Bøker utgitt av National Portrait Gallery Publications

The National Portrait Gallery, London, holdsa largecollection of portraits featuringsitters who have played an important role in British history and culture across the periods, manyof whichhave also made significant contributions as writers. Featured writers include:Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, William Shakespeare, George Eliot, Zadie Smith, Oscar Wilde,John Ruskin,Monica Ali, Stephen Hawking, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Syliva Plath, Harold Pinter, Jean Rhys, Kazuo Ishiguro, Roald Dahl,Stuart Hall, Carol Ann Duffy, Malala Yousafzai, Charles Darwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Bront¿nd Samuel Pepy.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries there was one art form in which English artists excelled above all their continental European counterparts: the painting of miniatures. This fascinating book explores the genre with special reference to two of its most accomplished practitioners, Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, whose astounding skill brought them international fame and admiration. Four centuries ago, England was famous primarily for its literary culture ¿ the dram a of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and the works of the great lyrical and metaphysical poets. When it came to the production of visual art, the country was seen as something of a backwater. However, there was one art form for which English artists of this period were renowned: portrait miniature painting, or as it was known at the time, limning. Growing from roots in manuscript illumination, it was brought to astonishing heights of skill by two artists in particular: Nicholas Hilliard (1547¿1619) and Isaac Oliver (c .1565¿1617). In addition to exhibiting the exquisite technique of the artists, portrait miniatures express in a unique way many of the most distinctive and fascinating aspects of court life in this period: ostentatious secrecy, games of courtly love, arcane symbolism, a love of intricacy and decoration. Bedecked in elaborate lace, encrusted in jewellery and sprinkled with flowers, court ladies smile enigmatically at the viewer; their male counterparts rest on grassy banks or lean against trees, sighing over thwarted love, or more modestly express their hopes in Latin epigrams inscribed around their heads. Often set in richly enamelled and jewelled gold lockets, or beautifully turned ivory or ebony boxes, such miniatures could be concealed or revealed, exchanged or kept, as part of elaborate processes of friendship, love, patronage and diplomacy at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I /VI. This richly illustrated book, like the exhibition it accompanies, explores what the portrait miniature reveals about identity, society and visual culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

Accompanying the first major exhibition of Gainsborough's family portraits, set to begin at the National Portrait Gallery this November, a close look at the eighteenth century master's paintings of his wife, daughters and close relatives.

Starting with the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867, at which a distinct Russian school of painting was recognised, this title examines developments in theatre and music, the rising Realist aesthetic and the powerful voices of wealthy patrons from the worlds of industry and commerce, such as Pavel Tretyakov.