Treatises on painting between the 1st and the 12th centuries A.D. may have been many but those preserved are found in two manuscripts from the 10th and 12th centuries: the Mappae Clavicula and Eraclius, On the Arts and Colours of the Romans – both of which probably date from c. 8th century. Of the 12th century itself there is On Divers Arts by Theophilus. All the passages on pigments from these three manuscripts are included in this handbook, and they include the earliest known recipes for vermilion (c. 3rd century A.

A French collection of recipes for painting on parchment, On Making Colours, by a painter, Peter of St. Audemar, possibly of the Benedictine Abbey of St Bertin at St. Omer in northern France. St. Omer was an active centre of painters and scribes from the end of the 12th century and from it probably came The Aviary / De avibus by Hugo de Fouilloy (c. 1140) in the so-called Gloucester copy which is dated 1277. Plates and illustrations have been included in this handbook, bringing together a treatise and a book which may have derived from the same place, an exceptional event in the history of pigments. Notable is the reference to painting in oil on panel, artists of the French school responsible for the London, Westminster Abbey Retable of 1280, also painted in oil on panel.

The 19th century was a century of new pigments. They were derived from recently recognised metals –cadmium, chrome, zinc and others – as well as from the discovery of the chemical colouring substances of plants. From indigo the aniline dyes were manufactured, and from madder came the alizarin red pigments – there were hundreds of these coal tar pigments. The English chemist, George Field, published his Chromatography in 1835, a comprehensive collection which included many of the new pigments and, as the century wore on so new pigments were added to up-dated editions of his book in 1869 and 1885. They were published by the English colour-makers, Winsor & Newton, so become a chronicle of a world of new pigments for painters not only in England but also in France and Germany especially. 19th Century Colour Palettes traces these developments, presenting the pigments in dictionary form in extracts taken from the editions of Field's Chromatography.

A collection of all the historical pigments mentioned in the treatises included in the series Colour Palettes, by century, complemented by recipes from other contemporary sources. The entries define the pigment – colour, its source (animal, plant, mineral) and its name – and describe its method of preparation, with historical remarks tracing the pigment through the centuries. Recipes provide the documentary history of the pigment beginning with the earliest known through to 1837, the date of George Field's, Chromatography, to make up a history of each pigment.

How can exhibitions stage encounters between art and science that not only make sense for visitors but encourage them to explore the intricate relationship between themselves and the world further? This book presents a collection of texts that explore exhibitions as a medium for new insights into connections between aesthetic and scientific knowledge production and how such insights facilitate new, more holistic understandings of entanglements between self and lifeworld. The texts all take their outset in a series of three exhibitions called Wunderkammer at Esbjerg Art Museum in Denmark from 2018 to 2022. The three main texts cover the conception, presentation, and reception of the exhibitions, respectively elaborating the curatorial process, the aesthetics of the exhibitions and the reception of the exhibitions by individual visitors. Also included is a written dialogue of a more associative nature between members of the research group of art historians who were invited to experience the exhibitions and contemplate and discuss the implications of the series of exhibitions.

Richly illustrated with colourful, quirky rag rugs (also known as hooked rugs), this delightful book examines Winifred Nicholson’s relationship with the Cumbrian craft, the way in which she helped revive the tradition in the 1960s and ’70s, and her influence on contemporary makers. For anyone interested in textiles, naive art, British folk traditions or mid-century craft, this book will be a treasure trove.British artist Winifred Nicholson (1893–1981) initially encountered rag rugs in Cumberland in the early 1920s, when, with her husband Ben Nicholson (1894–1982), she visited her neighbour Margaret Warwick, who was sat in her kitchen making a rug from scraps of old clothing. The Nicholsons were interested in ‘naive art’ at that time and had explored the work of Rousseau, as well as African sculpture, but this was the first time they had come face to face with naive art being made in their own country. In 1960 Winifred moved back to Banks Head, the old Cumbrian farmhouse she had owned since 1923. It was here that she helped to revive the local ‘hooky’ rag rug making tradition. Through Winifred’s efforts, well over a hundred new rugs were made. Notable makers included Mary Bewick, Janet Heap and Florence Williams. Winifred herself designed a number of rugs, and she also encouraged her grandchildren, who were paid a pound a time for a design.This beautiful book also presents a number of contemporary rag rug makers, with direct links to Winifred. Emma Tennant, who lives in Scotland not far from Winifred’s house, was inspired to start making rugs after seeing the ones in Winifred’s home. Also included are works by Winifred’s nieces Louisa Creed and the late Jenny Steinbugler. The author also discusses the extensive rag rug collection at Chillingham Castle, Northumberland, which has interesting parallels with Winifred Nicholson’s approach to rug making, as well as the rug by Lucie Aldridge in the Fry Art Gallery, Essex.

