When Hugh Thomson received a commission to illustrate Pride and Prejudice from George Allen in 1893, he was already well known for his delightfully humorous and accurate drawings of 18th century life. This book features 65 of his 160 illustrations capturing the moods and personalities of Jane Austen's characters, Mr and Mrs Bennet, Mr Bingley inspecting Netherfield Park, Mr and Mrs Bennet with their daughters Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty and Lydia, and Mr Darcy saying to Mr Bingley about Elizabeth 'She is tolerable.' All the beautiful costumes of the young ladies, Mr and Mrs Gardiner and their children, the post arriving by rider on horseback, news of Lydia and the reaction on Mrs Bennet's face on being told by Elizabeth of her engagement to Mr Darcy: 'Unable to utter a syllable.' A delightful collection, 48 page softback.

A companion to 93286 and 93287, we have three in this set of facsimile reprints to collect of the glorious and affectionate pen and ink illustrations to the original 1890s publications. The three popular Jane Austen novels covered in this collection are Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. 'He cut off a long lock of her hair.' - John Willoughby and Marianne Dashwood. With her sisters, here are the compliments of the young ladies being quite charming, Mrs Ferrars looking down her nose, whispers and feathers, the housekeeper and manservant and Edward arriving at Barton Cottage. In Northanger Abbey we meet Mr and Mrs Morland talking about young Catherine who 'grows quite a good-looking girl' and in Persuasion, Charles Musgrove spoiling his children, and Captain Wentworth removing young Walter from Anne Elliot and Wentworth attending to the unconscious Louisa Musgrove. 33 illustrations, 20 page softback.

England's gardens range from the Baroque splendour of Blenheim Palace, whose vast acres were designed by Capability Brown at enormous expense, to the low-density suburban housing of the 19th and 20th centuries which were planned specifically to allow the ordinary householder to own his or her plot of land. In the early 17th century Capability Brown was a millionaire many times over, although his work at Blenheim came to an abrupt end when his client the Duchess of Marlborough, Queen Anne's favourite, fell out of favour, as described in the 2018 film starring Olivia Colman. Brown kept overall control of his vast projects by using large numbers of sub-contractors, so that the failure of one of them was not an overall disaster. The author of this study is an economist by profession, and there are some interesting conclusions in his statistics relating to the fruit and vegetable consumption, and life expectancy, of different classes. A prominent feature of large country houses was the Kitchen Garden maintained by hundreds of staff. A cook was likely to insist on a certain size of fruit or vegetable to preserve aesthetic standards at the dining table, and the result was huge quantities of wasted produce, so that eventually most kitchen gardens were phased out in favour of a daily expedition to Covent Garden or other markets. The head gardener was a prestigious position which in earlier times required the holder to be formally dressed and also to be married. When the famous gardener Joseph Paxton was appointed to Chatsworth at the age of only 23, he proposed to the niece of the Housekeeper on his first morning. Head gardeners wielded enormous power over the 100 or so staff under them, and could require an apprentice to move hundreds of miles away to another estate. Royalty has always had the means to lead the way in garden design, and the author examines the changing goals and expectations in royal patronage, from Henry VIII's Hampton Court to Prince Charles's Highgrove House, with an interesting aside on the horticultural role played by Camilla Parker-Bowles, now the Queen. In the 20th century gardening became a respectable occupation for middle class women, and a few, most famously Gertrude Jekyll, became leaders in garden design. 422pp, colour photos.

Almost exact contemporaries, the French painters Boucher and Chardin represent contrasting trends in the way women are depicted. This discerning book takes as its starting point two paintings of the mid-18th century, Chardin's "Lady Taking Tea" and Boucher's "Woman on a Daybed". It has been suggested that both painters used their wives as models, and both provide an intimate portrait of a woman's personal domestic life. Chardin was devoted to his first wife Marguerite, a young woman in poor health who died young. Boucher married the lively 17-year-old Marie-Jeanne for her looks, and neither of them was faithful. In "Lady Taking Tea", Chardin captures a quiet, contemplative moment. The woman seen in profile has downcast eyes as she stirs the tea in a blue and white cup, lost in her own thoughts. Boucher's "Woman on a Daybed", by contrast, is looking out of the picture slightly to the viewer's left, her lips pursed in the mischievous smile for which Marie-Jeanne was celebrated. Her elaborate dress is frilled down the front, and she extends her pointed foot in a high-heeled slipper to the end of the bed. Whereas Marguerite is retiring, Marie-Jeanne is provocative, and her surroundings emphasize this, with a curtain half open and crumpled clothes on the footstool. Both paintings feature a teapot, Chardin's in brown earthenware and Boucher's in blue and white china. The author goes on to investigate tea-drinking in other paintings, including Nicolas Lancret's erotic "Morning", in which the woman's breast is exposed as she pours tea for a male visitor. Scenes of women's lives from this period often have erotic content, but there is also a tradition of formal tea parties emphasizing the respectability of the sitters, for instance Hogarth's "An Assembly at Wanstead House", Richard Collins's "Tea Party" of 1725 with a family gathered reverentially round an expensive pewter tea service, or Francis Hayman's "Jonathan Tyres and his Family", an elaborately posed ensemble that can be seen in London's National Portrait Gallery. 144pp, large softback, chronology, numerous colour reproductions.

