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THE LAST BOHEMIANS: THE TWO ROBERTS - COLQUHOUN AND MACBRYDE
Roger Bristow
The fruit of over twenty years’ original research, The Last Bohemians is the first full-length biography of two charismatic, talented and ultimately tragic individuals. It dispels many of the negative myths which grew around the pair following their early deaths and re-establishes their reputations as highly significant figures of twentieth-century British art.
In 1948, Alfred Barr, the esteemed curator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), visited London to purchase works from some of the new wave of British artists. He selected just five pieces – by Francis Bacon, Edward Burra, Lucian Freud, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde.
A rags-to-riches and back-to-rags-again story, The Last Bohemians is the account of the lives and time together of the artists who were known in the 1940s as ‘The Golden Boys of Bond Street’. To research this book, the author raveled widely in both England and Scotland, interviewing many of their friends and admirers – well-known names in the art and literary worlds including George Barker, Prunella Clough, John Craxton, Daniel Farson, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Bryan Robertson, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Patrick Heron and Ken Russell (many, alas, are now dead, making their memories all the more precious). He was also given exclusive access to their personal correspondence.
Born and brought up in Ayrshire to poor, working-class families, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde met at the Glasgow School of Art in the 1930s. They moved to London in 1941 and quickly became associated with the Neo-Romantic group of painters which included Keith Vaughan and John Minton. At a time when homosexuality was not only illegal but actively persecuted, they made little attempt to disguise their relationship and they had a constant stream of admirers, both male and female. The circle of friends that grew around them included the painters Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Michael Ayrton, John Minton and the poets George Barker and Dylan Thomas, all attending the regular weekend soirées held by The Roberts at their fashionable Kensington studio.
With catalogue raisonne.
244 x 172mm
456pp
profusely illustrated with 81 colour and 32 black and white illustrations
hardback £29.95
PUBLISHED
ALFRED EAST: LYRICAL LANDCAPE PAINTER
Paul Johnson and Kenneth McConkey 
Alfred East was the most significant figure in English landscape painting in the decades before the First World War, following in the direct line of Constable and Turner. And yet there has never been a full biography.
He was in his late-thirties when he left the family shoe-making business in Kettering for the precarious calling of professional artist. For the next 30 years he immortalised the rich landscape of Britain as it changed with the weather, the hour and the season. He also sketched regularly in France, Italy, Spain and north Africa and notably, following a visit in 1889, brought back the landscape of Japan to an appreciative home audience. In later years, he was a frequent traveller in the USA, where his work proved equally popular.
With national and international recognition for his landscapes in the 1880s and 1890s, East became a champion of decorative art and of his own evolutionary view of art in the face of the modernism of the new century.
The authors provide a critical assessment of East’s place as an artist in the Indian summer of imperial Britain. The book is generously illustrated with a range of East’s work in oils, watercolour and etchings drawn from private and public collections, including the Kettering art gallery which bears his name. This book offers the most representative showing of East’s work for almost one hundred years.
978-1-906593-33-9
144pp
Copious colour illustrations
softback
£19.95
PUBLISHED AND AVAILABLE NOW
MARGARET LOVELL: SCULPTOR
Peter Davies and others
This sumptuously illustrated book discusses the life and work of an award-winning sculptor who works largely in bronze, mainly but nor exclusively near-abstract and suggesting organic links to natural and botanical forms as well as the human figure. Her work varies in size from a few inches to eighteen feet in height, all notably elegant in form and texture.
More than 220 works, including commissions for Unilever, John Player and the Arts Council, are illustrated, mainly in colour.
ISBN 978-1-906593-35-3
240mm x 210mm
144 pages
Hardback £29.95
ADRIAN RYAN: RATHER A RUM LIFE
Julian Machin
Adrian Ryan: ‘The best kept secret in the art world’ – Francis Bacon
This unique study – blended with the author’s memoir of the artist – sheds light on how an impressive painter continues to evoke a first response among the art-going public of ‘Why have I never heard of Adrian Ryan?’
