The story of Ivan Aivazovksy is peerless in the history of art. A poor boy from an obscure Black Sea port, he ended his life as the best-known Russian painter ever. His exhibitions all over the world drew enormous crowds and earned him admiration from the likes of Horace Vernet and William Turner. Today, Aivazovsky's work passes constantly through salesrooms and is eagerly sought after by collectors. Published on the hundredth anniversary of his death, this is the first book on the artist in English. Over 200 of his works are reproduced in color, most for the first time. The lively text offers insights into the working methods of a man who raised European maritime painting to new heights.

Spreading Canvas takes a close look at the tradition of marine painting that flourished in 18th-century Britain. Drawing primarily on the extensive collections of the Yale Center for British Art and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, this publication shows how the genre corresponded with Britain's growing imperial power and celebrated its increasing military presence on the seas, representing the subject matter in a way that was both documentary and sublime. Works by leading purveyors of the style, including Peter Monamy, Samuel Scott, Dominic Serres, and Nicholas Pocock, are featured alongside sketches, letters, and other ephemera that help frame the political and geographic significance of these inspiring views, while also establishing the painters' relationships to concurrent metropolitan art cultures. This survey, featuring a wealth of beautifully reproduced images, demonstrates marine painting's overarching relevance to British culture of the era. Published in association with the Yale Center for British Art Exhibition Schedule: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (09/15/16-12/04/16)

Following the success in 2000 of Seas, Cities, and Dreams, the authors return with a second volume on the works of this remarkable 19th-century master who raised European maritime painting to a new level. A towering figure in his day, he shot to international fame at an early age. His exhibitions drew enormous crowds from all over the world and earned him the admiration of Vernet and Turner. He was elected a member of five European academies and was personally acquainted with most of the crowned heads of his day. Throughout his long and colorful career Aivazovsky claimed to have painted over 6,000 pictures. The authors—the foremost experts on the artist—have gathered the material for this book from public and private collections worldwide. The large number of paintings illustrated offer a significant addition to the published corpus of Aivazovsky's oeuvre. Their chronological arrangement makes this book an invaluable resource for scholars, collectors, and Aivazovsky's many admirers.

Anatoly Dverin:An American Impressionist is a combination of autobiographical story telling and brilliant painting in the Impressionist style. This is the story of a child's hardships in the 1930's in Communist Ukraine and his drive and determination to realize his dream of becoming a professional artist. Anatoly graduated from art college and became a member in the prestigious Artists' Union in the U.S.S.R. His future was secure with commissions from the Ministry of Culture and various publishing companies. Then, at the expense of giving up everything - college diplomas, precious old sketchbooks, and all personal property except $300 - and being repeatedly intimidated by the KGB, Anatoly immigrated to the United States with his wife and small daughter in 1976. During the last thirty years, Anatoly has worked as a professional illustrator whose astounding draftsmanship and attention to detail is so fine one could assume a colored pencil drawing to be a photograph. Still, Anatoly has traveled further with his talent to become not only a contemporary artist whose paintings are carried by the finest galleries but also a gifted teacher who is giving back by sharing his talent through teaching his craft. This is a man whose work is prolific and important. His portraits, sensitive to the nuance of personality, embody the life of the subject. The still lifes vary from delicate to bold through the subtleties of combining light, shadow and color. Most abundant in the book, and in Anatoly's work, are his landscapes. Readers can expect to enjoy the old and traditional landscapes of Europe as well as all the color and ruggedness of New England. Unifying all of Anatoly's work is his absolute mastery of composition and his playfulness with light. This book generously offers not only the pages of text, photographs, and illustrations for the autobiography, but also over 170 full color pages of portraits, still-lifes, and most importantly, Anatoly's landscapes.

This is a definitive, deeply researched biography of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) and is the first scholarly biography to be published in any language. The book is Todes's magnum opus, which he has been working on for some twenty years. Todes makes use of a wealth of archival material to portray Pavlov's personality, life, times, and scientific work. Combining personal documents with a close reading of scientific texts, Todes fundamentally reinterprets Pavlov's famous research on conditional reflexes. Contrary to legend, Pavlov was not a behaviorist (a misimpression captured in the false iconic image of his "training a dog to salivate to the sound of a bell"); rather, he sought to explain not simply external behaviors, but the emotional and intellectual life of animals and humans. This iconic "objectivist" was actually a profoundly anthropomorphic thinker whose science was suffused with his own experiences, values, and subjective interpretations. This book is also a traditional "life and times" biography that weaves Pavlov into some 100 years of Russian history-particularly that of its intelligentsia--from the emancipation of the serfs to Stalin's time. Pavlov was born to a family of priests in provincial Ryazan before the serfs were emancipated, made his home and professional success in the glittering capital of St. Petersburg in late imperial Russia, suffered the cataclysmic destruction of his world during the Bolshevik seizure of power and civil war of 1917- 1921, rebuilt his life in his 70s as a "prosperous dissident" during the Leninist 1920s, and flourished professionally as never before in 1929-1936 during the industrialization, revolution, and terror of Stalin. Todes's story of this powerful personality and extraordinary man is based upon interviews with surviving coworkers and family members (along with never-before-analyzed taped interviews from the 1960s and 1970s), examination of hundreds of scientific works

From the 18th century to the 20th, this book gives a panorama of Russian painting not equalled anywhere else. Russian culture developed in contact with the wider European influence, but retained strong native intonations. It is a culture between East and West, and both influences in together. The book begins with Icons, and it is precisely Icon-painting which gave Russian artist their peculiar preoccupation with ethical questions and a certain kind of palette. It goes on the expound the duality of their art, and point out the originality of their contribution to world art. The illustrations cover all genres and styles of painting in astonishing variety. Such figures as Borovokovsky, Rokotov, Levitsky, Brullov, Fedatov, Repin, Shishkin and Levitan and many more are in these pages.