Today we think of ukiyo-e—“the pictures of the floating world”—as masterpieces of Japanese art, highly prized throughout the world. Yet it is often said that ukiyo-e were little appreciated in their own time and were even used as packing material for ceramics. In Picturing the Floating World, Julie Nelson Davis debunks this myth and demonstrates that ukiyo-e was thoroughly appreciated as a field of artistic production, worthy of connoisseurship and canonization by its contemporaries. Putting these images back into their dynamic context, she shows how consumers, critics, and makers produced and sold, appraised and collected, and described and recorded ukiyo-e. She recovers this multilayered world of pictures in which some were made for a commercial market, backed by savvy entrepreneurs looking for new ways to make a profit, while others were produced for private coteries and high-ranking connoisseurs seeking to enrich their cultural capital. The book opens with an analysis of period documents to establish the terms of appraisal brought to ukiyo-e in late eighteenth-century Japan, mapping the evolution of the genre from a century earlier and the development of its typologies and the creation of a canon of makers—both of which have defined the field ever since. Organized around divisions of major technological and aesthetic developments, the book reveals how artistic practice and commercial enterprise were intertwined throughout ukiyo-e’s history, from its earliest imagery through the twentieth century. The depiction of particular subjects in and for the floating world of urban Edo and the process of negotiating this within the larger field of publishing are examined to further ground ukiyo-e as material culture, as commodities in a mercantile economy. Picturing the Floating World offers a new approach: a critical yet accessible analysis of the genre as it was developed in its social, cultural, and political milieu. The book introduces students, collectors, and enthusiasts to ukiyo-e as a genre under construction in its own time while contributing to our understanding of early modern visual production.

A collection of nearly four hundred Japanese woodcuts from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries is accompanied by technical and biographical data on the artist.

The almost three hundred portraits that once composed the New York Chamber of Commerce's renowned collection capture the giants of American business with aesthetic and symbolic power. The images of civic leaders and entrepreneurs, carefully assembled over two hundred years, tell the story of American industry as shaped and reflected in the life of a major institution. Interpreting these images as historical documents, Picturing Power traces the establishment, growth, and eventual decline of the nation's most powerful business organization. Lavishly illustrated, this book also charts the social and aesthetic course of institutional portraiture in the United States. From its inception in 1768, the Chamber regulated and codified commercial practice, provided business interests with a unified means of forming and advancing their agendas, and consolidated and elevated the status of its members and their professions. By linking commercial development to social and cultural progress, portraiture did much to support these ends. Whether enhancing, sanitizing, or stabilizing the reputations of business leaders; downplaying their wealth; or whitewashing their questionable practices, portraiture fashioned a public identity that matched corporate and civic needs as they evolved over time. By following changes in the use of these images, Picturing Power reveals the strategies and preoccupations of an American business culture that strove for egalitarian virtue while remaining firmly committed to the principles of competitive capitalism. Americans' shifting and ambivalent relationship to commerce situates these portraits--representations of the human face of business--at the critical intersection of enduring contests in American life, between self-interest and the greater good, between equality and the social hierarchy that wealth engenders.

A celebratory ode to the joy and enduring allure of the swimming pool, and a gorgeous photography book to accompany poolside daydreaming. Glamorous, seductive, and fun, made for lounging, frolicking, splashing, dipping, diving, floating, and escaping, swimming pools are symbols of both sport and leisure and conjure images of well-oiled bodies, colorful bikinis, and glimmering blue waters on hot summer days. Muse to writers, artists, photographers, and filmmakers, the swimming pool's careless opulence is splashed across the pages of this book in gorgeous images by contemporary photographers. In her second book for Rizzoli, curator, writer, and avid swimmer Lou Stoppard offers the promise of sunshine and the seduction of youth in her edit of some of the best contemporary swimming-pool photography. Organized by theme, from the glamour of the poolside party to the simple, meditative pleasure of being in the water, the selected photographs are as inspiring as they are moving. Photographers whose images are featured in this book include Sølve Sundsbø, Glen Luchford, Stephen Shore, Mert & Marcus, Diana Markosian, Martin Parr, Martine Franck, Alex Webb, Alice Hawkins, and Nick Knight. This is the perfect gift purchase for photography fans, swimmers, and lovers of leisure.

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

The international crash of 1720 long served as a touchstone for behavioral economists who perceive it as a gateway to the boom-and-bust cycles of the modern world. Perhaps not surprisingly, art history has contributed relatively little to our understanding of the significance of 1720. This book aims to redress this imbalance via a focus on the depiction of the first international financial crisis following the 1720 collapse of stock market bubbles in England, France, and the Netherlands. Its most important visual source, Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid ('The Great Mirror of Folly'), is a series of approximately seventy-five bawdy, tragicomic engravings satirizing the crisis and its catastrophic effects. The visual sources of the series are also explored, including prints related to the earlier 'tulip mania' bubble, as well as related materials including propaganda and satirical pamphlets, letters, coins, and paper currency. Key themes or motifs that recur in the Tafereel prints, include the New World and colonial trade; mass illness; paper and its association with insubstantiality, illusion and trickery; debauchery; and the carnivalesque.

Where water meets land, life abounds. This is the story of the nature and people of the wetlands of the world.