In the early 1940s Adrian Ryan was young, good looking and rich, and stood out from the moment of his first one-man show at the Redfern Gallery. The author’s analysis of the privileged world where Adrian Ryan grew up – Hintlesham Hall, Eton and in the south of France – reveals a darker side to what appears as a magical beginning. A future that seemed assured and glittering was tainted by the advent of Abstract Expressionism. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he saw no virtue in reinventing his painting style, not least because so much abstraction was already present in his figuration.
There are insights into relations with artist friends such as Augustus John, Lucian Freud and Matthew Smith along with the collector and dealer Eardley Knollys and Redfern’s Rex Nan Kivell; into his teaching at Goldsmiths’; and into his own disappointment at failing to make the very first grade of painters.
Adrian Ryan was three times married, with a succession of lovers. His contradictory way of life is shown as engaging and loving, mischievous and childlike, gentlemanly but licentious, and having a curious disregard for some conventions, though not others, but all the while – like his paintings – manifesting great charm.
ISBN 978-1-906593-23-0
244 x 172mm
Hardback
£21
UTMOST FIDELITY: The Painting Lives of Marianne and Adrian Stokes
Magdalen Evans 
When the Austrian-born painting student Marianne Preindlsberger (1855-1927) first encountered Adrian Stokes (1854-1935) in the summer of 1883 in Brittany, their shared aim was to study plein air realism at first hand. Both had arrived in the celebrated artists’ colony of Pont-Aven from rigorous training in various ateliers of Paris. Their marriage marked the start of a renowned artistic and personal collaboration, which was to last for more than 40 years.
Three significant exhibitions in their lifetimes showed her portraits and his landscapes side by side: two in London, and one in Budapest in 1910. 1909 saw the publication of their most enduring joint venture, Hungary, containing 75 illustrations of both their paintings.
2009, the book’s centenary year, will see the publication of a catalogue that for the first time will provide an extensive biography and illustrate their work in detail. The project’s title is from a tribute made by Adrian to their close friend and travelling companion John S. Sargent, with whom they were interned in Austria during the autumn of 1914.
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First book-length study of a major husband-and-wife painting team prominent in the Cornish art scene from the late 1800s to the early nineteenth century.
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Marianne is notable as a woman artist whose work did not suffer from marriage and who did not play a secondary role to her husband’s painting career.
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Adrian’s work had a groundbreaking influence on the early years of the St Ives colony in Cornwall and enthusiasts for his work included the great actor-manger Henry Irving and D.H.Lawrence.
(PB) ISBN 978-1-904537-85-4
(HB) ISBN 978-1-906593-01-8
270 x 210mm
176pp(PB) £24.95 (HB) £35
PUBLISHED JANUARY 2009
Trevor Bell
Chris Stephens
Edited and with a biography by Elizabeth Knowles
This elegant book presents the life and work of one of Britain’s leading painters. Trevor Bell’s big, bold, beautiful paintings have been specially featured at Tate St Ives– reflecting his status as a key figure in the development of painting in the past half century.
The book is illustrated from cover to cover with a lifetime’s work on canvas and paper, and with fascinating documentary photographs from the artist’s own archive. From the talented Yorkshire lad who loved jazz and big motorbikes, Bell became a revered elder statesman of abstract painting in Britain.
Trevor Bell’s work is introduced by Chris Stephens of Tate Britain, a leading authority on 20th and 21st-century painting. Elizabeth Knowles’s biography of the artist follows Bell from Leeds to London and St Ives, through his years in Florida and then back to Cornwall, where he now lives and works. Besides the landscapes closest to his heart – the Yorkshire moors, the steamy ‘heatscape’ of Florida and the wild Atlantic coasts of Cornwall – Bell’s inspiration has often come from his travels – always far off the beaten track, in India, the Himalayas, Burma, Mexico, Cuba and Peru.
The book reflects the monumental scale and glorious colour of Trevor Bell’s major paintings. His resonant and uniquely accessible paintings are its essential content. Bell’s particular character as an artist comes from the way he orchestrates his work with perfect craftsmanship, only to create an opportunity for radical innovation. He pushes for the unexpected, this extraordinary creative energy permeating the book and providing an exhilarating breath of fresh air.
