Welcome to an alarming book. In it Matthew Collings, known for his TV programmes and books about new art, tells you how to look at the old masters. Of course you can look at them however you like. But this book gives you some art historical facts as the context for what you're looking at - Collings gives you the resources you need, in order to make sense of what you're seeing. And he gets you to think for yourself. In art culture today all you hear about are literal meanings, about subject matter and ideas. Matt Collings objects to the droning repetition of that stuff. He looks to the past for a different model of art, one where the surface, the form, the look of something, is part of the idea, maybe even the main thing. We can't have the past back as a complete package, of course. That would be mad. But we can find critical principles in it that we can use to make something better out of our own time. The key figures he has chosen are Titian, Rubens, Velasquez and Hogarth. The first three stand for the highest that painting can go - rich, free, flowing, grand. In art historical terms, this is the 'painterly' stream of art. The last one didn't punch quite so high, but in him Collings sees a principle of adapting your understanding and admiration for what seems higher and greater than yourself - the achievements of the past - to your own sense of what is alive and real.Matthew Collings' new book gives a unique approach to the paintings of the past.

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Written by British author Israel Zangwill (1864 –1926), The Master is an intriguing and insightful novel that deals with issues such as class and the creation of art. A contributor and the subject of the book is George Wylie Hutchinson, a painter and leading illustrator in Britain from Canada, with whom Zangwill was also a close friend. Israel Zangwill's other notable works include: "Dreamers of the Ghetto" (1898) and "Ghetto Tragedies" (1899) An excerpt from The Master Despite its long stretch of winter, in which May might wed December in no incompatible union, 'twas a happy soil, this Acadia, a country of good air and great spaces; two-thirds of the size of Scotland, with a population that could be packed away in a corner of Glasgow; a land of green forests and rosy cheeks; a land of milk and molasses; a land of little hills and great harbors, of rich valleys and lovely lakes, of overflowing rivers and oversurging tides that, with all their menace, did but fertilize the meadows with red silt and alluvial mud; a land over which France and England might well bicker when first they met oversea; a land which, if it never reached the restless energy of the States, never retained the Old World atmosphere that long lingered over New England villages; save here and there in some rare Acadian settlement that dreamed out its life in peace and prayer among its willow-trees and in the shadows of its orchards.