In this collection of British drawings, about sixty artists are represented, including most of the significant draftsmen of the time. The introduction gives a history of the drawings in the Huntington collection and a commentary on the style and character of the artists included in the catalogue.
The Huntington collection of British art includes not only the unrivaled full-length, life-size portrait paintings, but also many examples of the less familiar, more informal, but charming side of British portraiture--the drawings. In this book, twenty-five of these drawings are reproduced, each accompanied by a facing page of commentary. There are works in pencil, pen, wash, pastel, watercolor, and various combinations thereof. Some are presentation works intended to fill a more private and intimate function than the life-scale portraits in oil. Some are preparatory studies for works of art. Some are casual sketches made for the artist's own enjoyment or as a record of a memorable face. The drawings are representative examples of the work of twenty-five artists. They range in date from the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth and vary enormously in style and purpose. They include "plumbagos," miniatures in pencil done by the masters of the form, Loggan and Forster; drawings done in pencil and wash by Cosway, Lawrence, and Harlow; drawings by Greenhill and Gardner; and drawings used as preliminary studies for portraits to be done in oils by Ramsay, Fuseli, and Mortimer. Together with Wark's text, they demonstrate the quality of British achievement, the variety in types, and the fascinating complexity in appeal.
The Huntington collection of drawings by Thomas Rowlandson is generally regarded as the largest and most comprehensive at present in a public museum. The collection offers an unrivaled opportunity for the study of this prolific artist's range of interests and the development of his technique. As a line draftsman and humorist, Thomas Rowlandson was probably the finest England has ever produced. Certainly he had a wider command of comic devices and comes closer to exploiting their full potentialities than any other British artist. He is also wonderfully inventive in discovering and expressing the comic aspects of a great variety of everyday situations. His reputation as a humorist, though, should not obscure his achievement in other fields: he is a charming landscapist and genre artist, and a skillful portraitist. All these facets of Rowlandson's work are well represented in this volume, which reproduces and catalogues all of the Huntington drawings, including those from A Tour in a Post Chaise and The English Dance of Death, both previously published by the Huntington. In his introductory essay, Robert Wark discusses Rowlandson's art and illustrates the various aspects of his work by relating them to selected drawings that are reproduced in full color. The book will be of immense value to the student of art history, and the layman will be delighted by the vigor and sheer virtuosity of Rowlandson's work.
With their broken lines and hasty brushwork, sketches acquired enormous ideological and aesthetic power during the Romantic period in England. Whether publicly displayed or serving as the basis of a written genre, these rough drawings played a central role in the cultural ferment of the age by persuading audiences that less is more. The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism investigates the varied implications of sketching in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century culture. Calling on a wide range of literary and visual genres, Richard C. Sha examines the shifting economic and aesthetic value of the sketch in sources ranging from auction catalogs and sketching manuals to novels that employed scenes of sketching and courtship. He especially shows how sketching became a double-edged accomplishment for women when used to define "proper" femininity. Sha's work offers fresh readings of Austen, Gilpin, Wordsworth, and Byron, as well as less familiar writers, and provides sophisticated interpretations of visual sketches. As the first full-length work about sketching during the Romantic era, this volume is a rich interdisciplinary study of both representation and gender.
Multi-disciplinary in approach & cross-European in scope, this volume explores links between the political & the monstrous in Europe from the Renaissance to the 19th century. These essays stress the continual reinvention & polemical applications of the monstrous.
This book marks the retirement of Robert Wark as Curator of the Huntington Art Collections and reflects his wide interests in the field of British art. Contributors include Shelley Bennett, David Bindman, Martin Butlin, Patricia Crown, Robert Essick, John Hayes, Ronald Paulson, Jules Prown, Graham Reynolds, and Duncan Robinson. Topics covered in this volume include the connection between the political and the aesthetic in Hogarth's art, verbal/visual relationships in British book illustration, Blake's illustrations to Paradise Lost, late-eighteenth-century portrait miniatures, Cotes's double portrait of the Crathornes, the French Revolution in English graphic art of the 1790s, comic art and the rococo, a study of a Reynolds portrait, and a tribute by John Hayes to Robert Wark's thirty-five years of curatorship of the Huntington Art Collections. The essays are accompanied by 122 color and black and white illustrations of items from leading British and American art collections.
The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal has been published annually since 1974. It contains scholarly articles and shorter notes pertaining to objects in the Museum’s seven curatorial departments: Antiquities, Manuscripts, Paintings, Drawings, Decorative Arts, Sculpture and Works of Art, and Photographs. The Journal includes an illustrated checklist of the Museum’s acquisitions for the previous year, a staff listing, and a statement by the Museum’s director outlining the year’s most important activities. Volume 21 of the J. Paul Getty Museum Journal includes articles by John Walsh, Barbara C. Anderson, Ariel Herrmann, Jill Finsten, Lynn F. Jacobs, And Peter J. Holliday.
The Spooner Collection of watercolours is one of the finest of its kind, featuring all the leading artists of the period 1750 - 1850. Notable among them are watercolours of the Lake District by John White Abbott, and rural scenes by several artists - Gainsborough, Turner, Cozens, Rowlandson, Francis Towne, Samuel Palmer. Architecture dominates the setting, in works by Girtin, Cotman and Sandby. The essays accompanying the catalogue discuss outdoor painting and the role of memory in watercolour painting, the connoisseurship, and attitudes towards watercolours; and give a brief biography of William Wycliffe Spooner himself. This complete catalogue of the collection, bequeathed by Spooner to the Courtauld Institute, is published on the occasion of a touring exhibition of select works from the collection, showing at The Worsworth Trust, Grasmere; The Huntingdon Library, California; and the Courtauld Institute Gallery, London, 2005 - 2006.