From 1931 to 1949, Julian Levy's New York gallery played an essential role in the shift of the avant-garde from Paris to America. It championed experimental film and photography and served as a venue for artists fleeing Europe and Hitler. It presented the first New York exhibitions of artists such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Joseph Cornell, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Arshile Gorky, Lee Miller, René Magritte, and Dorothea Tanning, all the while promoting a vision of art at its broadest. There were 'idea shows' suggested by such critical thinkers as André Breton and Marcel Duchamp, as well as shows about fashion, design, dance, popular culture and even music including a performance by Paul Bowles. It was also a place to watch the identity of the art gallery as a commercial institution taking shape, from a mere curiosity shop full of books, prints and lampshades among the first wares, to a contemporary art gallery - naked, white and modern. All this history argues for the need to read Levy's memoirs afresh. He tells the world he lived in with wit and appetite in a book that deals in sensual adventure; Levy was devoted to Surrealism, to Duchamp and Alfred Stieglitz, whom he claimed as his godfathers in art. Both men were high priests of early Modernism, prone to sermonising and wearing capes and to be reverent, especially of photography, then a new medium of dubious aesthetic standing. Duchamp inducted the young man into the living pleasures of both media when he invited him to tag along on a trip to Paris. On board ship, the two men speculated on the makings of a self-lubricating mechanical woman and discussed plans to shoot a film using Man Ray's equipment. The film was never made, but the trip altered the course of Levy's life and his co-travellers as artists, dealers, publishers, curators, writers and lovers of printed matter passed all their inclinations on to the young Levy. Besides running a gallery for almost 19 years, Levy wrote extensively and helped create exhibitions throughout his life with a high sense of style. There are tales of luminaries like James Joyce and incendiary episodes such as Duchamp's Kiss and Levy's purported rescue of Eugène Atget's great photographic archive of Paris. Levy slightly glorified his early investment and enthusiasm for the work at the expense of Berenice Abbott's essential role. Levy introduced Yves Tangui to New York, conceived the idea for Dalí's 'Birth of Venus' Pavilion at the World's Fair, shared a summer house with Max Ernst and fished with André Breton. He was with Gorky in the final tragic days before the painter's suicide. The memoir is a story of prescient vision and lifelong devotion. 320 page paperback, 32 pages of black and white photos, 2003 first edition US paperback facsimile of the original 1977 publication.

Paul Brown is primarily known for his wonderful paintings, drawings and sketches of horses and equestrian sports as well as for his elegant and prolific illustrations for Brooks Brothers catalogues over three decades from the 1920s onwards. Born in Mapleton, Minnesota in 1893, Paul Desmond Brown's family was of Scottish-Irish-German descent. 'One day in 1904, I got 50 cents some place and went over to the National Horse Show at the old Maddison Square Garden and saw 'fine leppers' as we call them, and Thoroughbreds for the first time.' From then on he appeared to be hooked on drawing horses and filled dozens of childhood sketchbooks from 1905 to 1908 with pencil drawings. Brown worked steadily in commercial art in the time leading up to the First World War, attempting to get newspaper or magazines to publish his drawings. He travelled six times to Aintree, the English steeplechase course, in 1933 and kept a diary, written for his daughter Nancy, excerpts of which are reproduced here faithfully, day by day. His illustrations graced the cover of Time magazine in 1929 and he published many books about golf and shooting and illustrated juvenile and adult biographies, dust jacket frontispieces and vignettes for books, plus hundreds of illustrations for show programmes, postcards, advertising calendars, bookplates and the like. In his early polo and steeplechasing books, Brown drew strong recognisable portraits and gave character to both men's and women's faces. But when it comes to animals, no one can touch Brown in capturing action and expression in a few fluid lines. We know what will happen when a colt barges into the back of Lady Anne's mount in Black Beauty, and we know just as surely that every dosing puppy is a little rocket in disguise. A lazy cocked hoof, a breeze-ruffled mane can fill the calmest scene with immense energy. Technically brilliant, this is a full listing with eight pages of colour plates. 149pp, large softback import.

In 1904, American artist Thomas Eakins gave us a painting of a beautiful woman, rich in ineffable sadness. Deftly with a small brush and the marriage of colour he painted her lustrous eyes, the right one in the light, with a hint of a tear forming. Edith Mahon is said not to have liked the picture and she herself was a talented English pianist and part of a circle of musicians Eakins knew. In the early indoor pictures of his sisters Frances and Margaret, painted soon after his return from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the Luxemborg Garden and Spain, there is a foretelling of the strength and anguish that he would find later in his career. When he went outdoors, the young man and the athlete took part in the sports he depicted - men on boats under sail, at bat, or bent to the wonderful exhaustion of rowing. Eakins' father Benjamin was a second-generation Irish American who moved to Philadelphia from rural Pennsylvania, a calligrapher and writing master who managed to provide his artist son with a lifelong where-with-all to paint without regard to whether he sold a canvas or did not. With almost photographic quality, some of the most striking images are reproduced in the book, some in colour plates such as the Gross Clinic of 1875 showing a bloody operation, the Cello Player, a Portrait of Walt Whitman, Baby at Play and photographs of Eakins and his friends in his studio or sailboats racing on the Delaware. His paintings offer an uncertain vision of the changing times, from the shadow of his mother's depression to his fraught identity as a married man with homosexual inclinations, to his failure to sell his work in his day. Eakins was a man marked equally by passion and by melancholy and his biographer defines the artistic moments and key relationships, with his wife Susan MacDowell, his subject and friend the writer Walt Whitman, and with several of the leading scientists of his time to shed brilliant light on his motivations as one of the founders of American Realism. The book is a powerful testament to the lasting vision of a man ahead of his time. 237pp, paperback with dozens of images and colour plates.

Born in Genoa in 1937, Renzo Piano while studying architecture at the Polytechnic of Milan, worked with Franco Albini. The projects of his father, who was an architect as well, were a very important source of experience for him. Piano completed his training with trips to Great Britain and the USA between 1965 and 1970. In 1971 he founded a company with Richard Rodgers, his partner on the Georges Pompidou Center project in Paris, and in 1993 on the redesign of the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. The book presents the ten most representative projects undertaken in the last few years by the firm that Piano runs, Renzo Piano Building Workshop. They give rise to warm, luminous spaces catering to the needs of human beings. Piano brings the spirit of the small-scale craftsman to large infrastructures, painstakingly perfecting the details of a precious object. Technology is used in all his projects to tone down light, evaluate the context, and find a means to integrate them into nature. The projects include the Columbus International Exhibition in Genoa marking the 5th centenary of the discovery of America with its huge sail-like top, and there are section plans and a series of colour photographs of its construction. Another is Aurora Place office block and multi-residential building in Sydney's historic centre, close to the emblematic Opera House which demanded a high degree of formal sensitivity in the design process. The project's two buildings are connected by a square covered by a glass roof. One of our favourites is the Niccolo Paganini Auditorium in Parma, Italy built inside an old sugar factory with large glass walls and with acoustic insulation. Another is a striking bubble-shaped building for the G8 summit meeting held in Genoa in 2001 and another the Padre Pio Church in Foggia Italy, a new church capable of accommodating all the worshippers that travel to the spot every year. The entire church is made out of stone - the floors, ceiling and the structural system, made up of arches spanning more than 50 meters. The use of a single material endows the setting with great expressive power. 80 pages, full page colour images throughout, plans and drawings and text in four languages including English.

Organised in a presentation tin with an Impressionist harbourside view with ladies and parasols and men in Panama hats, flags in the breeze and sailboats and steamboats out to sea, the protective box contains 24 ready sharpened coloured pencils. The set is in colours of sumptuous tones for professional, children or adult artists. There are four browns, five shades of green, two red, two pink, two orange, one yellow, two blues, two purples, two dark blues, one grey and one black. The tin tray is easy to open and snap shut, and the whole product would make a lovely gift item. An incredible bargain price.

With rich colour on every illustration, this reprint is made from one of the finest complete original sets of woodblock prints belonging to the Ota Memorial Museum of Art in Tokyo. Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) was one of the last great artists in the ukiyo-e tradition. His greatest talent was in creating landscapes of his native Edo (modern-day Tokyo) and his final masterpiece was a series known as "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo" (1856-1858). This resplendent complete collection pairs each of the 120 illustrations with a description, allowing readers to plunge themselves into Hiroshige's beautifully vibrant landscapes. Literally meaning "pictures of the floating world", ukiyo-e refers to the famous Japanese woodblock print genre that originated in the 17th century and is practically synonymous with the Western world's visual characterisation of Japan. Because they could be mass produced, ukiyo-e works were often used as designs for fans, New Year's greeting cards, single prints and book illustrations, and traditionally they depicted city life, entertainment, beautiful women, kabuki actors, wrestlers, and spectacular landscapes. Chinese binding in bookcase 25 x 34 cm, 302 pages. Text in English, French, German.