Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2011, George Shaw (b. 1966) is one of Britain's leading contemporary painters, best known for his painstakingly detailed, luminous, and often elegiac representations of the British suburban landscape. Beautifully des...

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...

From Italy to France to Flanders, the arts of painting in the 14th century were practised in manuscript illumination, on panel, and in fresco. Recipes for pigments appropriate to all these arts are included in this collection. "Experiments upon Colou...

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, m...

At the turn of the twentieth century, Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) created a body of work that left visible reality behind, exploring the radical possibilities of abstraction years before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, or Piet Mondr...

Beginning in 1800, "Looking at Men" explores how the modern male body was forged through the intimately linked professions of art and medicine, which deployed muscular models and martial arts to renew the beau id al. This ideal of the virile body der...

This beautifully illustrated book examines the artistic career of the French painter and draftsman Henri-Edmond Cross who was a key figure in the development of European modernism. Inspired by the work of Realist painters such as Gustave Courbet and...

The art of the Sistine Chapel, decorated by artists who competed with one another and commissioned by popes who were equally competitive, is a complex fabric of thematic, chronological, and artistic references. Four main campaigns were undertaken to...

In "Enchanted Islands", renowned art historian Mary D. Sheriff explores the legendary, fictional, and real islands that filled the French imagination during the ancien regime as they appeared in royal ballets and festivals, epic literature, paintings...