Gambart

The correspondence of Joanna and George Boyce, and Joanna's husband Henry Wells (published as The Boyce Papers) gives us a rare insight into the milieu of the artists of the mid-Victorian period. Many different aspects of mid-nineteenth century artistic life are recorded in their letters, providing surprising detail which is highly relevant to the study of their contemporaries. Victorian Artists and their World is a series of case studies based on this material. This book brings together a team of authors both well-established in their fields and emerging, offering a broad range of expertise and insight. The first group of essays begins with travel, particularly in Europe where the new railroads made journeys much easier than in the past, particularly to the new museums being created in European cities. All three of them went to Paris and other European cities, while George Boyce also travelled in the French countryside to find new subjects for his art. Paris was also where Henry Wells and Joanna Boyce trained, but there is also a great deal of material about art training in Britain. The Boyces began essentially as financially independent amateurs, and were gradually drawn in to the increasingly institutional world of art, with the formation of new societies and the activities of commercial galleries. The next stage in an artist's career, involvement with the art market, is a continuing theme in the correspondence, 'the quirks and eccentricities of patrons and art dealers'. Studios, clubs and societies all played a part in this process, while Henry Wells, as a portrait painter, dealt directly with his often wayward clients. It was also a period of great changes in the painting materials available to artists, and there are questions in the letters such as 'Does indigo fly?', referring to a long established colour. The survival of two of Joanna Boyce's paintboxes means that her use of newer artists' materials could be investigated, along with the problems they could cause, - several of Joanna Boyce's paintings deteriorated rapidly because of the use of new materials. A second group of essays looks at the place of women in the art world, as reflected in Joanna Boyce's career. While she did not belong to the campaigners who were creating a space for women artists, including the formation of the Society of Female Artists in 1857, she was very much aware of what they stood for, as is evident from her paintings, and also from her art criticism, which was praised by Ruskin; her writing for the Saturday Review remains vivid and impressive even today. The correspondence comes to an end with Joanna Boyce's untimely death, but the three final essays deal with the longer careers of George Boyce and Henry Wells. George Boyce moved in the different world of the watercolour artists, with the Old Watercolour Society at its centre, and was until recently the best known of the trio. His place in this world is the subject of one essay; another shows him as an important art collector; there is a complete record of the sale of the collection after his death which enables us to see the range of his interests. Finally, there is a collaborative study of the career of Henry Wells, which extended from miniatures of the early Victorian era into the twentieth century and a handful of paintings of modern life. The effect of photography led him to change from miniatures to formal portraiture in the 1850s, and he was a very active if rather conservative member of the Royal Academy towards the end of his life. This multi-facetted volume is a valuable set of case studies on topics which are not often treated on their own, but which are very relevant to Victorian art. They remind us that there is much more to this period than the Pre-Raphaelites, and that other movements, (such as the Aesthetic painters who were an important influence on Joanna Boyce's art) flourished in their shade. Edited by Katie J T Herrington. Contributors: Sue Bradbury, Meaghan Clarke, Louise Cooling, Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Alicia Hughes, Christiana Payne, Mark Pomeroy, Matthew Potter, Joyce Townsend, and Glenda Youde.

Philip Hook takes the lid off the world of art dealing to reveal the brilliance, cunning, greed and daring of its practitioners. In a richly anecdotal narrative he describes the rise and occasional fall of the extraordinary men and women who over the centuries have made it their business to sell art to kings, merchants, nobles, entrepreneurs and museums. From its beginnings in Antwerp, where paintings were sometimes sold by weight, to the rich hauteur of the contemporary gallery in London, Paris and New York, art dealing has been about identifying what is intangible but infinitely desirable, and then finding clients for whom it is irresistible. Those who have purveyed art for a living range from tailors, spies and the occasional anarchist to scholars, aristocrats, merchants and connoisseurs, each variously motivated by greed, belief in their own vision of art and its history, or simply the will to win. The cast of characters includes Paul Durand-Ruel, the Impressionists' champion; Herwath Walden, who first brought Modernism into the limelight; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, high priest of Cubism; Leo Castelli, dealer-midwife to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art; and Peter Wilson, the charismatic Sotheby's chairman who made the auction room theatre. Philip Hook's history is one of human folly, greed and duplicity, interspersed with ingenuity, inspiration and acts of heroism. Rogues' Gallery is learned, witty and irresistibly readable.

WINNER OF THE FRANCO-BRITISH SOCIETY LITERARY AWARD 2020 'Art is a Tyrant recounts [Bonheur's] life with no little brio.' Michael Prodger, The Times Books of the Year 2020 'A diligently researched, beautifully produced and insistently sympathetic biography.' Kathryn Hughes, Guardian A new biography of the wildly unconventional 19th-century animal painter and gender equality pioneer Rosa Bonheur, from the author of the acclaimed Mistress of Paris and Renoir's Dancer. Rosa Bonheur was the very antithesis of the feminine ideal of 19th-century society. She was educated, she shunned traditional 'womanly' pursuits, she rejected marriage - and she wore trousers. But the society whose rules she spurned accepted her as one of their own, because of her genius for painting animals. She shared an intimate relationship with the eccentric, self-styled inventor Nathalie Micas, who nurtured the artist like a wife. Together Rosa, Nathalie and Nathalie's mother bought a chateau and with Rosa's menagerie of animals the trio became one of the most extraordinary households of the day. Catherine Hewitt's compelling new biography is an inspiring evocation of a life lived against the rules.

Featuring 388 high-resolution photographs and concise descriptions of the Moon's topography, this atlas is an indispensable guide for amateur astronomers and astrophotographers.