This book sheds new light on one of the most important artworks of the early Italian Renaissance, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco cycle of Good and Bad Government in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. By connecting the images with the Hymn to Justice inscribed on the walls and highlighting Ambrogio’s ingenuity and personal approach to the subject the volume presents a fresh reading of its rich artistic message. In 1338 Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted three huge frescoes, known today as Good and Bad Government, on the walls of the Sala dei Nove, the Room of the Nine, in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, where the city’s nine executive magistrates presided over the destiny of this famous commune. The frescoes were meant to be strong visual reminders of the Nove’s duties and an admonishment of the nefarious effects of bad government. Boasting the largest artist’s signature of all time, the frescoes are testament to the extremely high esteem in which Ambrogio’s art was held by his fellow citizens. Nowadays Good and Bad Government has become one of the most widely reproduced works of the early Renaissance and is recognized for its many innovations, including the first European panorama of a cityscape and countryside. But what sort of visual journey was Ambrogio asking the Nove to make through this expanse? In pursuit of an elusive answer, the murals have become one of art’s great puzzles, challenging scholars and public alike. Scant attention, however, has been paid to the images themselves. They have been studied merely as symbols and allegories of abstract political concepts in which good and bad government are starkly juxtaposed. Despite his enormous signature, Ambrogio has been treated more as a servile illustrator than a creative artist, disregarding his highly personal approach to painting and the way his visual ingenuity, from composition to brushwork, shaped a far more complex and fascinating message. This book attempts finally to illuminate Ambrogio’s pictorial strategy by reading it in light of the Hymn to Justice inscribed upon the walls. The frescoes enrich the poet’s message, subtly changing and even subverting it. Instead of a pictorial lecture straightforwardly contrasting a utopia with a dystopia, Ambrogio blurs the binaries and invites the viewer to look beneath the idyllic surface of Sienese civic life.

This stunning catalogue of 15th and 16thcentury Italian drawings from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen will showcase highlights from this outstanding but still relatively little known part of the collection. It includes internationally significant sheets by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Pontormo, Pisanello, Giorgione and Tintoretto, as well as an important group of early Venetian drawings and a large number of workshop studies by Fra Bartolommeo. Published to accompany exhibitions at the Fondation Custodia, Paris, and The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, this volume will mark the conclusion of a five year cataloguing project at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, funded by the Getty Foundation. During the project all the Italian drawings were fully researched and catalogued, many for the first time. Several of these drawings have not been published in the last 70 years, if at all.The catalogue is a scholarly touchstone for this part of the collection. It includes two essays and 111 catalogue entries based on the online catalogue texts prepared by several Italian drawings specialists. They include the most well known drawings in Rotterdam as well as drawings that have never been published or exhibited before, such as newly attributed sheets by Pontormo, Federico Zuccaro and Aurelio Lomi.

