In the first three decades of the 20th century Augustus John (1878–1961) was widely considered one of the greatest living British artists, famous almost as much for his extraordinary Bohemian lifestyle as for his outstanding portraits, etchings and drawings. John was born in Wales in 1878 and educated at the Slade School of Art in London in the 1890s, where the onus of teaching was on the daily life class and a close study of the Old Masters. He soon emerged as a wonderfully gifted draughtsman – indeed, the American painter John Singer Sargent would declare that John’s youthful drawings were amongst the fi nest seen since the Renaissance. Dividing his life between England, Wales and France, and reaching his prime in the years immediately before the outbreak of the Great War, by 1910 John would be likened to a British Gauguin, a Welsh Post-Impressionist using bold colours and a willfully naïve and primitive style to explore the complex combination of romanticism, escapism and alienation engendered by 20th-century life. The great American collector John Quinn considered John and his sister Gwen key European artists, and his work would be included in the infl uential Armory Show in New York in 1913. After the War he would become Britain’s leading society portraitist, earning a fortune in commissions – though it was his more personal paintings of friends, lovers, family and fellow artists and writers such as W.B. Yeats, T.E. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Ottoline Morrell and his muse/ mistress Dorelia McNeill that best revealed his great talents. Published to coincide with exhibitions at Poole Museum in Dorset in the summer of 2018 and at Salisbury Museum in Wiltshire in the summer of 2019, Augustus John: Drawn from Life re-examines the life and work of this signifi cant but increasingly overlooked Britishartist. Focusing on around sixty works drawn from private and public collections, including the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of Wales, the book will off er new insights into John’s life and development as an artist from the late 1890s to theoutbreak of the Second World War.

A draughtsman of remarkable ability, matching even his mentor Augustus John, Henry Lamb (1883–1960) was a founder-member of the Camden Town Group, exhibiting at their inaugural exhibition in 1911. He was a powerful and original War artist, and an engaging and sensitive portrait painter, whose group portraits in particular are as successful as those by any British painter of the age. To date unfairly eclipsed by the glamorous and culturally infl uential circle around him, Lamb is now probably best known through these fi gures and his many compelling portraits of them, amongst them Lady Ottoline Morrell, Evelyn Waugh and Lytton Strachey, whose monumental full-length portrait by Lamb in Tate Britain is probably the artist’s best-known work. Lamb abandoned a promising medical career in Manchester to pursue his training as an artist at the London art school run by William Orpen and Augustus John. He found inspiration in the rural simplicity of Brittany, and a later visit to Ireland inspired his great genre painting Fisherfolk, Gola Island of 1913 – not seen in public since the last major retrospective in 1984. Following active service during the First World War as an army medical offi cer (for which he was awarded a Military Cross), he contributed two of the greatest artworks to the proposed National Hall of Remembrance a year after armistice in 1919. Following a productive period in Poole after the War, where he produced some evocative townscapes of its streets and skylines, he eventually settled in Coombs Bissett near Salisbury. Here he established a reputation as a sought-after portrait painter, executing a constant stream of landscapes, still lives, genre pictures and fi ne domestic subjects. Accompanying an exhibition at Salisbury Museum in 2018 and Poole Museum in 2019, Henry Lamb: Out of the Shadows will focus on over 50 works by the artist from across his career. As well as loans from major national collections, the group will include signifi cant works from private collections, including a substantial archive from the artist’s family and a number of re-discovered masterpieces. The catalogue will also feature an introductory essay by Lamb’s cousin, the writer Thomas Pakenham who knew the artist well.

