavishly illustrated, this unusually exquisite and scholarly book is a noteworthy addition to its field. This publication presents a collection of over sixty paintings, drawings and calligraphic specimens mostly made in the Safavid, Uzbek, Ottoman and Mughal Empires in the period from the 16th through the early 19th century for inclusion in albums (muraqqa‘). The compilation of these albums, involving the collection and ordering of the works to be included as well as the design and execution of decorative borders, was an art form in itself and amounted to a broader cultural phenomenon that has increasingly become the focus of scholarly attention. This was the age of the master artist, whose work was eagerly sought by collectors, imitated by admirers and forgers, taken as loot by invaders, and exchanged as gifts that had value across political borders. The international currency of a master artist’s work is particularly apparent in the case of the calligrapher Mir ‘Ali of Herat (d. 1544), whose calligraphies were almost obsessively sought out by the Mughal rulers of India and provided a model for subsequent generations of calligraphers in India and Iran. In Iran, Shah ‘Abbas’ new capital of Isfahan was the breeding ground for a generation of artists specialized in single-page calligraphic compositions, paintings and drawings, often working in distinctive styles. These included calligraphers such as Mir ‘Imad al-Hasani and ‘Ali Riza ‘Abbasi, and painters like Riza ‘Abbasi, Muhammad Qasim and, later, Mu’in Musavvir. The processes of collection and compilation were complex, as albums were gifted and reassembled to suit the tastes and outlook of new owners. An eloquent example of this ongoing evolution is the famous St. Petersburg Album. Compiled and given decorative borders in Iran in the mid-18th century, the album contains a number of Mughal and Deccani paintings and drawings presumed to have been taken to Iran as plunder by Nadir Shah following the invasion of India in 1739. The end of this tradition is marked in the publication by a number of works from Mughal-style albums of calligraphy and painting acquired by officers and administrators of the British East India Company such as Warren Hastings and William Fraser.

Published in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death, this engrossing publication accompanies an exhibition the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Raphael and the Pope’s Librarian brings together for the first time one of the most fascinating works in the museum’s collection – the Gardner Museum’s portrait of papal librarian Tommaso Inghirami – and a painting from the Vatican Museums depicting an episode in this life. This book tells the story of the first Raphael in America and explores Inghirami’s fascinating career. Nearly five centuries after his death in 1520, Raphael’s fame remains undiminished. Crowned “prince of painters” by Giorgio Vasari, he inspired both artists of his own time and others for centuries afterward. According to the celebrated writer Henry James, Raphael’s work was “semi-sacred.” Gilded Age American collectors swooned over his iconic religious images and masterly brushwork, and James’s contemporaries feverishly tried and failed to acquire Raphael’s rare paintings in a market flooded with copies, and the occasional forgery.Isabella Stewart Gardner took up the challenge, determined to buy a magnificent Madonna by Raphael. Following her gripping hunt, Gardner was the first collector to bring a work by Raphael to America, where its unexpected subject led to a mixed reception and generated surprising rumors in the years to follow. Despite any hesitations over the painting’s beauty, Gardner named an entire gallery of her new Boston museum after the Renaissance master and installed many of her most celebrated works of art around his portrait of the rotund cleric Tommaso Inghirami. Described by Erasmus as “the Cicero of our era”, Inghirami was a celebrity in the high Renaissance esteemed for his profound erudition and theatrical abilities. His unparalleled knowledge and understanding of classics made him the ideal choice for Vatican Librarian under Pope Julius II. Yet he achieved a lasting fame on stage, playing a leading role in the revival of ancient theatre and acquiring the nickname “Fedra” after starring as the lovesick Queen Athens in Seneca’s Greek tragedy Hippolytus (Phaedra). Inghirami’s friend Raphael offered him another role, recasting the Renaissance humanist as the congenial philosopher Epicurius in his legendary School of Athens fresco before memorializing him in the more worldly painted portrait at the center of this exhibition. Raphael and the Pope’s Librarian is the latest in the Close Up series of books accompanying a Gardner exhibition series, each installment of which sheds new light on an outstanding work of art in the permanent collection.

