Set in the first half of the twentieth century, but reaching back to Bavaria in the late nineteenth century, The Stone Carvers weaves together the story of ordinary lives marked by obsession and transformed by art. At the centre of a large cast of characters is Klara Becker, the granddaughter of a master carver, a seamstress haunted by a love affair cut short by the First World War, and by the frequent disappearances of her brother Tilman, afflicted since childhood with wanderlust. From Ontario, they are swept into a colossal venture in Europe years later, as Toronto sculptor Walter Allward’s ambitious plans begin to take shape for a war memorial at Vimy, France. Spanning three decades, and moving from a German-settled village in Ontario to Europe after the Great War, The Stone Carvers follows the paths of immigrants, labourers, and dreamers. Vivid, dark, redemptive, this is novel of great beauty and power.

Marjorie Hunt presents the lives and careers of two Italian American master stone carvers, Roger Morigi and Vincent Palumbo, who have spent decades creating the sculptural works, such as gargoyles, grotesques, capitals, pinnacles, saints, and angels that embellish Washington National Cathedral. Exploring the carvers' underlying aesthetic attitudes, Hunt reveals the spirit of creativity and mastery that infuses their work. The book records the stone-carving process, highlighting the carvers' complex body of technical knowledge—their opinions of various stones, their preferred tools for different stages of carving, and their techniques for achieving effects of light and shadow.

The sheer number of unfinished stone monuments in India is staggering and examples appear at some of India's most famous and well-studied sites that include rock-cut Ellora, Ajanta, and Mamallapuram. Unfinished work also appears on built temples celebrated for the intricacy of their sculpted decoration, such as those in Hoysala kingdom or in Orissa. This detailed study provides an overall coverage of India's unfinished work while addressing a range of issues related to stone-carving by examining a select number of monuments at specific sites. Instead of focusing on a site in its entirety, the study here focuses on specific issues of consequence in the context of unfinished work, as they gain an added weight and significance through discovery of their repetitive occurrence at site after site. At the heart of this book are the many varieties of unfinished stone carving that merit close observation to see what is there and what is not, and to appreciate that all the finished work has been through these various stages of being unfinished before reaching completion.

The Underpainter is a novel of interwoven lives in which the world of art collides with the realm of human emotion. It is the story of Austin Fraser, an American painter now in his later years, who is haunted by memories of those whose lives most deeply touched his own, including a young Canadian soldier and china painter and the beautiful model who becomes Austin’s mistress. Spanning decades, the setting moves from upstate New York to the northern shores of two Great Lakes; from France in World War One to New York City in the ’20s and ’30s. Brilliantly depicting landscape and the geography of the imagination, The Underpainter is Jane Urquhart’s most accomplished novel to date.

First published in 1966, this acclaimed Irish classic is an account of time as an apprentice stonecarver by a craftsman who was one of Ireland’s most respected sculptors. The young Seamus Murphy, studying modelling at the Crawford School of Art in Cork in the 1920s, took the unusual step of apprenticing himself to a master stone carver to learn the ancient craft of the mason. ‘Stone Mad’ tells the story of his seven years of growing knowledge of the challenges and joys of stone – and of the men who worked it. His artistic feeling for quality responded to his workmates’ reverence for the ‘well made thing’. The result is a book of surpassing beauty, full of warmth, humour and profound perception.

"Few decorative crafts can claim to be more ancient than stone carving, with the earliest carved objects being dated well into prehistory. The greatest monuments to human civilization, from the temples of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to the great cathedrals of Medieval Europe, are richly ornamented with decorative relief and sculpture carved in stone. Alan Micklethwaite, a stone carver with many years' experience in the conservation of historic monuments and sculpture, introduces the reader to the techniques and methodology of restoration stone carving, from simple relief to complex sculpture in the round, set against a sound conservation philosophy. The book provides a thorough understanding of stone as a material and describes its use in sculpture and the agents of its decay, as well as the method by which disfigured carvings can be forensically reconstructed, resulting in the re-emergence of beautifully carved historic architectural sculpture. The book is intended as a detailed introduction to restoration stone carving, and is aimed at those who are learning to carve stone or have an interest in pursuing a career in the conservation of stone sculpture and ancient monuments. While having a depth of detail which will allow it to serve as a reference manual for the professional, it will also inspire the beginner and fuel the interest of those who harbour a desire to pursue traditional crafts."--Front jacket flap.