This catalogue will be published to accompany the fi rst ever exhibition of Golden Age Dutch pictures in the collection of the National Trust, which will be shown at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the Holburne Museum in Bath and at Petworth House in West Sussex (2018–19). Celebrating the enduring British taste for collecting Dutch paintings from the long seventeenth century, the publication will explore why and how this particular type of art was desired, commissioned and displayed through the consideration of masterpieces from a number of National Trust houses. It will feature portraits, still lifes, religious pictures, maritime paintings, landscapes, genre paintings and history pictures, painted by celebrated artists such as Rembrandt, Lievens, Hobbema, Cuyp, Hondecoeter, De Heem, Ter Borch and Metsu, as well as less well-known artists such as De Baen and Van Diest. With over 350 heritage properties in the UK, the National Trust cares for one of the world’s largest and most signifi cant holdings of art and its collection of Dutch Old Masters is particularly impressive. The catalogue will include essays by Quentin Buvelot (chief curator at the Mauritshuis) and David Taylor (curator of pictures and s culpture at the National Trust). The authors will also discuss other aspects of the infl uence of Dutch culture in British country houses (using National Trust examples) – on furniture, garden design and print and ceramics collecting.

In terms of antiquarian fame, the Farnese Sarcophagus – elaborately carved with satyrs and maenads gathering grapes – may be the most important work of art in the Gardner collection, and perhaps of its type in America. A large, rectangular coffin of Pentelic marble, the Farnese Sarcophagus was exported from Athens to the area of Rome in the late Severan period, between c. 222 and 235 AD. Thecarving of the satyrs and maenads was especially suited to the artistic tastes of Mannerist and Baroque Rome, providing one of the most elegant examples of Greek imperial optic elongation to have survived from ancient times. Life Death& Revelry will offer a multi-disciplinary, multi-era look at this important monument. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum, Boston, it will bring together archaeological analyses of the piece and its previous restorations, and numerous Renaissance prints anddrawings depicting the sarcophagus during its time in Rome.

William Jackson, one of Gainsborough’s closest friends and biographers, noted that if he had “to rest his [Gainsborough] reputation on one point, it should be on his Drawings”. Gainsborough was indeed a draftsman of rare talent and creativity, and his experiments in drawing inspired an entire generation of British artists, from John Constable (1776–1837) to J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851). When not occupied with his lucrative portrait business, Gainsborough devoted much of his time to his true passion, the depiction of landscapes, and more than 600 of the artist’s approximately 800 surviving drawings depict the British countryside. Like most artists from his generation, Gainsborough did not draw directly from nature but instead re-invented landscape “of his own brain,” laying out on his work table stones,branches, leaves, and soil of various colors. His passion for drawing extended to technical experimentation. Gainsborough mixed diff erent kind of media and invented recipes to make drawings in his own personal fashion: he would sometimes immerse his drawing paper in milk, or varnish it to give his landscapes a lucent tint. The exhibition is based on the group of Gainsborough drawings in the permanent collection of the Morgan Library& Museum, one of the richest holdings of Gainsborough drawing in the United States. Additional drawings from private and public collections, among them some borrowed for the exhibition, are included in the introductory essay of the catalogue.

Patron Saints: Collecting Stanley Spencer is a revealing new exhibition at the renowned Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham – Spencer’s spiritual home and major source of inspiration. The exhibition draws together a spectacular collection of loans, including The Centurion’s Servant (Tate); Love on the Moor (Fitzwilliam); John Donne Arriving in Heaven, (Fitzwilliam) and one work not seen in the public domain in over 50 years. The exhibition and catalogue examine the often complex relationships between Spencer and his patrons and what drove them to collect his work. Spencer was a single-minded genius, but the influence of his patrons on his painting is far greater than has hitherto been realised. At the turn of the century, collecting art was no longer the preserve of the aristocracy and the upper classes, but Spencer’s art appealed to a broad spectrum of art lovers, fellow artists, businessmen and politicians. Many of his patrons lived in Cookham, where he lived and found artistic inspiration, and many of his paintings were influenced by his spiritual feelings for that place. His idiosyncratic and deeplypersonal approach gave him a wide and enduring appeal, and he was patronised by some of the most important cultural figures and taste-makers of that time. Curator Amanda Bradley comments, “Behind Stanley Spencer, one of the greatest Modern British artists, were a group of individuals who enabled his very existence – both artistically and emotionally. They were not wildly rich, but they were powerful, cultivated, intellectual and artistic. Some bought on spec, others were true patrons, giving him the freedom to fulfil his artistic genius. Most fostered long-lived relationships with the artist, influencing his life and work more than has hitherto been realised. These were the patron saints.” Patron Saints: Collecting Stanley Spencer explores the emergence of Spencer as an artistic personality, looking at those who helped him and why he – and his popularity – was a product of the zeitgeist (first half of the twentieth century) characterised by social and economic anxiety.

