This anthology, first published in 1939, aimed to present the English ideal in its various aspects as expressed by representative Englishmen. This book will be of interest to students of literature and to the general reader.

This illustrated survey covers what Nicholas Wade calls the "observational era of vision," beginning with the Greek philosophers and ending with Wheatstone's description of the stereoscope in the late 1830s.

The second half of the twentieth century has seen British artists, architects, and designers assuming a central role on the world stage. Starting in the years of reconstruction after the war, the young began to challenge accepted artistic values, looking at popular culture for their inspiration; the iconoclasm of the Pop movement has continued to be one of the most vital ingredients of the British art scene. In the year-by-year record that this book provides, the work of newcomers making their first impact is seen alongside that of outstanding artists in their maturity, with connections and contradictions across the entire visual scene-from architecture, interior design, furniture, and the decorative arts to painting, sculpture, and graphic art.

Pentreath is renowned as one of the foremost designers of new traditional buildings and country houses in the world. In celebration of his London-based firm’s twentieth anniversary, Pentreath presents his authentically, yet playfully, classical approach. This is the first of Pentreath’s books to present his own output in its entirety—from his personal residences in Dorset, London, and Scotland that brought him international fame to many old and new houses that he has designed and some of the larger, town-scaled projects that make his practice unique in the world of traditional design. Although the results range from his colorful and romantic versions of the English country cottage to traditional splendor, there are underlying ideas that inform the breadth of his output—a sense of scale, proportion, craft, detail, sustainability, and appropriateness—that have a universal relevance today. Pentreath has authored as well as taken all photographs in this book, which looks at some thirty case studies, large and small, including many previously unpublished works. The designs encompass an understanding of materials, texture, classical and vernacular detail, color, richness, and simplicity by turn—as exemplified in both sumptuous and honest interiors, grand country houses, and pragmatically organized town plans. While being steeped in a learned classicism, Pentreath’s work is celebrated by young and old around the world, as exemplified by his coverage in major media outlets.

From the landscapes of Constable to the imagery of Blake and Bacon, this book, published to accompany a major exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, is a lavish survey of British art from 1750 to 1950. Spanning two hundred years, British Vision presents some of the most iconic works in British art history from major public and private collections in Europe and the USA.William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs,William Blake, John Constable, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland, Henry Fuseli, Richard Dadd, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are mong the many outstanding artists whose work appears on the books pages. Essays by a raft of distinguished art historians focus on the two defining characteristics of British art: observation and imagination. This lavishly illustrated catalogue is a sumptuous record of the most comprehensive exhibition of British art to be staged under one roof in recent years, and represents a unique opportunity to discover the creative forces that shaped British art over two centuries.

The Vision of China is the first book on China as it came to be reflected in English literature. As such, it also offers the first comprehensive study of the image of China in Western literature. Featuring essays by prominent Chinese scholars such as Qian Zongshu, Fan Cunzhong, and Chen Shouyi, it complements such works as Pierre Martino's L'Orient dans la litterature francaise au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siecle (1906), Ursula Aurich's China im Spiegel der deutschen Literature des 18. Jahrhunderts (1935), and E. Horst Tscharner's China in der deutschen Dichtung bis zur Klassik (1939).Together with William W. Appleton's A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the 17th and 18th Centuries (1951) and Raymond Dawson's The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization (1967), the book studies the last phase of the Chinese mode in England. Some of the articles collected here actually inspired Appleton's study, at least in part.As a contemporary volume on the construct of China, The Vision of China can readily be considered the companion study to Edward Said's envisioned Orient in Orientalism (1979), to Tzvetan Todorov's Africa in Nous et les autres: la reflection francaise sur la diversite humaine (1989), and Gauri Viswanathan's Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989).