ISBN 978-1-904537-88-5
280 x 270mm
216pp
over 200 colour illustrations
hardback £40
Newlyn Copper : Arts & Crafts Copper Work in Newlyn 1890-1915
Daryl Bennett and Colin Pill
This is the first major study of the Newlyn Industrial Class, a small but very important part of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Victorian Britain. Established in Cornwall in 1890 with help from the Home Arts Industries Association and local artists, and teaching from John Pearson of the Guild of Handicraft, the Newlyn Class was started largely as a philanthropic gesture. Aimed at improving the quality of life for the young men of this small fishing village, it represented an almost unique partnership between artist and craftsman.
The copperwork produced at Newlyn – now highly collectable -- was in the fashionable ‘artistic’ style drawing on medieval imagery and honest construction ‘by hammer and by hand’. Apart from the social benefits which the Class brought to the village, Newlyn copperwork has provided a heritage of useful and beautiful objects. The decoration of Newlyn work, with repousse designs of sea creatures, sea birds and scenes from the fishing village, shows the consistent influence of artist/designer John Mackenzie who gave the work of the Class its character and visual appeal.
The quality of construction of the Newlyn copper pieces, its durability and the range of object and designs created by the craftsmen make the copperwork of Newlyn a joy for collectors. The book is profusely illustrated in colour with examples of this work.
ISBN: 978-1-904537-84-7
270 x 210mm
128pp, profusely illustrated with colour and black and white illustrations
Paperback £24.95
PUBLISHED
THE WOMEN'S LAND ARMY: A PORTRAIT
Gill Clarke
Using both words and images author Gill Clarke tracks the genesis of the Women’s Land Army in the First World War through to its re-formation in the Second World War and final disbandment in 1950. This is the first study to make extensive use of paintings by distinguished and lesser-known artists, together with recruitment posters, cartoons and photographs from both World Wars to portray the life and work of the Women’s Land Army.
Theirs is something of a forgotten history. Yet, the work these women did on the land often in terrible conditions was vital to the success of the war effort. They played a crucial part in increasing levels of productivity from the land in both World Wars. Drawing on published autobiographies and recent interviews by the author with Land Girls in the Second World War this book tells their story and those of the artists and illustrators who recorded their heroic work.
The book is divided into three illustrated sections:
Holding the Home Front: The Women’s Land Army in the First World War
Back to the Land: The Women’s Land Army in the Second World War
Recording Life on the Land: Portraits of the Artists and Illustrators
Artists featured include:
Cecil Aldin, Edmund Dulac, Randolph Schwabe, James Bateman, Evelyn Dunbar, Thomas Hennell, Nora Lavrin, Mona Moore, Laura Knight, Ethel Gabain, Fougasse, Clive Uptton.
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Profusely illustrated, many iconic images being published here for the first time
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Published to coincide with a unique exhibition devoted to the Women’s Land Army at St Barbe Gallery, Lymington in October 2008
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Publication follows renewed interest in twentieth-century British art
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Published in the year that the Women’s Land Army veterans are officially honoured by the Government and awarded a badge to recognise their efforts
This book will appeal not only to former Land Army Girls and their families, but to a varied audience including students, researchers and scholars of art, social and cultural history and biographical studies. In addition it will appeal to those with an interest in the connections between biography and art.
ISBN: 978-1-904537-87-8
270 x 210mm
216pp, profusely illustrated with colour and black and white illustrations
Softback £24.95
PUBLISHED
EVELYN WILLIAMS
Text by Nicholas Usherwood, with an introduction by John McEwen
Evelyn Williams studied art at St Martin’s School of Art in war-time London from the age of 15 before transferring to the Royal College of Art. Her life since then has been devoted to a search for the truth and an understanding of the nature of human frailty.
Nicholas Usherwood’s elegant and thoughtful monograph traces her work through a lifetime of drawing, sculpting and painting. ‘Peel away all the labels and Evelyn Williams will, I believe, emerge … as a painter and sculptor, most fundamentally, of people and their attempts to relate to one another.’
