Over 5000 portrait artists are included providing much original biographical information. Illustrations have been carefully selected to show as many rarely seen unpublished works as possible.
This book sets a new standard as a work of reference. It covers British and Irish art in public collections from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, and it encompasses nearly 9,000 painters and 90,000 paintings in more than 1,700 separate collections. The book includes as well pictures that are now lost, some as a consequence of the Second World War and others because of de-accessioning, mostly from 1950 to about 1975 when Victorian art was out of fashion. By listing many tens of thousands of previously unpublished works, including around 13,000 which do not yet have any form of attribution, this book becomes a unique and indispensable work of reference, one that will transform the study of British and Irish painting.
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.
The first reference work to cover all engravers working on copper in Britain and Ireland 1714-1820 This biographical dictionary of engravers working on copper encompasses both those who produced fine art prints, and also those who engraved book illustrations for medical, technical and literary works, all of which played a more important part than is usually realised in spreading information in the age of Enlightenment. Some 3,000 biographical entries draw on much unpublished information, researched over four decades, notably records of apprenticeship, genealogy, insurance and bankruptcy as well as newspaper advertisements and contemporary accounts. This is the first reference work to cover all engravers working on copper in Britain and Ireland 1714-1820. Many biographical entries describe celebrated engravers producing "fine art" prints of paintings, which spread knowledge about living and dead artists. However, this book also builds up a more complex picture of the occupation of printmaking and includes engravers, many previously unresearched, who engraved ephemeral material, such as trade cards, bank notes, and satirical prints as well as the images that spread knowledge across literary, geographical, historical, topographical, medical and technical fields.
Originally published in 1987, this new edition of British Prints is a comprehensive dictionary of British printmakers working between 1650 and 1950. It covers eighteenth century mezzotint portraits, nineteenth century sporting aquatints and topographical views, and original etchings and lithographs in the twentieth century. Since most prints in this period were either signed in the plate or individually signed in ink or pencil by the artist, it provides a convenient and accessible means to identify a printmaker, look up the concise biographical summary and ascertain the printmaker's range of work and relative stature, as well as to obtain some idea of the likely value of the works. British Prints reached the status of bible within the antiques trade in its successful first edition, and this new fully revised edition has been very quick to reprint due to the demand.
This comprehensive and versatile reference source will be a most important tool for anyone wishing to seek out information on virtually any aspect of British affairs, life and culture. The resources of a detailed bibliography, directory and journals listing are combined in this single volume, forming a unique guide to a multitude of diverse topics - British politics, government, society, literature, thought, arts, economics, history and geography. Academic subjects as taught in British colleges and universities are covered, with extensive reading lists of books and journals and sources of information for each discipline, making this an invaluable manual.
First published in 1989, An Illustrated Dictionary of British Steel Engravers contains more than 600 entries and an extensive plate section, providing examples of work referenced in the text and adding a clear chronological dimension to the subject. The book makes use of an array of surviving accounts and correspondence of engravers and publishers and adopts a comprehensive and systematic approach to identifying different types and variants of steel engravings over time. Equipped with a detailed introduction to the history of steel engravings, An Illustrated Dictionary of British Steel Engravers will be of great use to those interested in illustration, graphic art, Victorian literature, and the history of printing.