Drawn from the Francis Frith Collection photographic archive, this volume of over 400 photographs from the period 1865 to 1928 shows urban and rural Britain, people at work and play and tourist attractions such as Stonehenge and Bodiam Castle. Quaint cottages with rose bedecked walls, old stone-built pubs, ancient buttressed abbeys, ruined Franciscan priories, strange rock formations and tree-lined lanes - all sights we can still see today, but here the people bring the photos to life. Here are children paddling in the sea at Weymouth in 1909 with the girls in wide-brimmed hats, their white dresses tucked into their drawers. Other photos include solemn-faced boys packed onto an elephant in 1913 at London Zoo, ladies in straight shifts and cloche hats walking along a low bridge at Newquay in 1925 and a bowler-hatted young man posing with his horse-drawn delivery cart outside the shop. Though the pace of life was slower and the surroundings more picturesque, people still enjoyed visiting the beach, rummaging around a street market strolling on the pier, peering in shop windows or relaxing in a deckchair just watching the world go by, exactly like us. Covers family, church, military, school, parks, traffic and trains, high streets and shops, town halls, beauty spots and lakes, trade and attractions like donkey rides, paddling at Barry Island and Redcar, The Yorkshire Pierrots on Clacton-on-Sea 1912 with newly discovered leisure time for the masses. Goodwood races, golfing and boat races have changed very little. Wonderful snapshots of a bygone era, many 1880s-1910s all around Britain. The photos are from the Francis Frith and Archie Miles collections. Large, square format 11½", 400 full page mono very nostalgic photos, a real glimpse of past lives and times. Text in German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch. 320 pages, 27.8 x 29cm.
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European, French, early Netherlandish, Flemish, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, German and British painting are wonderfully represented in this lavish art gallery of a book without ever having to leave our armchairs or to travel to Russia. Beautifully reproduced are such masterworks as Casper David Friedrich's Moonrise by the Sea, Schönfeld's The Rape of the Sabines in all its drama and horror, Christ and the Adulterous Woman by Lucas Cranach with the most intriguing faces crowded into the painting, many religious paintings by Tintoretto and Veronese, landscapes, portraits, still life, mythological masterpieces like Rubens' The Union of Fire and Water or the simple almost monochrome lines of Cézanne's Girls at the Piano or Corot's Landscape with Lake opposite the colour and pageantry of the Heraldic Hall in the Winter Palace and portraits of nobility. There is also a look at archaeology and the applied arts, and a history of the Hermitage complex and the influence of Catherine the Great. The precious collection of paintings has established the Hermitage's reputation in St. Petersburg as one of the most important museums in the world, but the architectural ensemble on the banks of the Neva is also a masterpiece of world architecture. Softback, 320 pages. 21 x 24cm or 8½" x 9½". Hundreds of colour illustrations. Multi language edition from Könemann.

Lovers of Spanish art will know all about this famous museum. If you cannot travel to Madrid, this is the very next best thing. The Museo del Prado not only houses the largest collection of Spanish painting spanning the 15th to the 19th century, but also represents an entire history of the classical art of Western Europe and treasures from the royal collections, featuring a wide variety of Masters, regions, styles and genres with its 8,000 paintings, 5,000 drawings, 2,000 prints, 700 sculptures and 2,000 other works of art. The Monastery of El Escorial under Philip II collected 1,150 mostly religious paintings and the El Pardo 'Hunting Lodge' 117 paintings, mainly portraits. Blonde plaited hair, Doña Margarita of Austria in long black silk hooded robe is pictured in oil on canvas, 1665, and the Emperor Charles V with a dog on the following page, and portraits by Goya, Velázquez and Anguissola (1530-1626). Spanish painting from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the Golden Age, Neo-Classicism to Modernity, Northern European painting and Italian painting are selected and expertly covered in this exquisitely produced gallery. 280pp in large softback, colour plates on every page plus photos and introduction. 8¼" x 9½".

The capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900 Vienna consisted of some 15 nations and drew in many artists and intellectuals in a creative melting pot. In rapid succession Historicism, Art Nouveau and Expressionism developed as the dominant art styles and these emerged from typical Viennese themes. One of the first images in this sumptuous volume is of Gustav Klimt's Auditorium of the Opera House and Theatre followed by colour photographs of modern Viennese architecture, sepia postcards before this magnificent gallery of portraits by artists like Hans Makart of a beautiful female pianist and singer, a Caught Ball, idyllic family scenes with children, Leopold Carl Müller's Camel Market in Cairo, the sensuous Woman in Yellow by Max Kurzweil and his romantic A Walk in the Garden, the stunning gold iconography of Klimt, his Yearning for Happiness, poster art, Garden with Sunflowers, A Church in Cassone, his graphic Sitting Male nude and Two Girlfriends, self-portraits and nudes by Egon Schiele, nude male studies by Koloman Moser and much more architectural legacies photographed in colour, plus interiors and design, greetings cards, fashion and more. The turn of the 20th century was a fascinating period in Vienna, as Austria-Hungary's capital on the Danube became a leading centre of modernism, defined by styles of Art Nouveau, historicism and Expressionism, all with a touch of typical Viennese morbidity. Artists like Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann dreamed of forging a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total artistic expression, in which not just design, architecture and crafts were combined, but also art and life itself. In this sumptuously illustrated album, art historian Janina Nentwig explores such major movements in Vienna as the Vienna Secession, themes of sex and Eros and death in painting, the construction of the Ring Road, ornamentation and architecture, and objects of everyday beauty from the Wiener Werkstätte. Oozing with hundreds of colour photos. 320 pages, softback, 21 x 24cm.
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Now rare 2014 first edition, a 96 glossy paged colour tribute to artist Tessa Newcomb. The book explores her enchantment with Paris in words and paint portraying the city's flâneurs, chic ladies walking their no less elegantly coiffured dogs, expectant lovers, children playing on carousels in the Tuileries, dainty eaters of patisseries, stall holders selling mushrooms, haute cuisine of delicious artistry and simple little restaurants with Lapin à La Cocotte on the menu, mobile phone users outside cafés, butchers cleaning up and chess players sequestered under trees in the Luxembourg Gardens. These vignettes are layered with the flavour of Tessa's own eclectic reading of writers inspired by Paris including Verlaine, Colette, Jean Rhys and François Sagan. Approximately 100 oils and watercolour drawings are reproduced in this wonderfully intimate visual record of her wanderings in both historic and hidden parts of Paris. Colour.

Art Nouveau was a phenomenon with many faces. Between 1890 and 1910, artists developed a variety of styles from the plant-like forms of the Belgian-French Art Nouveau to the ornamentation of the Viennese Secession. For a fruitful period between the 1880s and WWI, European and North American culture deferred to nature. With a symphony of flowing lines and organic shapes, Art Nouveau influenced architecture, design, painting, graphic work, applied arts and illustration. Turning to vine tendrils, flowering buds, and bird feathers as ornamental reference, artists pursued not only a linear freedom but also liberation from the weight of artistic tradition and expectation. Highlights include beautiful Tiffany and Gallé vases, the Paris Métro, train stations, department stores, door handles, furniture, dining rooms, cartoons, posters, chairs, porcelainware, Macintosh's Art-Lovers House design, the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Austrian glassware and more. Ther are exquisite multi-coloured glass domes, leaded glass windows like Grasset's Le Printemps, a double page colour spread of Maurice Denis' Palting Badminton with your ladies in white flowing dresses in woodlands to stylised functional and beautiful interiors and Aubrey Beardsley's Arthurian lithographs. This edition considers the style's wider artistic, economic, and political circumstances, as well as its particular flavour in such hubs as Vienna, Glasgow, Munich, Weimar, Brussels, Nancy, Barcelona, Darmstadt, Helsinki and Chicago. Outstanding proponents such as Victor Horta, Antoni Gaudí, Alphonse Mucha, Gustav Klimt, Maximilian Liebenwein, Walter Crane and Charles Rennie Mackintosh are featured in connection with the cities of their greatest activity plus unusual works by the Belgian symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff. Oozing with hundreds of colour photos. 264 pages, softback. 21 x 24cm.
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With his graphic style, figural distortion, and defiance of conventional standards of beauty, Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was a pioneer of Austrian Expressionism. Mentored by Gustav Klimt, Schiele dabbled in a glittering Art Nouveau style before developing his own confrontational aesthetic of sharp lines, lurid shades, and mannered, elongated figures, favouring erotic or unsettling poses and thrust their genitalia into the foreground. His models are at times skeletal and sickly, at other times strong and sensual. In 1912, the artist was briefly imprisoned for obscenity. Of special interest to us are the striking 'Crucifixion with Darkened Sun', 'Four Trees', Sunflower II, Agony, The Embrace (Lovers II), Double Self-Portrait and Triest Harbour with its lapiz lazuli colours and watery perfection. Concise biography, over 100 illus in colour. 288 pages, 18cm square.