‘I have lived with your painting for years, and have looked at it every day, and it has filled me with pleasure. It is both clear and mysterious, painted with sensitivity and love.’ – Paula Rego, of Evelyn’s painting ‘Goodbyes’.
ISBN: 978-1-906593-13-1
298 x 245mm
176pp
hardback
£35
PUBLISHED
There was a Young Artist Called …
Sebastian Smith and Andrew Birch 
Everyone recognises a limerick when they hear or see one. Popularised by Edward Lear, this five-line humorous jingle actually goes back centuries. Mostly associated with Lear, limericks have also been coined to some effect by such moderns as W H Auden and Ogden Nash.
Now, in a sparkling twist to this popular verse form, artist and writer Sebastian Smith teams up with top cartoonist Andrew Birch to bring us 50 ‘Greats’ of the art world – amusingly, wickedly portrayed in words and pictures – as they’ve never been seen before.
ISBN 978-1-906593-05-6
A5
48 pages
section sewn softback
£5.99
PUBLISHED
Art in Exile : Polish painters in Post-war Brit
ain
Douglas Hall
This book is about a body of painters who have generally been marginalised by British art historians – the Polish exiles from war and persecution who made their homes and careers in Britain before or after 1939. It takes ten of them, explores their origins, their often hazardous escape from occupied Europe, their reception and the development of their work. Some who were personally known to the author, such as Herman and Ruszkowski, are, along with Gotlib and others, the subject of searching enquiry; a further group, perhaps better known, like Adler and Potworowski, are also covered. The book has chapters on the Polish context from which they came, on the problems East European art has encountered in the West, and on the Polish artistic community in Britain as a whole.
The author Douglas Hall, who was the first Keeper of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and still lives in Scotland, is known for his sympathy with the underdog and his interest in unfashionable or belittled values and modes of expression in modern art. He writes, as he says, himself from a marginal position relative to the art nexus, and therefore is an ideal exponent of marginalised art.
We believe the appearance of this book is timely. Since the author first began to study the subject the perception of Poland in Britain has changed utterly. Further integration of Poland into the European community should lead to further exchanges of art between the two countries. If it does not, it may not be for economic reasons alone, but may be further evidence of the reluctance of Western art authorities to take East European art, as a whole, seriously. The book suggests a beginning in better understanding by starting with those Poles who became British, and whose work for the most part is still here, a part of British art that is for ever Polish.
244 x 172mm
400 pages, with 100 colour and 50 mono illustrations
ISBN 978-1-904537-66-3
Paperback £35
PUBLISHED
Change in the Midlands:
Urban and industrial watercolours by Arthur Lockwood
‘Probably the most searching examination in the visual arts of any urban landscape in Britain’
In this lavishly illustrated book, artist Arthur Lockwood celebrates 20 years of painting change in the industrial landscapes of Birmingham and the Black Country. He has produced an elegy for a lost way of life, without pathos or bitterness but with realism.
Without making judgements, Arthur Lockwood has dedicated himself to recording the demolition of nineteenth-century buildings and the construction of new landmarks such as the Bull Ring Shopping Centre in Birmingham. Alongside this, he set out to document the decline of the region’s manufacturing, painting working factories and foundries before many were closed down and some of them demolished.
In Oldbury he recorded the last line of working drop hammers and in Wolverhampton the last manufacturer of tacks and cut nails. In Birmingham he painted the last drop forge in the city.
The book contains over 100 paintings selected from twenty years’ work.
Brendan Flynn, Curator of Fine Art at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, has written an introduction, noting that ‘In capturing the process of change, Lockwood slows it down for us and offers an overview of the economic and social forces at large in the urban landscape. His drawings are probably the most searching examination in the visual arts of any urban landscape in Britain.’
Arthur Lockwood is a member of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists and exhibits in the RBSA Gallery in Brook Street, Birmingham. He also exhibits in London at the Mall Galleries, where he is a member of the Royal Society of British Artists and at the Bankside Gallery where he is an associate of the Royal Watercolour Society.