This catalogue presents a selection of important European terracotta sculptures from the neolithic to the neoclassical periods. The accompaning exhibition traces the history of ‘fired clay’ starting with the Vinca civilisation of South-Eastern Europe in the fifth millennium BC, which produced the fascinating Idol of a Mother and Child in the show and from there, via the ancient classical period and the Renaissance, to the high baroque, ending with the neoclassical era. Among the works included is a North Italian idealised Portrait Relief of a Lady from the late fifteenth century, and an attentively described Portrait Bust of a Man from Emilia in Northern Italy, ca. 1500. Both testify to the birth of terracotta as a medium for portraiture which continued well into the early modern era. Among further highlights is a Portrait Bust of a Gentleman by the rare Flemish sculptor Servatius Cardon (1608–1649) and a poignant Portrait of a Young Man attributed to the great French artist Philippe-Laurent Roland (1746–1816). The latter work is a beautiful representation of the birth of the modern portrait, where hierarchy and status give way to the expression of individuality and emotion. Parallel to this, the exhibition and catalogue demonstrate how terracotta was essentialto artistic practice as a means for sculptors to develop ideas and compositions, shown by a recently rediscovered terracotta model for an allegorical representation of Winter, by the Venetian baroque master Giovanni Bonazza (1654–1736), which offers a crucial insight intothe work of the sculptor, presenting a highly accomplished model for a finished work to be carved in either stone or marble. A similar case is illustrated by a Character Head executed by Antonio Canova (1757–1822) around 1780, when he was still a young sculptor on the cusp of greatness. Inspired by the famous Laocoön group in the Vatican, this terracotta exists as an invenzione in its own right, and so a testimony to the sculptor’s search for his own artistic vocabulary. Deeply and richly modelled, the Character Head betrays a preoccupation with the representation of emotions, framed within a wider exploration of antiquity that would be a central themethroughout Canova’s career. Another remarkable discovery and a highlight is a terracotta model for a figure of Saint Mark by Giuseppe Piamontini (1664–1742), a colossal marble statue carved for the new baroque church of Santi Michele e Gaetano in Piazza Antinori on the central ViaTornabuoni in Florence.

In 1621, Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) wrote a letter to William Trumbull, the English diplomat and political agent to King James I, in which he described a large painting of a lion hunt that he had just completed: “As you rightly observe, such things have more grace and power in a large picture than in a small one … because the large size of a picture gives one much more courage to express one’s ideas clearly and realistically”. Rubens here casually disclosed what lay at the heart of his artistic intentions – his constant quest to achieve in his compositions the equilibrium between power and grace. The same can be said of Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) and Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678), whose lives and careers were markedly intertwined with and infl uenced by the senior artist. Just how diff erently they went about achieving this eff ect can best be seen in their drawings, for it is there that we see the artists thinking, evolving, and creating. The Morgan is particularly well suited to tell this story, for its holdings of Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens drawings are unparalleled in the United States. The nucleus stems from Pierpont Morgan’s important 1909 acquisition of the collection of European drawings from the English Pre-Raphaelite painter and collector Charles Fairfax Murray. During the decades following Pierpont Morgan’s death in 1913, thecollection of Flemish drawings was enriched with several notable acquisitions. The exhibited selection includes designs for paintings, tapestries, and sculpture, copies after Italian and German masters, portrait drawings, landscapes, and studies of the male nude.

