This overview answers key questions about the production and consumption of art in Britain in the 16th and early 17th century, integrating art history, history and conservation science. The illustrations allow the reader to engage directly and to see some of the most famous Tudor and Jacobean paintings in a new light.

This survey sets state, civic, commercial, church, private and other murals in their historical and cultural contexts. The book covers work by over 400 artists and numerous murals never previously documented or illustrated.

This book illuminates the original functions of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century mural paintings in Britain and is intended to be read primarily by specialists, graduate and undergraduate students with an interest in new approaches to British art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Fifty of Vincent van Gogh's celebrated paintings reveal the influences of British art and literature on his early career as well as his impact on British artists. Vincent van Gogh, the postimpressionist painter, remains among the most influential figures in the history of Western art. His 871 oil-on-canvas works and numerous sketches shaped the development of contemporary painting, as his tumultuous and tragic personal life typified the idea of a tortured artist. While much has been written on van Gogh, there is little scholarship on his early twenties, a period in which his artistic identity took form in London, England. Van Gogh and Britain follows the painter from his first exposure to British culture in the 1870s, when he lived in south London, to his influence on British art as he achieved iconic status in the 1950s. As a young art dealer in training, van Gogh wandered the streets of London, absorbing the work of the pre-Raphaelites, Shakespeare, and Charles Dickens, reporting happily to his brother Theo: "Things are going well for me here." This book reveals the British ideas, books, paintings, and prints that caught the unknown van Gogh's attention, in turn informing both his ideals and his practical investigations of a radical, egalitarian style. Even after moving to France, van Gogh's preoccupation with British art and literature remains visible in his dramatically original late works, including major pictures such as The Bedroom and Van Gogh's Chair. British painters and collectors were among the first to respond to van Gogh's work when he briefly participated in the Paris art scene, but his full impact would arrive later in the twentieth century, when the artist became an embodiment of embattled human creativity, inspiring modern British painters from Walter Sickert to Francis Bacon.

The field covered by this volume includes the work and influence of foreign-born painters such as Holbein and Van Dyck as well as native masters from Gower and Milliard to Gainsborough, Stubbs, and Sandby. We can follow step by step the development and flowering of British painting, and can compare, for example, the work of the English Sir Joshua Reynolds with the Scottish Allan Ramsay. Portrait and landscape, history piece, miniature, watercolour, there is a record of them all. The text is both scholarly and readable and the illustrations include well known examples of British painting and others seldom or never before reproduced between the covers of a book. This is the fifth edition of this work, newly enhanced with colour illustrations.

Black artists have been making major contributions to the British art scene for decades, since at least the mid-twentieth century. Sometimes these artists were regarded and embraced as practitioners of note. At other times they faced challenges of visibility - and in response they collaborated and made their own exhibitions and gallery spaces. In this book, Eddie Chambers tells the story of these artists from the 1950s onwards, including recent developments and successes. Black Artists in British Art makes a major contribution to British art history. Beginning with discussions of the pioneering generation of artists such as Ronald Moody, Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling, Chambers candidly discusses the problems and progression of several generations, including contemporary artists such as Steve McQueen, Chris Ofili and Yinka Shonibare. Meticulously researched, this important book tells the fascinating story of practitioners who have frequently been overlooked in the dominant history of twentieth-century British art.

This book explores the nature of Britain-based artists’ engagement with the transformations of their environment since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. At a time of pressing ecological concerns, the international group of contributors provide a series of case studies that reconsider the nature–culture divide and aim at identifying the contours of a national narrative that stretches from enclosed lands to rising seas. By adopting a longer historical view, this book hopes to enrich current debates concerning art’s engagement with recording and questioning the impact of human activity on the environment. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, environmental humanities, and British studies.

Repainting the work of another into one?s own canvas is a deliberate and often highly fraught act of reuse. This book examines the creation, display, and reception of such images. Artists working in nineteenth-century London were in a peculiar position: based in an imperial metropole, yet undervalued by their competitors in continental Europe. Many claimed that Britain had yet to produce a viable national school of art. Using pictures-within-pictures, British painters challenged these claims and asserted their role in an ongoing visual tradition. By transforming pre-existing works of art, they also asserted their own painterly abilities. Recognizing these statements provided viewers with pleasure, in the form of a witty visual puzzle solved, and with prestige, in the form of cultural knowledge demonstrated. At stake for both artist and audience in such exchanges was status: the status of the painter relative to other artists, and the status of the viewer relative to other audience members. By considering these issues, this book demonstrates a new approach to images of historic displays. Through examinations of works by J.M.W. Turner, John Everett Millais, John Scarlett Davis, Emma Brownlow King, and William Powell Frith, this book reveals how these small passages of paint conveyed both personal and national meanings.