A lavishly illustrated, beautiful collection of highlights from the Tate collection over the past 500 years Tate Britain is the home of British art from 1500 to the present day. This guide to the collection provides an essential introduction to the extraordinary development of British art over the centuries. British art is notable for genres unique to itself: group portraits, known as "conversation pieces," focusing on social relations between friends, family, and allies; themes from British literature, particularly Shakespeare, Milton, and Tennyson; and topical subjects in the late 18th and early 19th centuries reflecting the wars with France and the scientific innovations of the Industrial Revolution. The art from Britain in Tate's collection is rich with imaginative invention and reinvention, and this panoramic book celebrates this aesthetic ingenuity as an ongoing story, revealing how 500 years of art can act as a fascinating lens through which to deepen our understanding of ourselves and society, past and present, in both Britain and in the rest of the world.

An innovative and lavishly illustrated account of the art, writings, and global influence of one of the 19th century's most influential thinkers This book presents an innovative portrait of John Ruskin (1819-1900) as artist, art critic, social theorist, educator, and ecological campaigner. Ruskin's juvenilia reveal an early embrace of his lifelong interests in geology and botany, art, poetry, and mythology. His early admiration of Turner led him to identify the moral power of close looking. In The Stones of Venice, illustrated with his own drawings, he argued that the development of architectural style revealed the moral condition of society. Later, Ruskin pioneered new approaches to teaching and museum practice. Influential worldwide, Ruskin's work inspired William Morris, founders of the Labour Party, and Mahatma Gandhi. Through thematic essays and detailed discussions of his works, this book argues that, complex and contradictory, Ruskin's ideas are of urgent importance today. Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art Exhibition Schedule: Yale Center for British Art (September 5-December 8, 2019)

A dazzlingly original and ambitious book on the history of female self-portraiture by one of today's most well-respected art critics. Her story weaves in and out of time and place. She's Frida Kahlo, Loïs Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She's Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she's Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She's haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cézanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She's railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she's hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available. Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval. In The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery.

Providing a concise accessible introduction to British art, this is published to coincide with the new chronological re-hanging of the Tate Collection at Tate Britain. With entries of on over 170 artworks, representing the unrivalled collection at Tate Britain, this is the story of British art over the last five hundred years.

Andrew Graham-Dixon unveils the long-kept secret of Britain's rich and vital visual culture.

"Britain has played a key part in the history of the last five centuries, and its art reflects this in absorbing and complex ways. Andrew Wilton, Keeper and Senior Research Fellow at Tate Britain, traces the story of British painting from its hesitant beginnings under the influence of Holbein through its maturity in the time of Hogarth and Reynolds, when it reflected a prosperous society with growing imperial influence. He then explores the pioneering role of Constable and Turner in the revolutions of the Romantic period, and the enigmatic position of artists in Victorian England, when a stiff moral code came into conflict with the uncertainties of the age of Darwin. A consistent undercurrent has been Britain's preference for the real world (landscape, portraiture) as against 'high' art and abstraction. Andrew Wilton offers new insights into the great personalities of British painting, and assesses afresh the latest flowering, in which many threads of modern art come together in sometimes startling guises."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved