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A ground-breaking presentation of 60 projects of 'anarchist' architecture.

This bold catalogue brings together the work of two cultural icons for the very firsttime: Beryl Cook (1926-2008) and Tom of Finland (1920-1991). It was inspired by the2024 exhibition Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland at Studio Voltaire in London. Beryl Cook was a painter renowned for her exuberant style and descriptions of everydaylife. Her work captures the social milieu of the areas she lived in and visited, notablyPlymouth. Her most enduring images are of larger-than-life women carousing innightclubs, eating in cafés or enjoying ribald hen parties, rendered in graphic andcolourful forms. Cook's work came to prominence in the mid-1970s and she quicklybecame known as one of Britain's best-loved artists, highly recognised for her distinctiveworks, which are both celebratory and provocative. Tom of Finland's pioneering depictions of homosexual machismo in his images ofbikers, soldiers, cowboys, sailors and labourers broadly represent queer, leather andmuscle communities. A master draughtsman, he used his works to give form to animaginative universe that, in turn, helped fuel real-world liberation movements and hadsignificant influence on a wide range of cultural figures including the Village People,Freddie Mercury, Jean Paul Gaultier and Robert Mapplethorpe. Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland puts their work into conversation for the first time. Thepairing is perhaps unexpected, yet immediate and compelling relationships betweentheir practices are evident. Fundamentally, both artists employed a sustained andcoherent way of hyper-realising the body in images that celebrate pleasure and denyshame. Together, their works reveal interconnected ideas surrounding sexuality, gender,taste and class. Artist and writer Huw Lemmey has contributed an incisive new essay exploringthe queer contexts inherent to Tom of Finland's work, but that also finds latentresonance in Cook's paintings of gay bars and shapely women. He further considersthe commercial forms of distribution that made their complex bodies of works highlyaccessible. Spanning five decades of paintings, drawings and archival materials, this companioncatalogue contributes to new readings of the artists' practices and their enduring impacton popular culture.

This stunning catalogue of 15th and 16thcentury Italian drawings from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen will showcase highlights from this outstanding but still relatively little known part of the collection.

Richly illustrated with colourful, quirky rag rugs (also known as hooked rugs), this delightful book examines Winifred Nicholson's relationship with the Cumbrian craft.

This beautiful volume accompanies a major exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery that will reunite for the first time in 120 years an extraordinary group of Claude Monet's Impressionist paintings of London.

THE COMMONALITY OF HUMANS THROUGH ART: HOW ART CONNECTS MANKIND THROUGH THE AGES explores how art has linked different cultures over the past 30,000 years. Organized thematically rather than chronologically or geographically, it traces how all humans are connected from birth to death.

This handsome catalogue explores a remarkable collection of medieval and Renaissance art in various media. It features stunning new photography and original research, significantly broadening the scope of the existing scholarship on the subject.

American artist Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is best known for his landmark text-based paintings, which draw on the influential writings and speeches of twentieth-century historical and cultural figures including James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Gertrude Stein. This catalogue accompanies a major exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

This illuminating exhibition catalogue interrogates the entanglement of the Islamic world with European visual culture during the medieval period and Renaissance, from the 9th century to the end of the 17th. It traces and reveals this interconnectedness through works of art that reflect the intense environment of contact, influence and exchange which developed over centuries between the two cultures. It also explores the reception of the image of ‿Islam‿ in Europe, as highlighted by an important painting of the Supper at Emmaus, painted in the so-called ‿Oriental Mode‿ by the Venetian artist Giovanni Mansueti (c. 1465‿1527) in the last decade of the 15th century. Islam in Europe presents a survey of artistic production in the medieval Islamic world and the many ways it altered the trajectory of European visual culture. Opening with earlymedieval objects produced by Muslim artisans and known to have been exported in large numbers to medieval Europe, the catalogue explores the crosscurrents of visual culture at the nexus of Islam and Christendom which were already well developed by the 10th century. It continues with artworks produced under the aegis of the Umayyads (711‿1031) and later Islamic dynasties which ruled large swathes of the Iberian Peninsula until 1492, and the influence of Islamic rule on the development of a distinctive visual culture in medieval Spain. A central group of objects traces the breathtaking force with which refined export wares from Mamluk Egypt and Syria, Central Asia and Anatolia flooded the Italian market during the 14th to 16th centuries, revolutionizing European aesthetics as well as the taste for (and very definition of) luxury goods. This section of the catalogue includes objects that chart the rise of European textiles, metalwork, ceramics and other arts specifically emulating Islamic designs. The catalogue concludes with a group of important early textiles spanning the 13th to 17th centuries. It explores how and why European artists started to incorporate lavish Ilkhanid silks into their imagery, and how Italian weavers began to imitate both these early imports, and later also Ottoman velvets flooding the market in the 15th century, with voracious appetite. One of the catalogue‿s key foci is an important group of rare Anatolian carpets woven between the 15th and 17th centuries and richly imitated both by European painters including Titian and Holbein, and by local weavers vying for control of the market in luxury furnishings. The catalogue presents 60 works of art, which have taken a decade to bring together and are presented in this way for the first time. Together the works elucidate the complete integration of Islamic art and artisanal technology into European visual culture during a period of extraordinary efflorescence. A brief introductory essay explores questions of entanglement in the medieval world and proposes a new lens through which to examine the artistic production of the period. The catalogue closes with a new essay by Michael Franses analyzing the importance of the only firmly dateable ‿Lotto‿ Arabesque carpet still in existence, acquired by The David Collection, Copenhagen, in 2022.

A fully illustrated and insightful exploration of Black and diasporic British art. Claudette Johnson: Presence accompanies a major exhibition of work by British artist Claudette Johnson (b. 1959) at The Courtauld Gallery. A founding member of the Black British Art Movement, Johnson is considered one of the most significant figurative artists of her generation. For more than thirty years she has created large-scale drawings of Black women and men that are at once intimate yet powerful. Presenting a carefully selected group of major works from across Claudette Johnson's career, from key early drawings of the 1980s, with which first established her name, to her remarkable new and recent works, this exhibition and publication offers a compelling overview of Johnson's pioneering career and artistic development. It explores how Johnson has directed her approach to representing her subjects over three decades. It also considers how her practice is rooted in the art of the past, with The Courtauld's collection providing a rich context in which to see her work.

A fascinating biography on Helen Coombe that addresses her art, personal life, and struggles with mental illness. Helen Coombe was a woman admired not only for her artistic skill, but also for her intellect, personality, and wit. The first biography of Coombe, The Artist Helen Coombe reveals her family background and education, her place in the arts and crafts movement, and her outstanding artistic output. Coombe was married to Roger Fry, an artist who was to achieve most fame as an art critic, historian, and protagonist of the Bloomsbury Group. Soon after their marriage in 1896, she displayed symptoms of schizophrenia. After the first episode, she temporarily resumed her career and had two children with Fry, but for the last thirty years of her life, she was committed to an institution. This thoroughly researched investigation makes full use of archival material, including correspondence, diaries, and medical records, and illuminates late Victorian and Edwardian society and culture. It sheds new light on Fry and is a must for anyone interested in the Bloomsbury Group, art history, and the handling of mental illness in the late nineteenth century.

Art and essays that explore the complex world of the family. What is a family, and how is family experienced? These questions, explored through artists' eyes, are at the heart of Real Families: Stories of Change, a collaboration between the Fitzwilliam Museum and the University of Cambridge Centre for Family Research. This catalog presents the exhibition in four sections, containing twelve illuminating essays that discuss the concept of the family. It focuses on art produced in the past fifty years, a period of significant change in how families are created and structured, with historical works woven throughout to examine what is genuinely new and what has remained the same about the family. The catalog includes reproductions of paintings, photography, and sculptures that examine the wider social, cultural, and political influences on family relationships, from aging, fertility, divorce, LGBTQ+ perspectives, and adoption. Artists featured include Alice Neel, Chantal Joffe, Sunil Gupta, Donald Rodney, Nan Goldin, Paula Rego and Lucian Freud.

An introduction to the life and mind of one of England's most significant architects. John Carr of York (1723-1807) was one of the most prolific and significant architects of the eighteenth century, with an output of more than four hundred designs, which range from simple gateways to the grandest schemes. Highly successful in his day, he had a recognizable style that was sensitive to the latest fashions as they continued to change. His ability to create beautiful buildings and marry this with a practical approach to both the purpose of the building and the budget of his clients won him many commissions. Carr was born in Yorkshire in the North of England and remained there for the duration of his career. Because of this, he has often been overlooked as an architect, and his extensive output has defeated many attempts to write a complete study of his work. Although not a comprehensive review, John Carr of York seeks to situate Carr as an architect of national significance. It includes photographs and covers overarching themes such as landscape and color and some commissions in more detail.

Venetian Disegno: New Frontiers circa 1420 to 1620 offers a fresh perspective on the art of Venice and the Veneto. The volume brings together the contributions of scholars and curators specialist on a wide variety of artists and art forms including drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture and architecture. Venetian Disegno: New Frontiers circa 1420 to 1620 takes disegno as its central theme, that in its plurality of meaning allows for a consideration of the conceptual role of design and the act of drawing. The relationship between disegno and RenaissanceVenetian art has historically been a problematic one, with emphasis instead being placed on the Venetian predilection for colore. This volume is reflective of an ongoing challenge to this perspective and draws attention to the importance of Venetian disegno and the study of drawings for understanding various art forms. The book commences with a critical study of what constitutes disegno in Venetian art. It does so through questioning the historiography of Venetian artistic scholarship and the restrictive framework and preconceptions that have emerged before setting out the merits of a broader, more inclusive approach. Disegno is applied in its multifaceted nature to address the physical act of drawing, the tangible drawn object and the role of design in artistic practice. The term 'Venetian' is taken to encompass both Venice and its mainland territories not least because of the mobility of artists across and beyond the region. Contributions are divided into five thematic sections. The first, entitled 'Peripheries', frames the art of Venice within a wider discourse on the movement of ideas across and beyond the Veneto in locations including Padua, Verona and Rome. A section on Media considers the origins and innovations that took place in the use of materials such as blue paper, oil and coloured chalks. In another, the theories that have developed on Venetian notions of disegno are brought under scrutiny, addressing topics such as the long upheld perspective that Venetian artists did not draw, the role of sculpture in Tintoretto's drawing practice and the interrelation between the written and drawn line in Palma Giovane's draftsmanship. The section on Invention reflects on the technical innovations that were facilitated through theuptake of printmaking and the intellectual freedom granted by humanist patrons. Finally, Function gets to the heart of the practical purpose of disegno. Contributions focus on the workshops of the Bellini family and Titian to consider the diverse ways they used drawing within their artistic practices with an emphasis on technical analysis. These sections are all preceded by introductions that provide an overviewon each theme while the volume is bookended by two reflections on the state of research into Venetian disegno and the potential for further progress. Sumptuously illustrated with over 100 images with a comprehensive bibliography, Venetian Disegno: New Frontiers circa 1420 to 1620 represents a significant contribution to scholarship on the art of Venice, Renaissance workshops and drawing studies.

The Wider Goldsmiths' Trade in Elizabethan and Stuart London is the first book to study all aspects of the Goldsmiths' trade. It considers allied trades such as refining, wiredrawing, and the making of small-swords and watches, as well as the development of the modern banking system.

This volume brings together over 25 scholarly essays, reviews and shorter contributions by Peter Hecht, preceded by an introduction on what he thinks his life in art history has taught him.

"This extraordinary collection, assembled carefully over fifty years, features an exceptionally wide array of Asian blue and white porcelain - that most ubiquitous and influential of all ceramics. Ranging from Chinese pieces specially made for Portuguese traders in the 16th century to late 19th century commissions for the Thai royal court, the collection also includes numerous Chinese classics from the era of the European trading companies and a notable selection of Japanese export porcelain. In its vast scope it speaks of the diverse impulses and historical forces that propelled the trade in Asian porcelain and provides a lens through which to view the interaction of East and West from the early modern age to the dawn of the 20th century. More than 300 pieces from the collection are illustrated and discussed in full and another 250 are illustrated in a compendium, all divided into thematic chapters that reflect the many ways Chinese and Japanese porcelain has been traded, collected and lived with around the world. Essays by William R. Sargent, former Curator of Asian Export Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, and noted armorial porcelain authority Angela Howard, precede the thirteen chapters, which include Faith, Identity, For the Table, To European Design and Made in Japan. Great rarities are featured alongside small, amusing pieces and the many export porcelains made to elevate the practices of daily life. With its strict adherence to blue and white porcelain, the collection intensifies our focus on forms, patterns and designs, gathering together wares that are often considered only separately for study while also covering areas of little recent scholarship, such as the Thai market material. The specialized reader will find references to the latest research while the more general reader will appreciate a comprehensive overview of Asian export porcelain. There has not been a significant survey of either Chinese or Japanese blue and white since the 1990s, and they have never been considered together in a major publication"--

A collection of work from contemporary Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales. This vibrant catalog presents the work of contemporary artist Harmonia Rosales. Featuring over twenty paintings and a monumental sculptural installation, Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative is the artist's first major touring exhibition and first scholarly catalog of her work. Los Angeles-based artist Harmonia Rosales is known for rewriting the master narrative of art history, from the perspective of an Afro-Cuban American woman in the twenty-first century. Her canvases seamlessly weave the tales and characters rooted in West African Yorùbá religion, Greek mythology, and Christianity with the canonical works and artistic techniques of the European Renaissance. Through her visual storytelling, Rosales presents the notion of human and cultural survival on her own terms--one that highlights the beauty and strength of Black people, particularly women, while touching upon grand narratives of creation, tragedy, survival, and transcendence. This beautifully illustrated publication includes a catalog of works in the exhibition, a biography of the artist, and new essays by noted scholars in their fields. These essays explore themes ranging from storytelling and narrative to gender and depiction of beauty to race and diaspora.

This book explores the concept of travel as inspiration for artists across history. Comprising over one hundred such works, Connecting Worlds: Artists & Travel is the first exhibition dedicated to artists' experiences of travel from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. A collaboration between the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Katrin Bellinger Collection, London, the exhibition includes works by major artists, lesser-known professionals, as well as amateurs, mostly from Northern Europe. Divided into three sections, the exhibition begins by exploring the work of artists on the road and what they regarded as important to record in their sketchbooks. The second section looks at Rome as one of the most important destinations for Northern travelers, and the journey ends in Dresden, a center of cultural exchange and glamorous festivities. This richly illustrated catalog features essays by an international panel of experts addressing such topics as the uses of artist sketchbooks across time, written and visual accounts of travel in books and prints, and encounters with the Ottoman world.

A study of theatrical portraiture through the work of William Hogarth and David Garrick. In 1770 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg remarked, 'What a work could be written on Shakespeare, Hogarth, and Garrick! There is something similar in the genius of all three.' Two-and-a-half centuries on, Robin Simon's highly original and illuminating book takes up the challenge. William Hogarth (1697-1764) and David Garrick (1717-79) closely associated themselves with Shakespeare, embodying a relationship between plays, painting, and performance that had been understood since Antiquity and which shaped the rules for history painting drawn up by the Académie royale in Paris in the seventeenth century. This book offers a fresh examination of theatrical portraits through a close analysis of the pictures and of the texts used in performance. It also examines the central role of the theatre in British culture, while highlighting the significance of Shakespeare, Hogarth, and Garrick in the European Enlightenment and the rise of Romanticism.

A selection of medieval European sculptures from the McCarthy collection. This substantial catalog explores a remarkable collection of medieval European sculptures. Richly detailed with plentiful illustrations and original research, it is a notable contribution to medieval scholarship. The McCarthy collection comprises more than 150 specimens of medieval European sculpture, produced over nearly six hundred years. A testimony to the comprehensiveness of Robert McCarthy's interest in the art and culture of the Middle Ages, its geographical, chronological, and typological breadth place it among the most important of its kind in private hands. Enriched with outstanding photography by Barney Hindle and Mark French, this book provides detailed stylistic, iconographic, and contextual analyses. This approach, complemented in some cases by petrographic analysis, has allowed the authors to connect much of the material presented in these pages with specific buildings, workshops, or regional schools, contributing to a better understanding of the pieces themselves, their original settings, and their cultural and artistic milieux. This catalog is part of an ambitious project to document the entirety of McCarthy's holdings--which also include notable selections of medieval ivories, stained glass, and East Christian Art.