ISBN 978-1-904537-72-4
240mm x 245mm
96pp with more than 100 illustrations in colour
hardback £18.50
A Singular Vision: Dod Procter 1890-1972
Alison James
For a period in the 1920s Dod Procter was perhaps the most famous artist in Britain. Her painting of a reclining young woman, Morning, caught the public imagination when the Daily Mail purchased it ‘for the nation’ from the Royal Academy annual show in 1927.
Monumental figure paintings and sympathetic studies of the female form, from babies to young women, would be defining elements of her life’s work. But her unflinching nude paintings of pubescent girls proved problematical during her lifetime and are still controversial today.
As a teenage girl in 1907, Dod studied at the Forbes School of Painting, in Newlyn, where she met her future husband, Ernest Procter. The author of a Singular Vision sets their marriage against the background of having to paint for a living, a commission which took them to Burma and their return to Newlyn, where Dod enjoyed many artistic friendships. After Ernest’s early death in 1935, she travelled widely to Tenerife, the West Indies and Africa. The tender and exquisite portraits of the local children she painted on these trips were later to fall foul of post-colonial sensitivities. She always returned to Newlyn, where she lived and painted for the rest of her life.
The fame, even notoriety, of her nude studies have tended to obscure the importance of Dod’s other great pre-occupation – the painting of still lifes. Drawing on the flora in and around her Newlyn cottage, she painted exquisite flower studies, many of which are reproduced in this book.
Elected an RA, Dod’s great ambition was to have a major Royal Academy retrospective. This was not to be, as by the time of her death in 1972 artistic fashion had changed and Dod Procter’s work was out of favour. Only now is critical attention focussing again on her work, a process which will be accelerated by the publication of this timely book and the exhibition it accompanies at Penlee House Gallery, Penzance.
ISBN 13: 978-1-904537-78-6
270mm x 210mm, 144pp
Softback £19.95
PUBLISHED
Where the Sea Meets the Land: Artists on the Coast in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Christiana Payne 
The coastline of Great Britain was a powerful magnet for artists in the nineteenth century. Itsstrong light created ideal conditions for experiments in open-air sketching and photography, and the difficulties of painting the endlessly moving waves presented a constant challenge.
It also occupied a crucial place in important debates of the time. Napoleon’s planned invasion in the early years of the century focused attention on the coast as a defensive boundary. Coastal geology and marine biology provided much of the evidence used in the disputes over theories of evolution which led to the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. Meanwhile, the British invention of the seaside holiday gradually worked its way down the social scale.
The author explores artists’ responses to the coast and looks at the different ways politicians, tourists, theologians, poets and scientists would have viewed the coast. She shows how the images fit into the wider responses to social change and the transformation of religious belief. Special attention is paid to the development of lighthouses and lifeboats, and to the interest in the social organisation of fishing villages, both of which provided important subject matter for artists.
Cartoons, photography and book illustrations are considered alongside significant oil paintings and watercolours. Their themes range from satirical humour to the most serious philosophical reflections. The book discusses the work of well-known artists, including J M W Turner, John Constable, William Powell Frith and Winslow Homer, as well as others, such as James Clarke Hook and Henry Moore, whose contributions have been little studied in modern times.
ISBN 13: 978-1-904537-64-9
270mm x 210mm, 224pp, approx 100 colour and 15 b & w illustrations
Softback £24.95
Published
In Field and Stable: The Life and Work of Richard Weatherby
David Bradfield
‘Seal’ Weatherby (1881-1953) spent most of his active life as an artist in the Cornish countryside. And yet, until now, he has been an underrated, relatively unknown and unrecorded member of the Newlyn and Lamorna artist societies. Although gregarious and ‘a favourite with the ladies’, he was essential a very private man who left few documentary records of his life.