The Dresden collection’s singular group of Rembrandt works – about 20 drawings attributed to the master today and the nearly complete oeuvre of etchings– will provide the basis for this remarkable publication. It will have a particular focus on Rembrandt’s narrative compositions, printed self-portraits, studies of his wife Saskia, and will include works from all periods of his oeuvre plus prints and drawings by artists from his workshop and followers. The list of artists who understood Rembrandt as a dynamic authority and source of inspiration is long, reaching from his immediate followers to masters of the 18th century, from Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione to Jonathan Richardson to the kindred spirit Francisco de Goya, into the 20th century and up to the present day. Examples include Edouard Manet, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, MaxBeckmann, Pablo Picasso, as well as Marlene Dumas and William Kentridge and artists from the GDR such as A.R. Penck. By including works by these artists, the exhibtion and catalogue foreground Rembrandt as one of the most important ‘artists’ artist’ of all time. Select juxtapositions will help the reader better understand the fi reworks of creativity that Rembrandt not only lit in his own time but those he continues to ignite today. Rembrandt remains eternally captivating, not only because of his radical choices and unconventional interpretations of Christian and profane pictorial subjects, but also because of his joy in experimentation, especially in the use of printing and drawing techniques, and his refl ective, humorous intellect, complemented by his sensually direct approach to the world. With a light hand, he broke open the conventions of his era. The pictorial worlds that he created with his free, decisive mark convey his near inexhaustible interest in nature as creation, whether it be the human exterior or interior, and off er a wealth of connecting points and constellations for other artists as well as for the viewer.

2019 jährt sich Rembrandts Todesjahr zum 350ten Mal. Die Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden, die eine der bedeutendsten Sammlung seiner Gemälde, Zeichnungen und Druckgrafiken bewahren, nehmen dieses Jubiläum zum Anlass, den Künstler in einer Ausstellung des Kupferstich-Kabinetts zu feiern. Rembrandts Strich wird sich auf den Grafiker und Zeichner konzentrieren und einen frischen Blick auf ihn suchen, der vielleicht wie kein zweiter bis heute als sogenannter „artists‘ artist“ andere Künstler zur Auseinandersetzung angeregt hat. Die einzigartige Dresdner Sammlung – etwa 20 Zeichnungen, die Rembrandt heute zugeschrieben werden und das nahezu vollständige druckgrafische Werk – bildet die Grundlage für die herausragende Ausstellung. Sie wird ein besonderes Augenmerk auf seine erzählerischen Kompositionen, radierten Selbstbildnissen und die Studien seiner Frau Saskia richten. Die Ausstellung umfasst rund 100 Werke aus allen Schaffensperioden Rembrandts und etwa 50 Radierungen und Zeichnungen von Schülern seiner Werkstatt sowie von späteren Künstlern, die Rembrandt als Autorität und kreative Inspirationsquelle verstanden haben. Die lange Reihe derer, die ihr Selbstbildnis in Auseinandersetzung mit Rembrandt definierten, reicht von unmittelbaren Nachfolgern und Meistern des 18. Jahrhunderts wie Benedetto Castiglione und Georg Friedrich Schmidt, über den kongenialen Francisco de Goya ins 20. Jahrhundert bis heute. Als Beispiele mögen Edouard Manet, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann und Pablo Picasso sowie Marlene Dumas und William Kentridge, aber auch Künstler aus der DDR wie A.R. Penck dienen. Indem Werke dieser Künstler einbezogen werden, wird Rembrandt als einer der wichtigsten „Künstlerkünstler“ aller Zeiten vorgestellt. Ausgewählte Gegenüberstellungen werden den heutigen Betrachtern helfen, das Feuerwerk an Kreativität besser zu verstehen, das Rembrandt nicht nur zu seiner Zeit freisetzte, sondern auch heute noch entzündet. Zeitlos fesselnd bleibt Rembrandt durch seine Radikalität in Auswahl und unkonventioneller Interpretation christlicher und profaner Bildthemen, nicht weniger durch seine Experimentierfreudigkeit – besonders im Gebrauch grafischer Techniken – als auch durch seinen reflektierten und dabei oft humorvollen Intellekt, der von seinem sinnlich zupackenden Blick auf die Welt ergänzt wird. Mit leichter Hand, fast spielerisch doch voller Energie, sprengte er in seiner Zeit Konventionen. Mit seinem freien, unverkennbaren Strich schuf er Bildwelten, aus denen sein schier unerschöpfliches Interesse an der Natur als Schöpfung spricht, sei es die äußere oder die innere des Menschen. Damit bietet sich eine Fülle von Anknüpfungspunkten und Anregungen für Künstler und Betrachter.