This beautiful volume accompanies a major exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery that will reunite for the first time in 120 years an extraordinary group of Claude Monet’s Impressionist paintings of London. The exhibition will realise the artist’s unfulfilled ambition of showing the group on the banks of the Thames, just a stone’s throw away from where many of them were created.Claude Monet (1840–1926) is world renowned as the leading figure of French Impressionism, the movement that changed the course of modern art. Less known is the fact that some of Monet’s most remarkable Impressionist paintings were made not in France but in London. They depict extraordinary views of the Thames as it had never been seen before, full of evocative atmospheres, mysterious light and radiant colours. Begun over three stays in the capital between 1899 and 1901, the series – depicting Charing Cross Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and the Houses of Parliament – was unveiled at a landmark exhibition in Paris in 1904. Monet fervently wanted to show them in London the following year, 1905, but plans fell through. To this day, they have never been the subject of an exhibition in the UK.Monet and London: Views of the Thames will realise Monet’s unfulfilled ambition of showing this extraordinary group of paintings in London, on the banks of the Thames and a mere 300 metres from the Savoy Hotel where most were painted. By presenting the paintings Monet himself selected for his public in Paris and London, it will provide visitors with the unique experience of seeing the show Monet curated and the works he felt best represented his ambitious artistic enterprise – brought together for the first time over a century after their inaugural exhibition.The accompanying catalogue is richly illustrated and includes 21 entries and four original essays that shed new light on this famous series.

American artist Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is best known for his landmark text-based paintings, which draw on the influential writings and speeches of twentieth-century historical and cultural figures including James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Gertrude Stein. This catalogue accompanies a major exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, in which Ligon’s art will be displayed in dialogue with objects from the Fitzwilliam and Trinity College collections selected by the artist himself. Glenn Ligon is widely considered one of the most important figures in the contemporary art world. Informed by his experiences as an African American living in New York, his art is a sustained meditation on issues of interpretation through translation and quotation, the role of the past in the present, and the representation of the self in relation to culture and history, both as the conceptual underpinning and as a critique of modern society. His text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, engage provocatively and incisively with the written and oral legacy of writers and cultural icons, from Ralph Ellison to Richard Pryor, highlighting the social, linguistic and political constructions of race, gender and sexuality. The catalogue accompanies a major exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, while also serving as an introduction to the artist’s oeuvre. A large-scale neon, Waiting for the Barbarians (2021), will be installed in the museum’s grade-I listed portico and two dedicated galleries will be linked by interventions threaded throughout the museum’s permanent collection, in which the artist has been invited to select artworks and objects following themes including annotation, cultural hybridity and legibility. By exploring Ligon’s curatorial practice alongside his artworks, the exhibition showcases the ideas of one of the most significant Black artists working today in direct dialogue with museological tradition. Issues such as art making and aesthetics, as well as broader questions about race and its socio-political implications, will be further developed in the catalogue, which includes a series of essays and conversations between Ligon and a range of museum curators.

This bold catalogue brings together the work of two cultural icons for the very first time: Beryl Cook (1926–2008) and Tom of Finland (1920–1991). It was inspired by the 2024 exhibition Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland at Studio Voltaire in London. Beryl Cook was a painter renowned for her exuberant style and descriptions of everyday life. Her work captures the social milieu of the areas she lived in and visited, notably Plymouth. Her most enduring images are of larger-than-life women carousing in nightclubs, eating in cafés or enjoying ribald hen parties, rendered in graphic and colourful forms. Cook’s work came to prominence in the mid-1970s and she quickly became known as one of Britain’s best-loved artists, highly recognised for her distinctive works, which are both celebratory and provocative. Tom of Finland’s pioneering depictions of homosexual machismo in his images of bikers, soldiers, cowboys, sailors and labourers broadly represent queer, leather and muscle communities. A master draughtsman, he used his works to give form to an imaginative universe that, in turn, helped fuel real-world liberation movements and had significant influence on a wide range of cultural figures including the Village People, Freddie Mercury, Jean Paul Gaultier and Robert Mapplethorpe. Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland puts their work into conversation for the first time. The pairing is perhaps unexpected, yet immediate and compelling relationships between their practices are evident. Fundamentally, both artists employed a sustained and coherent way of hyper-realising the body in images that celebrate pleasure and deny shame. Together, their works reveal interconnected ideas surrounding sexuality, gender, taste and class. Artist and writer Huw Lemmey has contributed an incisive new essay exploring the queer contexts inherent to Tom of Finland’s work, but that also finds latent resonance in Cook’s paintings of gay bars and shapely women. He further considers the commercial forms of distribution that made their complex bodies of works highly accessible. Spanning five decades of paintings, drawings and archival materials, this companion catalogue contributes to new readings of the artists’ practices and their enduring impact on popular culture.

Portrait miniatures were highly prized in Europe for nearly four hundred years and, unusually, artists based in Britain were the acknowledged masters of this specialised field. Many of the best painters are represented in this remarkable but relatively little-known collection. As is illustrated and described in this book, miniatures were frequently made as tokens of love or memorials of loved ones; part-likeness, part reliquary and part-jewel, they might be wearable in a locket, on a bracelet or even on a finger ring, but their portability also made them desirable as gifts. Styles, techniques and modes of presentation naturally evolved between 1560 (the date of the first miniature in the catalogue) and around 1900. Some changes happened rapidly; in England, for example, the foundation of exhibiting societies in 1760s created a demand for larger miniatures that could hang on the wall alongside full-sized portraits. The Thomson collection includes fine examples of the work of Nicholas Hilliard (from the Elizabethan period) and John Smart (from the eighteenth century) as well as notable portraits by less familiar names such as Jacob Van Doordt and James Scouler. It is apparent from the scope and character of his acquisitions that Ken Thomson never planned an encyclopaedic collection. Reacting to miniatures that spoke most eloquently to him when held in the hand, or examined under a glass, he developed over time a fondness for particular artists and had no qualms about omitting others altogether. Using this collection housed at the Art Gallery of Ontario as a case study, the catalogue discusses the function of miniatures, their material presence, the circumstances in which they were made and aspects of their later history. The homes and studios of the most successful painters, as sumptuous as those occupied by oil painters, often passed from one generation to another: here, one key property in Covent Garden is described and illustrated. In this book, for the first time, a number of specialist artists’ suppliers are identified, showing where ivory could be obtained and enamel plates prepared and fired. The links between enamelling for clock and watch faces and enamelling for miniatures are demonstrated. The illicit practice within the late nineteenth and early twentieth century art trade of duplicating old miniatures, a topic generally avoided in the literature, is addressed here. Miniatures are difficult to display in museums, but recently-developed photographic methods of identifying pigments are also proving to be a way of introducing a new audience to this multi-layered subject. Eighteen years after Ken Thomson’s death, there could not be a more opportune moment to highlight his collection.

This catalogue, the first of its kind in the UK, accompanying the 2024 exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, explores the important contribution to Japanese woodblock printing of the Yoshida family, from patriarch Hiroshi down to the current generation, led by Yoshida Ayomi. The story of the Yoshida family has been woven into the story of Japanese printmaking across two centuries, with each generation infusing this traditional art form with their sensitivity and imagination.Trained as a painter and watercolourist, Yoshida Hiroshi (1876–1950) was a pioneer of the shin hanga artistic movement, which revived the traditional ukiyo-e prints (‘pictures of the floating world’) focusing on beautiful landscapes and landmarks and combined them with Western influences. His incredible corpus of woodblock prints, inspired by his travels across Japan but also in Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa and North America, greatly contributed to the popularity of Japanese prints in the West. A rare instance in the early twentieth-century Japanese art world, the Yoshida legacy relies also on the important contribution of its women: first Fujio (1887–1987), Hiroshi’s wife, a watercolourist, painter and printmaker, who was the first Japanese woman artist to gain international acclaim. Her style developed over time from naturalism towards greater stylization and organic abstraction, with her late still lifes strikingly balancing boldness and sensuality.Tōshi (1911–1995) and Hodaka (1926–1995), Hiroshi and Fujio’s sons, represent the second generation of this artistic dynasty; Tōshi introduced post-war abstraction to the Japanese printmaking process, while Hodaka pushed these modernist instances further, achieving a unique personal style inspired by the sōsaku hanga movement of artistic self-expression. His wife Chizuko (1924–2017) co-founded the first group of female printmakers in Japan, the Women’s Print Association. Her works sapiently connect popular art movements like Abstract Expressionism with Japanese printmaking.The youngest member of the Yoshida family is Ayomi (b. 1958), daughter of Hodaka and Chizuko, whose practice bridges the gap between ukyio-e and contemporary art thanks also to the exploration of organic materials. She has been exhibited at major international institutions and will contribute an original installation to the Dulwich show.