This catalogue accompanies an exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, which is the first dedicated to the graphic oeuvre of Antoine Caron (1521–1599). Bringing together a core group of drawings centred around the figures and deeds of the French Royal family, the Valois, this display highlights the role played by Catherine de’ Medici (1519–1589). Featuring the Valois series, a set of drawings herereunited for the first time, the display showcases the way in which the powerful and influential Catherine promoted the success of her regency and future of her progeny by delivering a series of lavish courtly events that were meant to enhancethe power and diplomacy of her family. The drawings represent jousts, tournaments, festivals and a mock naval battle, events that occurred at the French court during the reigns of Catherine’s sons Charles IX and Henri III. Preparatory designs for a group of tapestries, these visual documents relate to actual events that were organised by the court, some of which took place at the French castles of Anet, Palace of Fontainebleau, Bayonne and at the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. Minutely designed, they thus allow a reconstruction of the visual testimony of those events, as they were documented in written contemporary sources.

Disillusioned with London life and struggling to make a living, Blake and his wife Catherine went in 1800 to live at the coastal village of Felpham, which the artist soon described as “the sweetest spot on earth”. Providing his principal encounters with both English rural life and the coast, the artist’s three years “on the banks of the ocean” informed his two greatest illustrated epic poems, Milton and Jerusalem, and continued to be refl ected in his work for the rest of his career: “In Felpham”, claimed Blake, “I saw and heard Visions of Albion”.In addition to the work associated with Felpham, this publication considers the collections of nearby Petworth House, which include three major paintings by Blake – otherwise unrepresented in other grand houses of Britain – along with related prints, books and archival material. The authors will examine the relationships formed by Blake in Sussex, particularly with the poet William Hayley, the sculptor John Flaxman, the 3rd Earl of Egremont (one of the great collectors of contemporary art in the early 19th century) and his estranged wifeElizabeth Ilive, who commissioned two of the three paintings now in Petworth. Blake’s work for Hayley, often dismissed as illustrative and decorative, will be reappraised, and other projects he worked on in Sussex – including remarkable biblical watercolours produced for his great London patron, Thomas Butts – will be celebrated. Blake’s infamous arrest and trial for sedition – chief among the events profoundly aff ecting him in Sussex – will be discussed. It is not widely known that Blake was tried fi rst in Petworth, where he was vouched for by the 3rd Earl.

The depth of history at Queen Anne’s Gate – a handsome Baroque street overlooking St James’s Park – is unusual even in London, and few houses resonate with more memories than the extraordinary number 14. The story of the house over the centuries features political revolutionaries, occult initiations, clandestine war meetings, and a decapitated head. It begins, however, as a museum of Roman sculpture, unrivalled outside Italy, designed for connoisseur and virtuoso Charles Townley (1737–1805). Townley embodied Enlightenment values perhaps more completely than any other figure in the art world of 18th-century Britain – his portrait by Johann Zoff any (seen above) is one of the iconic paintings of the period – yet remarkably he has never been the subject of a major publication. Written with a sparkle matching Townley’s own enthusiasm, this beautiful and engaging publication tells the story of 14 Queen Anne’s Gate and examines the extraordinary life of Charles Townley and his remarkable collection of over 150 Roman marble statues (mostly now in the British Museum but captured in spectacular engravings of the period). It will be a revelation. The house was designed as a temple to the past, reviving in the modern city the occult practices of the ancient world. Here visitors in eighteenth century would have found an assembly of Roman sculpture unrivalled outside Italy, as well as a library and collection devoted to understanding a universal ‘generative sprit’ worshipped by early civilizations. That spirit may be found in the succession of major roles the house has continued to take through generations of dramatic change up to the present day. Charles Townley, for whom the house was built, was a fi gure both marginal and emblematic. Catholic and bisexual, he forged a life literally on the borders of the Protestant British establishment. He remains little understood or appreciated in his homeland and, remarkably, has never been the subject of a major exhibition or publication. The ‘emblematic’ side of Townley’s life was dedicated to virtù, the term used for an appreciation of fi ne art pursued for its own sake. The ‘marginal’ side of Townley, by contrast, manifested itself in a fascination with the ancient occult, particularly the Bacchic mysteries. The house he made for himself was at once a temple to virtù and to Bacchus and contained an unprecedented programme of Bacchic iconography.

Chevening stands in a magnifi cent park below the wooded escarpment of the North Downs in Kent. It has a history dating back around 800 years, but the house we see today is almost entirely the creation of seven generations of the Stanhope family, building on the original Inigo Jones house of 1630. For 250 years the Stanhopes served their country as soldiers and statesmen, and at Chevening as patrons of architecture and art. This new guide highlights the contributions of the Earls and Countesses Stanhope to the building, furniture, pictures, gardens and landscape of Chevening. It also gives a short account of the family in the wider world in order to set theircreations in context. The decoration and architectural features of each of the rooms – from the Entrance Hall with its spectacular swirling staircase of c. 1721 to the sumptuous Tapestry Room with its rare Berlin tapestries woven by Huguenot craftsmen in 1708 – are described and illustrated, and signifi cant and unusual works of art highlighted, such as important portraits by Allan Ramsay, Thomas Gainsborough, and Sir Thomas Lawrence. The Estate consists of some 3,000 acres, and the gardens include a lake, maze, parterre and a double hexagonal walled kitchen garden. The history of the garden is explored, from the extensive landscaping in the formal style by the 1st and 2nd Earls in the early 18th century, to the naturalistic style created in 1775–78 – much of the character of which survives today – to the re-formalizing in the 19th century, with the creation of the ‘Italian’ gardens, a maze and hedged allées. The wonderful restoration of recent decades and the replanting to the designs of Elizabeth Banks is celebrated with new photography. Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Chevening Act coming into eff ect with the death of the last Earl Stanhop and the 300th anniversary of his family’s acquisition of Chevening Estate.

The Leiden-born artist Jan Steen (1626–1679) is widely admired as one of the most engaging and technically brilliant painters of the Dutch Golden Age. This volume accompanies an exhibition that will be the first in the UK devoted to Steen’s Old Testament subjects. The focal point will be his magnificent Wrath of Ahasuerus (c. 1668–69), one of the highlights of the Barber’s collection, whichwill be joined by a number of other paintings by Steen from private and public collections across the world. Three essays will examine the core themes of the show – the role of Jewish history in Steen’s Old Testament scenes; the infl uence of Dutch theatre on his work; and the critical response to his Old Testament paintings from the 17th century to date. Robert Wenley (Barber Institute of Fine Arts) will look at how the Dutch nation established its identity in part by associating its people with the Biblical Israelites, seeing themselves as persecuted by the Spanish for their faith. He will explore the popularity of the story of Esther and other Old Testament subjects in Dutch culture – in plays as well as paintings – and the possibility of Jewish patrons for Steen’s Old Testament paintings. Nina Cahill (University of Kassel) will put forward new research about how Steen adopted the gestural language of contemporary Dutch theatre, amateur and professional, in order to represent the key fi gures in these scenes and to convey the pivotal dramatic moments. In some instances, Steen may have been quoting from an actual production of a play based on the Biblical story. Rosalie van Gulick (Utrecht University) will consider how Steen’s Old Testament scenes have been received and understood over the years. She will investigate how the apparent farcical character of these scenes has been understood over the centuries and why they have prompted adversely critical responses from some modern art historians.

Chaim Soutine (1893–1943) produced some of the most powerful and expressive portraits of modern times. His ability to capture in paint the character, humanity and emotion of his sitters is the hallmark of Soutine’s greatest work. The major exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London, focuses upon one of his most important series of portraits; his paintings of cooks, waiters and bellboys who sat for him inParis and the South of France during the 1920s. These works helped to establish Soutine’s reputation as a major avant-garde painter, seen by many as the twentieth centuryheir to van Gogh. This will be the fi rst time that this outstanding group of masterpieces has ever been brought together and it will be the fi rst exhibition of Soutine’s work in London for over thirty years. Soutine arrived in Paris as an émigré from Russia in 1913 and began a precarious existence as a penniless artist in Montparnasse living among fellow painters, such as Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani. As part of this avant-garde coterie of artists, Soutine developed a highly original style that combined an expressive handling of paint with deep reverence for the Old Masters that he studied in the Louvre.His portraits often appear both timeless and vividly modern. These qualities are exemplifi ed by the series of paintings of cooks, waiters and bellhops that he produced during the 1920s. These lowly and often-overlooked fi gures from Paris’s fashionable hotels and restaurants, including the famous Maxim’s, appealed to Soutine’s sense that profound emotion and a deep sense of humanity could be found in such humble sitters. The contrast between their working uniforms and the individuality of their faces adds to the emotional charge of these extraordinary portraits. Soutine strived to achieve the most powerful eff ects of colour from the bold whites, reds and blues of their diff erent uniforms. When he started the series, Soutine was living in near-poverty as a struggling artist. These portraits helped to lift him out of these desperate circumstances as they were soon admired by friends and become prized by collectors. Today, they are considered among his greatest achievements. This publication will bring together the most comprehensive group of these portraits. It will be a unique opportunity to experience the power and profound emotion of Soutine’s art.