Tiepolo in Milan: The Lost Frescoes of Palazzo Archinto brings together preparatory drawings and paintings, as well as documentary photographs, to commemorate an extraordinary fresco cycle by the Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo (1696–1770). Painted for Palazzo Archinto in Milan, the frescoes were destroyed in a bombing during World War II. The catalogue accompanies an exhibition at The Frick Collection. In 1730–31, Tiepolo undertook his first significant project outside the Veneto, frescoes for five ceilings in Palazzo Archinto in Milan. The paintings were commissioned by Count Carlo Archinto (1670–1732), likely in honor of the marriage of his son, Filippo, to Giulia Borromeo. Tiepolo’s mythological and allegorical scenes—Triumph of Arts and Sciences; Apollo and Phaëton; Perseus and Andromeda; Juno, Fortune, and Venus; and Nobility—were painted in some of the largest rooms of the palazzo. Unfortunately, the palazzo was bombed during World War II and its interior completely destroyed. Only a series of black-and-white photographs, taken between 1897 and the late 1930s, preserves the frescoes’ appearance, but a number of preparatory drawings and paintings provide precious information, including three painted sketches (Triumph of Arts and Sciences, the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon; Apollo and Phaëton, Los Angeles County Museum; and Perseus and Andromeda, The Frick Collection). Three drawings from the British Museum in London, the Museo Civico in Trieste, and the Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki are the only related graphic works. These—along with other drawings and prints by Tiepolo and some books— have been reunited for the first time in order to bring to life these extraordinary works of art.On view at The Frick Collection from April 16 to July 14, 2019, the exhibition is curated by Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at the Frick, with Andrea Tomezzoli, Professor at the University of Padua, and Denis Ton, Curator of the Musei Civici in Belluno. Included in the publication are essays on Tiepolo’s work in Palazzo Archinto (Salomon), on the role of the frescoes in Tiepolo’s career (Tomezzoli), on the intellectual world of the Archinto family (Ton), and on the architectural history of the palace (Kluzer).

Children have always fascinated artists and Painting Childhood will explore some of the most iconic paintings of children produced over the past 500 years. Featuring stunning portraits, amusing genre scenes and touching ‘fancy pictures’, the book will examine both the creative process and the specifi c challenges posed by painting children: from how to capture the fleeting moments of youth to how to encourage young subjects to sit still. Accompanying the exhibitions Painting Childhood: From Holbein to Freud and Childhood Now, the book will discuss a wealth of masterpieces from British collections by artists including Hans Holbein the Younger, Anthony van Dyck, Jan Steen, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Johan Zoff any and John Everett Millais. These iconic paintings will be considered alongside the preparatory sketches that were made for them and the works that were made after them in an exploration of the creative process and the artistic ‘conversations’ that occurred throughout the centuries. Painting Childhood will also explore ‘intimate portraits’ – artist’s portrayals of their own children. Paintings, sketches and sculptures by Stanley Spencer, Louise Bourgeois, Jacob Epstein and Lucian Freud, among others, present highly personal insights into the place offamily within an artist’s life, and the ongoing dialogue between biography and creativity. This theme extends to the present day, and the work of three contemporary figurative painters - Chantal Joffe, Mark Fairnington and Matthew Krishanu. Drawn to children as subjects, each of these London-based artists depict childhood in very diff erent ways. Together, they provide fresh perspectives on what constitutes childhood today and reaffirm the place of painting as a diverse and powerful artistic practice.