This fascinating volume presents a wide-ranging overview of one of the lesser known yet fundamental disciplines of Art History: conservation. What happens when art ages? By bringing together some of the leading experts in the field, the essays chart a journey through the theoretical, aesthetic and technical debates surrounding the conservation of Old Masters. The problem of how to look after paintings as they grow old is a historically complex one. Should they be ‘restored’ to their original glory, or should the patina of time be acknowledged? What is to be done with damp and dirt, with rotten panels and yellowing varnishes? The development of conservation is profoundly entwined with the development of Art History itself, as both deal in the interpretation of the past and its preservation for the future. The seventeen essays collected by editors Jane Martineau and David Bomford, which originally appeared in The Burlington Magazine, explore how these questions have been answered from the mid-sixteenth century to the present day. Masterpieces like Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece or Rembrandt’s Night Watch have been treated and mis-treated many times in their long lives. By the nineteenth century, the growing knowledge of the techniques employed by the old masters had a profound influence on the treatments applied to their works. In the same period, the birth of national galleries as public institutions entrusted with the collective heritage led to the need to preserve large numbers of paintings and establish conservation departments rooted in scientific research. By the mid-twentieth century, the materials and techniques of painting were utterly transformed, demanding fresh approaches to their preservation. A discipline that sits uniquely at the crossroads of art, science, philosophy and technology, modern conservation is the result of an ongoing collaboration between conservators, scientists and art historians following rigorous ethical standards and training programmes.

This new series will enchant seasoned country house visitors and amaze people new to art and architecture as they read about surprising snippets of history that occurred at, or because of, a country house in England, Scotland, or Wales. Three volumes in total, the first covering the letters A through H, each book will contain fascinating content and beautiful illustrations.Curt DiCamillo’s series of three high quality hardback books use the alphabet to frame an astonishing variety of material as a backdrop to endless, beguiling stories. Curt’s series of crisp, zesty entries dive into fascinating moments of British cultural history—from tea to bananas, from Canaletto to Agatha Christie, from porcelain to ghosts. The text is an exhilarating whistle-stop tour—perfectly pitched for pleasurable sampling that will enchant both newcomers and seasoned visitors to country houses.

This beautifully illustrated and scholarly catalogue presents a selection of exceptional drawings from the Clement C. Moore Collection. It accompanies an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum. The drawings assembled by Clement C. (“Chips”) Moore constitute one of the preeminent private collections of Dutch drawing in America. The collection also includes works by Flemish, French, Italian and British artists, ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. These works have long been intended to join the collections at the Morgan Library & Museum, and this exhibition – timed to coincide with the Morgan’s centennial celebrations – makes formal the promised gift. Accompanying the exhibition, this catalogue will demonstrate the breadth of the Moore Collection with a selection of around eighty works that highlight the principal themes of Dutch art, the various functions and techniques of Dutch drawings, and the connections between the Dutch and other European artistic traditions. Works by Hendrick Goltzius, Jacob de Gheyn, Jan Bruegel, Rembrandt van Rijn, Aelbert Cuyp, Jacob van Ruisdael, Peter Lely, Claude Lorrain, Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable are among those featured. The catalogue includes an introductory essay by Jane Turner and entries authored by an international team of specialists.