"Peacock in the Desert" traces the evolution of royal identity in the kingdom of Marwar-Jodhpur in southwestern Rajasthan from the 17th century to the establishment of independence after 1947, presenting the area as a microcosm of India's extraordina...

Judged by the portrait Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1 (1871), painted by her son James McNeill Whistler, Anna Whistler (1804-1881) appears to have been a pious, unassuming, domestic woman. This characterization, however, is far from the whole tr...

Landscape art in the early 19th century was guided by two rival concepts: the picturesque, which emphasized touristic pleasures and visual delight, and the sublime, an aesthetic category rooted in notions of fear and danger. British artists including...

Acclaimed and beloved for her paintings of women and children in intimate, informal settings, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was the only American artist to exhibit with the French Impressionists in Paris. Cassatt celebrated women in an age of rapid female...

"The Poetry of Nature" offers an in-depth look at more than 40 extraordinary Japanese paintings that represent every major school and movement of the Edo period, including Kano, Rinpa, Nanga, Zen, Maruyama-Shij?, and Ukiyo-e. The unifying theme is a...

Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) is renowned for a single, monumental, modernist artwork, "Life? or Theatre?" ("Leben? oder Theater?"), comprising 784 paintings and created between 1941 and 1942. This major art-historical study sheds new light on the re...

This eloquent and generously illustrated book asserts that artists were fascinated by and extremely skilled at still life significantly earlier than previously thought. Instead of the genre beginning in the early 17th century, noted scholar David Eks...

In ancient China (2000-221 b.c.) elaborate bronze vessels were used for rituals involving cooking, drinking, and serving food. This fascinating book not only examines the cultural practices surrounding these objects in their original context, but it...

South African-born Belgian artist Kendell Geers changed his date of birth to MAY 1968 as a performance, effectively giving birth to himself as a work of art. His artistic practice weaves together African animism, European mysticism, and socio-politic...

Winslow Homer (1836-1910) is widely regarded as the greatest American painter of the 19th century, but it is not well known that he spent a pivotal period of time on the other side of the Atlantic. The eighteen months Homer spent in England in 1881 a...