This publication will be a highly visual celebration of the massively popular, but now largely forgotten, Britain Can Make It exhibition. Organised by the Council of Industrial Design, it was held in empty ground-floor galleries of the Victoria & Albert Museum, from September to December 1946. A ground-breaking, morale boosting exhibition, it showcased British design and manufacturing. Despite its short run, it boasted an incredible 1.5 million visitors, and remains one of the most visited exhibitions ever held at the V&A.Long before the end of the Second World War hostilities, the government’s Post War Export Trade Committee recognised the importance of promoting the country’s manufacturing capabilities. Plans for an exhibition of ‘National Importance’ were set in place in October 1942, for an event that would illuminate the gloom of austerity, educate the public in the value of good design, and most importantly, boost much needed foreign trade. Britain’s need to promote, manufacturer and export its goods was urgent.The job of organising the exhibition was given to the Council of Industrial Design on behalf of the government’s Board of Trade. From its early planning stages, there was a desire to create an exhibition that was full of colour, light and airy, and far removed from the browns and greens of the inter-war years. The exhibition was also intended to work as a public morale boosting exercise and it did, attracting visitors from around the country. Mile-long queues constantly formed outside the V&A. Interviewed in 1984, James Gardner, the designer of the exhibition, commented on the motivation for the exhibition: ‘We’d got to get British manufacturers to produce well-designed goods quickly and to cheer the British public up. They were so depressed. Give them something to look forward to. You know, this was the dream of the future, if you like’. BCMI was not a trade show. Manufacturers had to put forward their products and only those deemed the best examples were chosen by specialist committees. An accompanying catalogue detailing the manufacturers of products (and significantly, wherever possible the names of the designers of each product), could be bought by visitors from one of the bookstalls dotted around the exhibition. The catalogue explained when goods would be available for the home and trade markets: ‘Now’, ‘Soon’ or ‘Later’. Most often they were ‘Later’ for the home market which led to negative comments in the press, such as: ‘Britain Can’t Have It’, ‘Britons can’t buy it’, and ‘Britain Can’t Get It’. Products representing key consumer groups, including clothing, leisure, and domestic products were displayed. These were diverse, from pottery and glass, to radios, women’s and men’s wear, furniture, fabrics, toys, jewellery, boilers, taps, and sporting equipment. The Furnished Rooms section were room sets that sought to show how a range of people from different professional groups might live.By taking its structure loosely from the exhibition itself and from the accompanying Design ’46 catalogue, Britain Can Make It will take the reader through an eclectic range of subject areas and consumer products. The book begins with a discussion of the political climate and economic motivations that led to this exhibition of ‘National Importance’ taking place, and an overview of the contemporary social context. Additional essays will cover specific aspects of the exhibition itself, including the surrealist design of the exhibition, the art and artists involved, the naming, and the ‘Design Quiz’. Most chapters will be in the form of short illustrated essays.

Botticelli: Heroines and Heroes explores the work of the legendary Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli, focusing on a genre called spalliera that Botticelli employed with staggering originality. The catalgoue and exhibition, held at the Gardner Museum, Boston, include significant loans from European and American public collections. Accompanying the exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (14 February – 19 May 2019), this catalogue explores the work of legendary Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli (about 1444–1510). Today the alluring and enigmatic Primavera forms the cornerstone of his modern fame, but its familiarity belies distant origins in the heady intellectual environment of Laurentian Florence and the residences of its moneyed elite. Part of a genre called spalliera, so named for their installation around shoulder (spalla) height, this type of painting introduced beautiful, strange, and disturbing images into lavish Florentine homes. With staggering originality, Botticelli reinvented ancient subjects for the domestic interior, paneling patrician bedrooms with moralizing tales and offering erudite instruction to their influential inhabitants. At the center of this exhibition is a spalliera reunited, the Gardner’s Tragedy of Lucretia and its companion The Tragedy of Virginia (Accademia Carrara, Bergamo). Together with extraordinary loans of the same genre from European and American public collections, Heroines and Heroes explores Botticelli’s revolutionary approach to antiquity – from ancient Roman to early Christian – and offers a new perspective on his late career masterpieces. Catalogue essays address Botticelli’s spalliera (Nathaniel Silver), their violence (Scott Nethersole), his textual sources (Elsa Filosa), and rediscovery in Gilded Age Boston (Patricia Lee Rubin). Entries include new insights for each work and up-to-date bibliographies, while a special section features archival materials devoted to Gardner’s pioneering acquisition of the first Botticelli in America.

