In 'Turner's Golden Visions' by C. Lewis Hind, readers are treated to a comprehensive examination of J.M.W. Turner's exceptional works of art. With eloquent prose and detailed analysis, Hind delves into the mystical and poetic qualities of Turner's landscapes and seascapes, exploring the artist's use of light, color, and composition. The book provides a valuable insight into Turner's influence on the Romantic movement in art, as well as his innovative techniques that paved the way for modernist painting. Hind's writing style is both informative and engaging, making this book a must-read for art enthusiasts and scholars alike. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of art history, Hind offers a nuanced understanding of Turner's masterpieces, allowing readers to fully appreciate the artist's genius and lasting impact on the art world. 'Turner's Golden Visions' showcases Hind's passion for art and his deep admiration for Turner's visionary approach to painting, making it a compelling read for anyone interested in the intersection of art and literature.

John Constable is arguably the most accomplished painter of English skies and weather of all time. For Constable, the sky was the keynote, the standard of scale and the chief organ of sentiment in a landscape painting. But how far did he understand the workings of the forces of nature which created his favourite cumulus clouds, portrayed in so many of his skies over the landscapes of Hampstead Heath, Salisbury and Suffolk? And were the skies he painted scientifically accurate? In this lucid and accessible study, John Thornes provides a meteorological framework for reading the skies of landscape art, compares Constable's skies to those produced by other artists from the middle ages to the nineteenth century, analyses Constable's own meteorological understanding, and examines the development of his painted skies. In so doing he provides fresh evidence to identify the year of painting of some of Constable's previously undated cloud studies.

A sweeping look at the lives and work of two important English Romantic painters, from a Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author. Renowned poet Stanley Plumly, who has been praised for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant” (Washington Post) nonfiction, explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. How is it that this disparate pair will come to be regarded as Britain’s supreme landscape painters, precursors to Impressionism and Modernism? How did each painter’s life influence his work? Almost exact contemporaries, both legendary artists experience a life-changing tragedy—for Constable it is the long illness and death of his wife; for Turner, the death of his singular parent and supporter, his father. Their work will take on new power thereafter: Constable, his Hampstead cloud studies; Turner, his Venetian watercolors and oils. Seeking the transcendent aesthetic awe of the sublime and reeling from their personal anguish, these talented painters portrayed the terrible beauty of the natural world from an intimate, close-up perspective. Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists’ lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though inherently connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapes takes a wide-angle look at the philosophy of the sublime.