"This publication accompanies a 2023 exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum of the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). Authored by John Marciari, this comprehensive study offers a new perspective on his life and artistic creations, with insights on his print publications, his church of Santa Maria del Priorato, and his work as a designer and dealer"--

"This scholarly publication presents the work of the designer, painter and illustrator Claude Gillot (1673-1722). The first volume on the artist in English, it accompanies a major exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum that explores Gillot's inventive and highly original draftsmanship and places his work in the context of artistic and intellectual activity in Paris circa 1700"--

This fully illustrated catalogue is the first of its kind to examine the relationship between money, power, resistance and dissent. It accompanies major exhibitions at The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. War, revolution and protest are defining themes in all periods of world history, shaping national identities and influencing material and visual culture in myriad ways. The ubiquity of money makes it a powerful vehicle for diseminating the messages of the state to the public, but the symbolic and nationalistic iconography of currency could also be subverted or mutilated in powerful acts of defiance, rebellion and propaganda. Beginning in Britain in the wake of the American and French Revolutions, the exhibition explores the political and social tensions present in society, and communicated through the production or defacement of money, over the past 200 years. It contrasts the use of money by the radicals of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, such as Thomas Spence, and the Suffragette movement, with the money produced by European empires as they scrambled to dominate the rest of the world. The currency histories of the two World Wars reveal the subversion of the very nature of what money is, and highlight the role of money as the tool of occupation, imprisonment, resistance and remembrance. The coins countermarked during the Troubles in Northern Ireland hint at the polarised nature of political discourse and sectarian violence. The exhibition culminates with the work of contemporary artists and activists who use money to highlight the challenges of the modern world, both locally and globally - as a canvas, as a raw material, or as a powerful means of communication. From a unique coin commemorating the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 to a Syrian banknote refashioned to raise awareness of the refugee crisis, this publication showcases many newly acquired objects from the Fitzwilliam Museum collection, alongside materials from the Archive of Modern Conflict. These objects are enhanced by a number of important loans from museums and private collections, including the cannon used at the Battle of Mafeking, an exploded transit van and contemporary art works that take money, its authority and destruction as their theme. Each object constitutes a witness statement to its time and its conflict, and each section has its own story to tell. The chapters - by archaeologists, historians, curators, and artists - create a rich context for the more than 130 objects in the catalogue, most of which have never been studied in depth or published before.

This beautiful publication presents for the first time the Eveillard Gift of drawings to The Frick Collection, the most important gift of drawings and pastels in its history. It accompanies an exhibition at the Frick and includes a catalogue of the works and commentaries by noted scholars.  Twenty-six works of art promised to The Frick Collection by Elizabeth and Jean-Marie Eveillard dramatically advance the museum's commitment to the research and display of European drawings. Included in this transformative gift from two longtime supporters of the Frick are exquisite drawings, pastels, prints, and one oil sketch by François Boucher, Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Thomas Lawrence, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, John Singer Sargent, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Jean-Antoine Watteau, among others. The works include figurative sketches, independent studies, portraits, and landscape scenes, each either deepening the museum's celebrated holdings or bringing the work of an artist who is not - but should be - represented in the collection.  This lavishly illustrated publication, which accompanies an exhibition at the Frick, includes a catalogue of the works, as well as comprehensive commentaries on each of promised gifts written by noted scholars in their field.