Watching and recording the gradual dismantling of life, beauty and diversity in our oceans is a tortuous experience for scientists. Our oceans function as earth’s organs and our survival depends on their health. Yet in the last fifty years half of coral reefs have disappeared, only 10% of large fish remain and many species are at the brink of collapse. Unsustainable fishing practices, pollution – including 20 million tonnes of plastic entering the oceans yearly – and rising temperatures are continued threats. Even as the sense of urgency to save our oceans continues to grow, at the time we publish this book, an estimate of only 2% of all global philanthropic and charitable donations go to protecting the environment. Of this, only a tiny fraction go toward supporting and safeguarding our oceans. Brimming with spectacular, full-page photography of underwater scenes from the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern and Arctic oceans and many seas, Call of the Blue tells the stories of positive, focused people who are working to save our oceans. The first book of its kind, Call of the Blue unites more than 100 modern-day explorers, sailors, free divers, film-makers, lawmakers and conservationists who talk about their lives, passions and exploits on, in or under the water. Call of the Blue demonstrates how the efforts of individuals and communities can inspire and drive change. Notable contributors include United States Senator Sheldon Whitehouse; explorer and BBC presenter Paul Rose; Danish environmentalist and Director General of the IUCN Inger Andersen; French photojournalist and UNEP Goodwill Ambassador Yann Arthus-Bertrand; and American marine biologist Edith Widder (to name only a few). Contributors include hardworking men and women from around the world including the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada, France, India, Mozambique, Mauritius, Ecuador and more. Alongside these passionate and necessary voices, Philip Hamilton’s mesmerising images – of reefs, blue whales, salt water crocodiles, manatees, sea lions, sailfish, penguin, mantas, jellyfish, turtles, sharks, pygmy sea horses and more – provide readers a glimpse of some of the world’s most stunning underwater locations, bringing into sharp focus all we are at risk to lose.

Madame Vuillard is a particular focus of the work produced during the initial decade of Édouard Vuillard’s (1868 - 1940) career, the 1890s, when Vuillard was a member of the Nabis and forging an artistic identity as part of the Parisian avant-garde. During this period Vuillard and his widowed mother shared a series of modest rented apartments in central Paris in which the artist sustained a works-on-paper and (from 1897) amateur photographic practice out of his ‘studio-bedroom’, whilst in the dining room Madame Vuillard ran the corsetry business employing a handful of seamstresses including Vuillard’s sister. In these apartments Vuillard and Madame Vuillard operated mutually supportive, parallel working practices, to the extent that Vuillard put his mother and the fabric of her atelier ‘in the picture’ whilst she posed for his pencil and camera or developed his photographs in the kitchen. Their Parisian co-habitation, and Vuillard’s portrayal of his mother across a range of pictorial media, lasted until Madame Vuillard’s death as an elderly woman in 1928. This mutuality of working and living practice will constitute one of the themes of this unique loan exhibition, drawn from UK and Parisian collections and featuring paintings, lithographs and other works on paper as well as photographs. It will also explore the diverse domestic roles and responsibilities of a petit-bourgeois widow at the turn of the century in works that portray Madame Vuillard as seamstress; resting after dinner; imparting maternal advice and care to her daughter; as a woman at her toilette; and as the apartment’s cook and cleaner. The exhibition will also foreground Vuillard’s practice as modernist artist by focusing on the maternal fi gure in relation to the specifi c formal properties of his work. These include, in the 1890s at least, the paintings’ diminutive size; their shallow, simplifi ed compositional structure worked over with dense webs or matt patches of pigment; and the omission of spaces between fi gures and things. It was the intimacy (sometimes serious or witty, often banal) of their maternal motifs, the intimate formal relation between fi gure and ground and the intimateviewing conditions these small works required of their viewers that caught the attention of Vuillard’s earliest critics, who in the 1890s fi rst labeled him an ‘intimiste’ artist. This exhibition and accompanying illustrated catalogue will locate Madame Vuillard as muse, as motif andas everyday practical support at the core of Vuillard’s developing Intimism; an artistic corpus spanning 40 years. The exhibition catalogue will feature an essay on Madame Vuillard’s role in her son’s practice by the exhibition’s curator, Dr Francesca Berry, and an essay on Vuillard and photography by Mathias Chivot of the Archives Vuillard-Archives Roussel, Paris.