A rare exhibition catalogue produced by the Morgan Library and Museum New York in 2016, generously illustrated with drawings, etchings, photographs, letters, colour photographs, sepia images, exquisite colour artworks and paintings such as the Arch of Constantine seen from the Colosseum, an albumen print of the Theatre of Marcellus, a panorama of Rome from the Piazza Montecavallo, the Girandola at Castel Sant'Angelo in a spectacular etching with colour washes of a firework display. Described by Byron as the City of the Soul, Rome has always inspired fervid imaginings and visionary renderings of itself and its past, and projected a romantic idea onto artists and writers. Its passion, imagination, individuality, transcendence and nonconformity has led to a thriving artistic community, particularly in the century between 1770 and 1870 when visitors experienced the Grand Tour to the onset of mass tourism. Here is every kind of encounter from letters and diary entries, poems, novels, prints, drawings, sketching, watercolours, oil sketches and the exciting new medium of photography, collectively constituting the portrait of a very special and particular place that has touched the very soul. Villas, gardens, fountains to speaking ruins, this is a beautiful visual celebration and text by a Princeton University lecturer. 224 large pages, 21.6 x 28cm. Very well illustrated, includes colour.
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A Royal Academy of Arts publication on the Renaissance Woodcuts from the Collections of Georg Baselitz and The Albertina, Vienna. The chiaroscuro woodcut developed in Germany in the early 16th century. By printing from one or more colour blocks in addition to the customary line block, artists found they could create a dramatic interplay of light and shade - chiaroscuro, the word that came to define the genre. They used its painterly qualities to create both independent works of art and reproductions of drawings and paintings by others. This handsome publication reproduces more than 130 woodcuts from Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, the Golden Age, in this fascinating history of the technique. It includes masterpieces by such well-known artists as Cranach, Beccafumi and Golzius, Ugo da Carpi, alongside other specialists and chapters cover Cremona and Bologna and developments in Italy. Today chiaroscuro woodcuts have once again become prestigious collectors' items and this tome is a rare opportunity to enjoy the creativity and technical brilliance of the artist and printmakers involved in this revolutionary printing technique. The story begins with the printer Erhard Ratdolt of Augsburg who played a key role in colour printing and who from 1476-1486 was active in Venice where he produced an edition of Euclid with a preface printed in gold. In his 1485 edition he used as many as three colours for the astronomical diagrams. 230 large glamorous pages with 120 masterpieces reproduced. 24.1 x 28cm, 2014 rare exhibition publication.

Beautiful Calla Lilies, Rams Head with Blue Morning Glory, Figures Under a Rooftop, A Nude Series, Flagpole, My Last Door, Abstraction White Rose, Black Iris, Winter Cottonwoods, Autumn Maple Leaves in the Trees section, Above The Clouds, On The Old Santa Fe Road and Storm Clouds Over Lake George, a Black Mesa landscape are among the temptingly colourful artworks in this collection. Georgia O'Keeffe's unique artistic vision made her one of the great American artists of the 20th century. Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) taught art in South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, and spent many years making art in New York and New Mexico. Beginning in the 1950s she travelled extensively around the world, and out of all these experiences, she distilled a style that is at once American and universal, cool and passionate. Reproduced in glorious colour here is a curator's collection from the premier collection of her work at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe New Mexico with a brief biographical overview and chronology. 80 page Abrams softback rare exhibition catalogue, 2003.