This catalogue accompanies the first exhibition devoted to a fascinating group of drawings by the Anglo-Swiss Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), one of eighteenth-century Europe's most idiosyncratic, original and controversial artists. Best known for his notoriously provocative painting The Nightmare, Fuseli energetically cultivated a reputation for eccentricity, with vividly stylised images of supernatural creatures, muscle-bound heroes, and damsels in distress. While these convinced some viewers of the greatness of his genius, others dismissed him as a charlatan, or as completely mad. Fuseli's contemporaries might have thought him even crazier had they been aware that in private he harboured an obsessive preoccupation with the figure of the modern woman, which he pursued almost exclusively in his drawings. Where one might have expected idealised bodies with the grace and proportions of classical statues, here instead we encounter figures whose anatomies have been shaped by stiff bodices, waistbands, puff ed sleeves, and pointed shoes, and whose heads are crowned by coiffures of the mostbizarre and complicated sort. Often based on the artist's wife Sophia Rawlins, the women who populate Fuseli's graphic work tend to adopt brazenly aggressive attitudes, either fixing their gaze directly on the viewer or ignoring our presence altogether. Usually theyappear on their own, in isolation on the page; sometimes they are grouped together to form disturbing narratives, erotic fantasies that may be mysterious, vaguely menacing, or overtly transgressive, but where women always play a dominant role. Among the many intriguing questions raised by these works is the extent to which his wife Sophia was actively involved in fashioning her appearance for her own pleasure, as well as for the benefit of her husband. By bringing together more than fi fty of these studies (roughly a third of the known total), The Courtauld Gallery will give audiences an unprecedented opportunity to see one of the finest Romantic-period draughtsmen at his most innovative and exciting. Visitors to the show and readers of the lavishly illustrated catalogue will further be invited to consider how Fuseli's drawings of women, as products of the turbulent aftermath of the American and French Revolutions, speak to concerns about gender and sexuality that have never been more relevant than they are today. The exhibition showcases drawings brought together from international collections, including the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand, and from other European and North American institutions.

A stunning showcase of the bold and original work of artist Tony Meeuwissen. Tony Meeuwissen's lively and engaging artwork has appeared in many decorative forms, from books and playing cards to magazine covers and postage stamps. Born in London in 1938, Tony Meeuwissen began his career at sixteen in a commercial art studio. By the age of thirty, he was a successful freelancer with commissions from Penguin Books, Radio Times, the Royal Mail, and many more. In 2013 he earned the prestigious Royal Designer for Industry designation from the Royal Society of Arts in London--a title which only two hundred designers can hold at any one time. In this absorbing memoir, the artist writes about his life at the drawing board and delves into the inspiration and ideas behind his imagery.

A selection of seventy exceptional seventeenth-century Dutch drawings. This beautifully illustrated catalog presents a selection of exceptional seventeenth-century Dutch drawings from the Peck Collection in the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Featuring many previously unpublished and rarely exhibited works, the catalog brings together examples by some of the best-known artists of the era, including Rembrandt, Jacques de Gheyn II, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and Frans van Mieris. The collection was donated to the museum in 2017 by the late Drs. Sheldon and Leena Peck. The transformative gift is comprised of over 130 largely seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch and Flemish drawings, establishing the Ackland as one of a handful of university art museums in the United States where northern European drawings can be studied in depth. Drawn to Life presents seventy works from this exceptional and diverse group of drawings amassed by the Pecks over four decades. Featuring new research and fresh insights into seventeenth-century drawing practice, the catalog and accompanying exhibition celebrate the creativity and technical skills of Dutch artists who explored the beauty of the natural world and the multifaceted aspects of humanity. Meticulously researched and written by Robert Fucci, Drawn to Life introduces both scholars and drawings enthusiasts to the depth and beauty of the Peck Collection at the Ackland Art Museum.

The memoirs of Anthony Speelman, the doyen of English art dealers specializing in Dutch Golden Age art. In this remarkable and handsomely illustrated memoir, Anthony Speelman offers fascinating insights into the often-secretive world of the Dutch masters, covering a lifetime of dealing in fine art at the very highest level. Throughout his long career, Speelman has sold paintings to many of the world's greatest collectors--including Norton Simon, Paul Mellon, Baron Thyssen, Harold Samuel, Charles Clore, and the Wrightsmans in New York--along with world-renowned museums such as the Getty, the Louvre, and the National Gallery, London, among many others. In intriguing tales that are sometimes shocking and always interesting, he shares stories of his encounters with these eminent bodies in a lighthearted style. Other chapters go beyond the world of fine art to detail Speelman's interest in gastronomy, his thrilling adventures in the world of horseracing, and his travels to California, New York, and Paris. Beautifully illustrated with examples of the many works that have passed through the author's hands, the wide range of illustrations is not limited to Dutch art and includes works by Canaletto, Stubbs, Raphael, Tiepolo, Melendez, and other Old Masters. Lighthearted and engaging, the book will appeal to dealers, collectors, and any would-be collectors eager for a glimpse behind the curtain.