This innovative and compelling study reconsiders Whistler’s work from the context of his military service and his relationship with ‘nature at the margins’. Whistler came from a family of soldiers and engineers; his father, Major George Washington Whistler, was originally a US military engineer. Drawing and mapmaking were important components of the military training that Whistler acquired as an offi cer cadet at West Point Academy in 1851-4 and subsequently in the Drawing Department at the US Coast and Geodetic Survey,where he attempted to realise his father’s hopes that he would make engineering or architecture his profession. These infl uences in turn shaped Whistler’s attitude towards nature, as expressed in works ranging from his celebrated London ‘Nocturnes’ to his French coastal scenes – all of which were created after Whistler moved permanently to Europe in 1855. Whistler’s close observation of nature and its moods underpinned his powerful and haunting visions of nineteenth-century life. His images explore the contrasts between the natural and man-made worlds: rivers and wharves, gardens and courtyards, the ideal and the naturalistic. And his singular vison was always defi ned by his enduring affi nity with the makers of railways, bridges and ships, the cornerstones of Victorian wealth and trade. Infl uenced by Rembrandt, Whistler’s early etchings of London are notable for their focus on line and topographical accuracy. From the 1860s, his enthusiasm for Japanese art, too, infl uenced his attitude to perspective and spatial relations between objects. This led him, in his London Nocturnes, to reduce the external world before him to its bare bones. Whistler’s smoky images of warehouses, bridges, harbours and tall ships were designed to showcase a new kind of productive, wealth-generating landscape. It is a view of nature constrained by man-made structures: the shadowy outline of the warehouses and chimneys on the far shore; the mast and rigging of a Thames barge in the middle distance. This absorbing book reassesses a familiar and notoriously colourful artistic fi gure in a fascinating and pertinent new light, and is an important new contribution to our understanding of the Victorian art world and its physical context.

Patricia Wengraf is one of the world’s leading dealers in bronzes, sculpture and works of art. In her particular speciality, bronzes of the 15th-18th centuries, her knowledge and connoisseurship are of world repute. This exquisite catalogue - the first sales catalogue ever published by the dealer - presents a selection of exceptional works. Accompanies an exhibition in New York City.

Based at Bardon Hall, Leeds, Tomasso Brothers Fine Art was established in 1993 and opened their London gallery in St James’s in 2013. Dino and Raffaello are recognised internationally for specialising in important European sculpture from the early Renaissance to the Neo-Classical periods, with a particular knowledge of European Renaissance bronzes. They have interests in several other fields including Old Master paintings, antiquities, fine furniture and objects. Tomasso Brothers also advises the Arts Council of England’s ReviewingCommittee on the export of works of art and objects of cultural interest. Dino and Raffaello have promoted and supported, through loans and exhibitions, major international institutions and in addition to advising private collectors of European sculpture and Old Master paintings internationally, the brothers have made significant sales to some of the world’s most prestigious museums. Tomasso XXV: A Celebration of Notable Sales showcases a selection of some of the Tomasso brother’s favourites among the works of art they have handled over the past quarter of a century.