Best known for his depiction of animals, particularly horses – his family business was horse racing – his work was compared with Alfred Munnings’, from whose studio he worked for a time. He had a keen interest in fox-hunting and at one stage had stables and a pack of hounds above Mullion Cove. He was also a prolific portraitist of exceptional quality and regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy and London galleries. Among his best known portraits is one of fellow-artist Stanley Gardiner on the Lamorna Cove quayside.
Publication coincides with a major exhibition of the artist’s work at Penlee House Gallery, Penzance March–June 2007.
ISBN 13: 1-904537-65-6
265mm x 210mm, 96pp, approx 65 colour and 15 b & w illustrations
Price £12.95
Softback
Passion for Paint: The Life and Work of Barrington Tabb
Jonathan Benington
The Barrington Tabb story is one of quiet but stubborn perseverance against the odds. For nearly fifty years Tabb’s art has been dedicated to everyday subjects: working class terraces, the docks, railway bridges, canals and smoking factory chimneys. Having worked in industry for twenty-five years he was very familiar with these places, although his working class background proved an obstacle to his artistic ambitions.
Almost totally self-taught, he never lost faith in his natural talent, however much he was discouraged by friends, family and fellow artists. He has no great desire for fame or money. He is intoxicated by the smell, the feel, the colour and the texture of paint. Guided by his instincts alone, he handles his expressive medium with all the gutsy passion of a Vincent Van Gogh or a Lucian Freud. Yet his work remains totally original, for he brings his imagination into play and the end result is never a mere descriptive record.
His places are felt and experienced, imbued with a sense of the passage of time and the working of memory. By bearing the signs of the artist’s emotional engagement so openly, Tabb's paintings are somehow alive. He is to Bristol what Lowry was to Salford.
This book describes Tabb’s fifty-year career, from his earliest landscapes through to the industrial scenes and townscapes for which he is best known. His childhood in the country, his work as an inspector of buses and his long battle against ill health are also described. The artist’s working methods and influences are discussed, aided by quotes from an interview together with over 150 colour reproductions of his paintings.
approx 120 colour and some b & w archive photographs
ISBN 1 904537 62 6
270mm x 210mm 160pp Softback, with flaps
Price £15
Published December 2006
Evelyn Dunbar: War and Country
Dr Gillian Clarke
Evelyn Dunbar holds a unique position in twentieth-century British art. Described by William Rothenstein, when principal of the Royal College of Art, as one of the most promising of the younger painters, with ‘real genius.’, she specialised in mural painting at the RCA and carried out decorations at Brockley School, Lewisham from 1933-36 under Charles Mahoney´s direction. It was at Brockley that her work first gained public notice and wide acclaim.
Evelyn Dunbar was devoted to nature and the natural world and in particular the garden, which was rooted in her affection for the Kentish landscape. That she did not seek publicity, was modest about her achievements and did not see herself as part of a clique have all contributed to the neglect of her work.
Dunbar´s most successful and extensive body of work dates from the Second World War when she was commissioned by the War Artists´ Advisory Committee, and so became the only woman, on a salaried basis, to record women's activities on the Home Front. It was for her lyrical but unsentimental paintings of the Women´s Land Army that she is especially known. These provide an important documentary record of women´s work and contribution to the war effort.
Like many other war artists she tended to fall out of sight of the mainstream, modernist art world following the cessation of hostilities. But she did much to add to the ‘spirit and practice of English art’ and deserves to be placed alongside her contemporaries Edward Bawden, Barnet Freedman, Charles Mahoney, John Nash, Eric Ravilious and Stanley Spencer.
Marking the centenary of Dunbar´s birth, this unique and authoritative biography, the publication of which is accompanied by the first retrospective exhibition of her work, celebrates for the first time the range of her achievement. Sumptuously illustrated, it is an essential and invaluable text for all those interested in twentieth-century British art and culture.
Drawing extensively on interviews with family members, including Evelyn Dunbar´s husband Dr Roger Folley and other key figures not previously identified, and newly located archives and correspondence, the author focusses on Dunbar´s career from illustrator and mural painter, to war artist and teacher at The Ruskin School of Drawing and of Fine Art, Oxford. Each chapter explores a different period in her life, revealing the variety of her work and demonstrating her profound understanding and love of the countryside.
Gill Clarke is Director of the Centre for Biography and Education at the University of Southampton and guest curator for the exhibition Evelyn Dunbar: War and Country.
- Major study of neglected mural painter
- Only World War II woman artist commissioned to depict women´s ‘Home Front’ war effort
- British neo-Romantic interest
ISBN 1 904537 56 1 Sansom & Company 270mm x 210mm 224pp
approx 50 colour and 40 b & w illustrations
Softback £24.95 PUBLISHED - AVAILABLE NOW
Stanley Spencer: Journey to Burghclere
Paul Gough
Stanley Spencer was one of Britain´s greatest twentieth-century artists. He became famous for two things: his celebration and immortalisation of his home town of Cookham in Berkshire - his ‘heaven on earth’ as he lovingly called it - and the fusion in his paintings of sex and religion, the heavenly and the ordinary.
In 1915 Spencer left home to serve as a medical orderly in the Beaufort Military Hospital in Bristol. Aged 24, he had rarely stayed away overnight from home. For ten months he scrubbed floors, bandaged convalescent soldiers and carried supplies around the vast, former lunatic asylum.
In 1916 he signed up for overseas duty in Macedonia, where he saw violent action up to the eve of the Armistice. Five years after the war, Spencer started making large drawings of a possible memorial scheme based on his wartime experiences. So extraordinary were his sketches, and so committed was he to realising them in paint, that the Behrend family became his patrons, funding a purpose-built memorial chapel at Burghclere, near Newbury. 
For five years he toiled, often on top of a giant scaffold, to produce the painted chapel now regarded as his masterpiece - one of the unsung artistic glories of Europe.
Drawing on Spencer´s own letters, illustrations and paintings, Paul Gough tells the story of the artist´s journey from cosseted family life, through the drudgery of a war hospital and the malarial battlefields of a forgotten front, to his unique vision of peace and resurrection in Burghclere. The book locates Spencer´s work alongside other soldier-artists of the time.
- First major in-depth study of Stanley Spencer´s masterpiece
- ‘One of Europe´s unsung artistic glories’
Author biography:
Paul Gough, painter, broadcaster and writer, is Dean of the Bristol School of Art, Media and Design at the University of the West of England. His research interests lie in the processes and iconography of commemoration, the visual culture of the Great War, and the representation of peace and conflict in the 20th/21st centuries.
ISBN 1 904537 46 4 Sansom & Company
270 x 210mm 208pp 70 colour and b & w illustrations
Softback £24.95 Published September 2006
Jacob Kramer: Creativity and Loss
David Manson 
The first biography of an important artist difficult to ‘pigeon hole’ in the history of twentieth-century British art. A Jewish immigrant, Kramer was a contemporary of Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, William Roberts and C R W Nevinson, but was not interested in joining artist groups. Yet he brought a robust energy, largeness and simplicity of design to the English art scene. As Frances Spalding has commented, there is a quality in his art that remains defiantly Eastern European.
Despite his Slade training and friendships, Kramer lived his life in Leeds, his best work done in the post-World War I years. There, he became a close friend of critic Herbert Read, and for years was a pivotal figure in the Leeds cultural scene.
Kramer´s artistic reputation rests largely on his early portraiture, especially of Jewish subjects - tense, haunting images, strong and compelling. He is represented in many public and private collections, notably Tate Britain, National Portrait Gallery, Leeds City Art Gallery and the University of Leeds.
There are some strong self-portraits, and Epstein sculpted Kramer´s head in bronze.
- Only book available on this important 20th-century artist
- Anglo-Jewish interest
- Associated exhibition at Leeds City Art Gallery September-November 2006, and others at commercial London galleries.
