The Lady Lever Art Gallery has a collection of 18th Century British furniture unsurpassed by any other holding outside the Victoria and Albert Museum. The commodes are the most important and spectacular part of this collection and are analysed in meticulous detail providing new documentation on their origin and attribution.
Port Sunlight was founded in 1888 by the industrialist Lord Leverhulme to house the workers from his prospering business—which would evolve into Unilever. Acclaimed for its planning and house design, Port Sunlight greatly influenced subsequent planned developments, as well as the garden city movement. This fully revised version of A Guide to Port Sunlight marries the practical details of a guidebook with historical information about Port Sunlight’s design and architecture, its place in the history of urban planning, and Leverhulme's role in the town’s creation. A wealth of illustrations helps make this the perfect book for armchair and actual travelers to this jewel of nineteenth-century town planning.
There are over thirty public art galleries in north-west England with substantial permanent collections. The superb collections in Liverpool at the Walker Art Gallery and in Manchester at the City Art Gallery and at the Whitworth Art Gallery are well known, while Lord Leverhulme’s splendid British paintings and sculptures preserved at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight have an international reputation. For Pre-Raphaelite, Classical, Aesthetic and Impressionist British art and much else, north-west England cumulatively has public collections unmatched even in London. This book is both a guide and a history to these collections as well as other less famous public collections containing little-known masterpieces.
Beginning in the 1950s, Pablo Picasso concerned himself intensely with the linocut, creating a veritable cosmos of bullfighting scenes, mythological images, and abstract portraits. Neglected for many years, this traditional printmaking technique--which effectively combined his talent as a draftsman with his expressive use of color--was consequently to experience a renaissance. On par with his paintings in their coloristic effects, Picasso's linocuts convey both the mature tone of the late Picasso and the almost youthful buoyancy of an artist of over seventy years who once more found himself the eager apprentice of a new technique. And with his experimental approach to the new medium--as shown by countless artist's and trial proofs, many of which are included here--Picasso helped to establish the linocut in the modern-day art world as a professional printmaking technique. In addition to exploring Picasso's unconventional handling of the linocut, this volume--created to accompany an exhibition this year at the Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso in Munster--also recounts the history of the linocut and the biographical circumstances under which Picasso created his works. Included in this lavish volume are more than one hundred illustrations of the vibrant prints Picasso created between 1954 and 1968. Many are among the artist's most defining work and demonstrate his lifelong ability to engage with virtually any medium and to make it his own.
THE HAMMOCK: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot portrays ten remarkable years in the life of James Tissot (1836-1902), who rebuilt - and then lost - his reputation in London. THE HAMMOCK is a psychological portrait, exploring the forces that unwound the career of this complex man. Based on contemporary sources, the novel brings Tissot's world alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.
This innovative history of British art museums begins in the early 19th century. The National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in London may have been at the center of activity, but museums in cities such as Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, and Nottingham were immensely popular and attracted enthusiastic audiences. The People's Galleries traces the rise of art museums in Britain through World War I, focusing on the phenomenon of municipal galleries. This richly illustrated book argues that these regional museums represented a new type of institution: an art gallery for a working-class audience, appropriate for the rapidly expanding cities and shaped by liberal ideals. As their broad appeal weakened with the new century, they adapted and became more conventional. Using a wide range of sources, the book studies the patrons and the publics, the collecting policies, the temporary exhibitions, and the architecture of these institutions, as well as the complex range of reasons for their foundation. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
A detailed catalogue of the paintings in the gallery by British artists born before 1810. This group of 151 paintings, collected by Lord Leverhulme between 1896 and 1925, represents one of the key areas of his taste, and includes masterpieces by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Wilson, Stubbs, Constable and Turner.
The definitive account of exploitation in the Congo, introduced by Adam Hochschild In the early twentieth century, the worldwide rubber boom led British entrepreneur Lord Leverhulme to the Belgian Congo. Warmly welcomed by the murderous regime of King Leopold II, Leverhulme set up a private kingdom reliant on the horrific Belgian system of forced labour, a programme that reduced the population of Congo by half and accounted for more deaths than the Nazi Holocaust. In this definitive, meticulously researched history, Jules Marchal exposes the nature of forced labour under Lord Leverhulme’s rule and the appalling conditions imposed upon the people of Congo. With an extensive introduction by Adam Hochschild, Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts is an important and urgently needed account of a laboratory of colonial exploitation.
The first reference work devoted to their lives and roles, this book provides information on some 200 artists' models from the Renaissance to the present day. Most entries are illustrated and consist of a brief biography, selected works in which the model appears (with location), a list of further reading. This will prove an invaluable reference work for art historians, librarians, museum and gallery curators, as well as students and researchers.
The English Civil War has become a frequent point of reference in contemporary British political debate. A bitter and bloody series of conflicts, it shook the very foundations of seventeenth-century Britain. This book is the first attempt to portray the visual legacy of this period, as passed down, revisited, and periodically reworked over two and a half centuries of subsequent English history. Highly regarded art historian Stephen Bann deftly interprets the mass of visual evidence accessible today, from ornate tombs and statues to surviving sites of vandalism and iconoclasm, public signage, and historical paintings of human subjects, events, and places. Through these important scenes and sometimes barely perceptible traces, Bann shows how the British view of the War has been influenced and transformed by visual imagery.