Published to coincide with the exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London, this fascinating book will re-introduce Joseph Highmore (1692–1780), an artist of status and substance in his day, who is now largely unknown. It takes as its focus Highmore’s small oil painting known as The Angel of Mercy (1746, Yale), one of the most shocking and controversial images in 18th-century British art. The painting depicts a woman in fashionable mid-18th-century dress strangling the infant lying on her lap. A cloaked, barefooted fi gure cowers to the right as an angel intervenes, pointing towards the Foundling Hospital, the recently built refuge for abandoned infants, in the distance. The image attempts to address one of the most disturbing aspects of the Foundling Hospital story – certainly a subject that many (now as then) would consider beyond depiction. But if any artist of the period had attempted such a subject it would surely be William Hogarth, not the portrait painter Joseph Highmore? In fact, the painting was attributed to Hogarth for almost two centuries, until its reattribution in the 1990s. Even so, it is surprising that despite the wealth of scholarship associated with Hogarth and the ‘modern moral subject’ of the 1730s and 1740s, The Angel of Mercy has received little attention until now. The book (and exhibition) seeks to address this, while encouraging greater interest in, and appreciation for, this signifi cant British artist. Highmore expert, Jacqueline Riding, will set this extraordinary painting within the context of the artist’s life and work, as well as broader historical and artistic contexts. This will include exploration of superb examples of Highmore’s portraiture, such as his complex, monumental group portrait The Family of Sir Eldred Lancelot Lee and the exquisite small-scale ‘conversations’ The Vigor Family and The Artist and his Family, juxtaposed with analysis of key subject paintings, including the Foundling Museum’s Hagar and Ishmael and Highmore’s ‘Pamela’ series, inspired by Samuel Richardson’s bestselling novel. Collectively they tackle relevant and highly contentious issues around the status and care of women and children, master/servant relations, motherhood, abuse, abandonment, infant death and murder.

At Stowe, 250 acres of parkland off er a complex web of views, pathways, statues, inscriptions, urns and ideas. Unlike its French fl oricultural precursors, Stowe presents sudden shifts of scene, abrupt revelations, as well as spots at which to stop to absorb the visual eff ect. There is natural beauty in the gardens of Stowe, but they serve a larger purpose than to please the eye. Beneath this facade of bucolic idyll lies a deeply important suggestion of man’s relationship to nature. Accompanying an exhibition of historic and contemporary art at Stowe House, The Garden at War explores the gardens at Stowe, built by a general, as a site of perpetual confl ict in which the preconditions of destruction and creation are inescapable. If nature is understood to be original, then the garden is an ordered but un-orderly condition; a re-ordered vision of the natural order, a vision of nature disciplined by human action in a attempt to advance and yield control. Starting with works by the preeminent neoclassical painters Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain – whose distinct pictorial visions gave rise to an unmistakable relationship between the garden, the viewer and the natural world – the publication brings together an arrangement of interpretations and theories exploring metaphors and meanings within the very practice of gardening itself. An introduction by the pre-eminent critic Stephen Bann and an essay by the foremost garden historian John Dixon Hunt lead on to newlycommissioned illustrations by artist Gary Hincks, a previously unpublished interview with the Scottish conceptual artist and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay, and a new discussion of confl ict in the work of Richard Long.