Covering the period between the late 16th century through to the third quarter of the 19th century, this book features paintings by English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish artists which are part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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.
Everyone knows the story of the Boston Tea Party—in which colonists stormed three British ships and dumped 92,000 pounds of tea into Boston Harbor. But do you know the history of the Philadelphia Tea Party (December 1773)? How about the York, Maine, Tea Party (September 1774) or the Wilmington, North Carolina, Tea Party (March 1775)? Ten Tea Parties is the first book to chronicle all these uniquely American protests. Author and historian Joseph Cummins begins with the history of the East India Company (the biggest global corporation in the eighteenth century) and their staggering financial losses during the Boston Tea Party (more than a million dollars in today’s money). From there we travel to Philadelphia, where Captain Samuel Ayres was nearly tarred and feathered by a mob of 8,000 angry patriots. Then we set sail for New York City, where the Sons of Liberty raided the London and heaved 18 chests of tea into the Hudson River. Still later, in Annapolis, Maryland, a brigantine carrying 2,320 pounds of the “wretched weed” was burned to ashes. Together, the stories in Ten Tea Parties illuminate the power of Americans banding together as Americans—for the very first time in the fledgling nation’s history. It’s no wonder these patriots remain an inspiration to so many people today.
New York is like an infinite onion that you discover layer after layer, never tiring of peeling. You get to know it step by step, enchanted by its colours, its light, the sunsets and sunrises, by the ever-changing colour of the sky, as mutable as the wind. In the shadow of its breathtakingly tall skyscrapers, its buildings, its townhouses, as you hurry from one of the varied shop windows to the next. In its elegance and glamour, the formality of its museums, great temples of culture, in the magic of evocative moments and glimpses of street life. Indeed, New York does not actually exist, because there is not only one New York City, but ten, one thousand, one hundred thousand cities within the city, all jostling and intersecting each other, all connected to each other, in a melting pot of people, traditions and cultures that take you on a journey to every part of the world. This latest addition to the successful CubeBook Collection is dedicated to the discovery of this multifaceted city that is in a state of continuous transformation. AUTHOR: Alessandra Mattanza lives in New York. As a writer, journalist and photographer, she feels multi-faceted like the City that she adores from its most insignificant sidewalk to the top of its stunning skyscrapers. She writes for the major Italian and German magazines of the Mondadori, Conde Nast, Rizzoli, Gruner + Jahr and Stern publishing groups and for several publishers, including Sperling & Kupfer, White Star and Giunti. She is also the author of a work of fiction Storie di New York, FBE Edizioni (2010), a collection of short stories, for which she is now producing a screenplay. SELLING POINTS: * The images of the "new" New York, with the latest skyscrapers and exceptional works of architecture. * The passionate texts of an "adopted" New Yorker. * The testimony to the rebirth of the city. * 390 photographs from air and land. * A new title in a successful series for collectors. ILLUSTRATIONS: 392 colour photos
Studies of the English gentleman have tended to focus mainly on the nineteenth century, encouraging the implicit assumption that this influential literary trope has less resonance for twentieth-century literature and culture. Christine Berberich challenges this notion by showing that the English gentleman has proven to be a remarkably adaptable and relevant ideal that continues to influence not only literature but other forms of representation, including the media and advertising industries. Focusing on Siegfried Sassoon, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh and Kazuo Ishiguro, whose presentations of the gentlemanly ideal are analysed in their specific cultural, historical, and sociological contexts, Berberich pays particular attention to the role of nostalgia and its relationship to 'Englishness'. Though 'Englishness' and by extension the English gentleman continue to be linked to depictions of England as the green and pleasant land of imagined bygone days, Berberich counterbalances this perception by showing that the figure of the English gentleman is the medium through which these authors and many of their contemporaries critique the shifting mores of contemporary society. Twentieth-century depictions of the gentleman thus have much to tell us about rapidly changing conceptions of national, class, and gender identity.