British Watercolours explores the many ways in which British artists have employed this versatile medium.

"The Metropolitan Museum began acquiring American drawings and watercolors in 1880, just ten years after its founding. Since then it has amassed more than 1,500 works executed by American artists during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in watercolor, pastel, chalk, ink, graphite, gouache, and charcoal. This volume documents the draftsmanship of more than 150 known artists before 1835 and that of about 60 unidentified artists of the period. It includes drawings and watercolors by such American masters as John Singleton Copley, John Trumbull, John Vanderlyn, Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, George Inness, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Because the 504 works illustrate such a wide range of media, techniques, and styles, this publication is a veritable history of American drawing from the eighteenth through most of the nineteenth century."--Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

The mentally ill have always been with us, but once confined in institutions their treatment has not always been of much interest or concern. This work makes a case for why it should be. Using published reports, studies, and personal narratives of doctors and patients, this book reveals how therapeutics have always been embedded in their particular social and historical moment, and how they have linked extant medical knowledge, practitioner skill and the expectations of patients who experienced their own disorders in different ways. Asylum therapeutics during three centuries are detailed in encyclopedic entries, including "awakening" patients with firecrackers, easing brain congestion by bleeding, extracting teeth and excising parts of the colon, dousing with water, raising or lowering body temperature, shocking with electricity or toxins, and penetrating the brain with ice picks.

A fresh perspective on British landscape drawing in the Victorian and Modern eras. The attempts by artists of the Victorian and early Modern period to convey not merely the physical properties of a landscape but also its emotional and spiritual impact - landscape as 'places of the mind', as the critic Geoffrey Grigson put it - is the focus of this fascinating new study of British watercolours produced between 1850 and 1950. Drawing on the British Museum's impressive collection, this book explores artists' spiritual quests to capture the essence of landscape and convey a sense of place. Artists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on earlier traditions but developed and extended the genre through their imaginative, personal responses to the artistic, cultural and social upheavals of the time. The book includes works by Victorian artists Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Poynter and by many well known twentieth-century artists, such as John and Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore, some of which have never previously been published.

Descriptions and histories of the 1,265 oils by John Sloan (1871-1951), more than 1,000 of which are illustrated. Includes critical commentary, the artist's own comments, and an analysis of Sloan's work and his role in American painting. Indexing by title and subject. Illustrated.

"The revolution in watercolours of the later eighteenth century and its Victorian aftermath is acknowledged to be one of the greatest triumphs of British art. Its effect was to transform the modest tinted drawing of the topographer into a powerful and highly flexible means of expression for some of the Romantic era's greatest artists, among them Thomas Girtin, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. The painters of the next generation were no less ambitious, and the range of subject-matter and technical inventiveness that was sustained for much of the Victorian period was to set a standard in watercolour painting that was without equal abroad." "In this magnificently illustrated survey of the great age of British watercolours, Andrew Wilton and Anne Lyles trace the development of attitudes to landscape and to the human figure in the landscape from 1750 to 1880. They show how once the traditional pen and ink drawing and its augmented washes of colour had been abandoned in order to paint directly in watercolours without pen outlines, the way was open for the powerful Romantic landscapes of the following decade and beyond, many of which were painted in the wild mountainous regions of Wales and Scotland." "During the nineteenth century, as the gilt-framed exhibition watercolour began to challenge the long-established oil painting in terms of size and in brilliance of colour and effect, the range of subject-matter was broadened to include scenes of country and town life from every part of Britain and, increasingly, from the Continent too. By mid-century the Near East was attracting many of the greatest Victorian watercolourists, including J. E. Lewis, David Roberts and Edward Lear. Other leading Victorians who regularly worked in watercolour include the Pre-Raphaelite painters John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, and the American-born James McNeill Whistler, all of whom are included in this book."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved