A beautiful book that reveals the world of art collecting from home, featuring exquisite examples of Hollingsworth and Morris family furniture. Start with House, Finish with a Collection is the story of how a couple's use of American art and antiques evolved from furnishing a house into a full-blown passion for collecting. Featuring exquisite examples of Hollingsworth and Morris family furniture, Weber boxes, Pennsylvania clocks and Kirk-Stieff silver, as well as American paintings by the Peale family, Edward Hicks, Edward Redfield and Horace Pippin, this museum-calibre collection reveals a pride in the early American sensibility. The combination of text and extraordinary photographs traces this remarkable journey and demonstrates that life can be more than comfortable living among these collections. The compendium catalogues the diversified and important collection, making this a valuable scholarly reference as well as a reading pleasure.

This is a richly illustrated volume that focuses on the remarkably ornamented silverware produced by Indian craftsmen during the period of the British Raj. Silversmiths created elegant silver tea services, bowls, wine and water ewers, beer mugs, and goblets to adorn the sideboard or mantelpiece in a British Raj home, creating European forms fulfilling European requirements. These same silversmiths then adopted a unique manner of embellishing these objects with a variety of different motifs that reflect local taste and carry a recognizably local pattern. This book carries a set of five essays that explore different facets of the production and consumption of Indian silver for the Raj. It considers the silverware in terms of its clearly distinguishable regional styles, which is prefaced by two thematic sections, one on calling card cases and the other on tea services, which demonstrate its wide prevalence. The visual presentation of the silverware does justice to it dazzling quality. The book is published in conjunction with an exhibition that opens at the Miriam & Ira D Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York, in September 2008.

A dazzling look back at six decades of paintings by America's favorite artist, this is the crowning book of Andrew Wyeth's career. This comprehensive survey reproduces 133 tempera, drybrush, and watercolor paintings and five pencil sketches - the only true retrospective of the artist's work ever published. But what makes this book truly extraordinary are Wyeth's comments about each painting - an "autobiography," told through conversations with Thomas Hoving - which offer fascinating, sometimes unexpected facts about Wyeth's life and art. Based on a retrospective exhibition that originated in Japan and travels to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Andrew Wyeth: Autobiography includes many seminal paintings from both his Chadds Ford and Maine work - including Distant Thunder, Garret Room, and several paintings of Helga - as well as recent work from the 1990s and some rarely seen images. As Thomas Hoving writes in his introduction, "Wyeth, in essence, has always painted for himself." This beautifully printed, elegantly designed book reveals that self as no other collection has done before.

Suzanne Farrell, world-renowned ballerina, was one of George Balanchine's most celebrated muses and remains a legendary figure in the ballet world. This memoir, first published in 1990 and reissued with a new preface by the author, recounts Farrell's transformation from a young girl in Ohio dreaming of greatness to the realization of that dream on stages all over the world. Central to this transformation was her relationship with George Balanchine, who invited her to join the New York City Ballet in the fall of 1961 and was in turn inspired by her unique combination of musical, physical, and dramatic gifts. He created masterpieces for her in which the limits of ballet technique were expanded to a degree not seen before. By the time she retired from the stage in 1989, Farrell had achieved a career that is without precedent in the history of ballet. One third of her repertory of more than 100 ballets were composed expressly for her by such notable choreographers as Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Maurice Bejart. Farrell recalls professional and personal attachments and their attendant controversies with a down-to-earth frankness and common sense that complements the glories and mysteries of her artistic achievement.

A journey through time.

An unparalleled introduction to American folk art, accompanying a major traveling exhibition. A handsome and insightful survey of American folk art, this book includes paintings, sculptures, furniture, and household objects made by untrained—or minimally trained—folk artists in New England, the Midwest, and the South between 1800 and the 1920s. This richly illustrated volume includes rare and very fine portraits, radiant still lifes and landscapes, a mature version of The Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks, playful animal sculptures and trade signs, and ornately painted German American furniture. With newly researched texts by leading scholars, this publication makes an important contribution to the field.