ISBN 1904537 57 X Sansom & Company 244 x 171mm
212pp approx 40 colour illustrations + 40 b & w
Hardback Price £19.95 Published September 2006
AVAILABLE NOW
John Brett: A Pre-Raphaelite in Cornwall
CHARLES BRETT AND OTHERS
The Victorian painter John Brett delighted in the natural world. As a Pre-Raphaelite in the mid-century, he created glowing landscapes, famously the Stonebreaker of 1857 and
The Val d’Aosta painted in the following year, which showed all the qualities of the Pre-Raphaelites, truthfulness to nature and almost obsessional attention to detail. He was at this time influenced by the teachings of John Ruskin, although their friendship was to end in some acrimony.
There were to be other sides to John Brett and from the 1870s onwards he devoted much of his time to painting the sea and the coast of the British Isles, including, as this sumptuous book shows, the many faces and colours of Cornwall. Painting during long family holidays, he left over 200 known views of the coastline from Fowey in the east to Bude in the north. In thirty years, he recorded with Ruskinian precision and Pre-Raphaelite intensity of colour its varied beauties, revelling in the diverse moods of sea and sky, the golden sands and the majesty and grandeur of the Cornish cliffs.
Three experts on John Brett discuss his life and work, his relations with Ruskin and his time in Cornwall, concluding with a large selection of the paintings.
There are 70 colour and many black and white illustrations.
- Strong Pre-Raphaelite and John Ruskin interest
- Marine interest
ISBN 1 904537 51 0 210mm x 270mm 144 pages
70 colour and many black & white images Softback
£19.95
Published Summer 2006 AVAILABLE NOW
Glyn Morgan at Eighty
DAVID BUCKMAN
Through a life-time dedicated to painting, Glyn Morgan has joined that important body of Welsh artists who have transformed the role of the visual arts in the principality in the twentieth century.
Along with his early teachers Ceri Richards, his mentor Cedric Morris, John Elwyn, Augustus John and Kyffin Williams and other singular modern painters, Morgan has helped dispel the myth that the Welsh are not a visual nation. 
Like all these Welsh painters, he is a painter of marked individuality. He is a confessed romantic, a visionary, producing work steeped in dream, imagination and legend. A figurative painter, he nevertheless aspires not just to surface realism, but an inner reality, probing the mystery in the earth and all growing things.
‘The primary purpose of art is to uplift the human spirit,’ he has written. It is a high and now rather unfashionable aim, but the life-enhancing canvases illustrated in the book, produced over more than 60 years, show that Glyn Morgan has done more than most to achieve it.
ISBN 1 94537 44 8 Sansom & Company
270mm x 210mm 160pp Colour illustrations throughout
Hardback £30 Published April 2006 AVAILABLE NOW
Brunel and the Art of Invention
Claire O’Mahony
Isambard Kingdom Brunel embodies the self-reliance, hard work and inventiveness which was a core achievement of the nineteenth century; Robert Howlett's famous photograph Brunel with chains has become an iconic image of the spirit of creative adventure. This man, 'in love with the impossible', by sheer brilliance of invention and force of will, helped transform modern transport, engineering and architecture.
In this short but beautifully illustrated study, Claire O' Mahony shows how the self-made inventors whom Brunel has come to epitomise were shaped by a society that recognized the creative interaction between the worlds of art, industry and science.
The book has other dimensions. The author looks at the role of women in art and industry, and also suggests that our awareness of the Victorian legacy will be longer-lasting and wider-reaching if we recognise the difficulties many young Britons experience in coping with the heroic view of the nation's history so well illustrated in this book.
Brunel interest in the 'Brunel 200' anniversary year
- Victorian engineering, invention and industry
- Women in art and industry
The author:
Dr Claire O’Mahony specialises in the history of art, design and interior decoration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She has published exhibition catalogues and articles on art and design, including entries in the RA's 1900 Art at the Crossroads and an introductory essay to Essential William Morris. She is Director of Programmes for Lifelong Learning in the History of Art at Bristol University.
ISBN 1 904537 50 2 Sansom & Company 265 x 210mm 64pp colour and black and white illustrations
Paperback £7.95
Tom Early: The Catalogued Work
DENYS J WILCOX & MICHAEL MILLER
Catalogue raisonne of the work of a self-taught member of the St Ives art colony in the late 1940s and 1950s. He exhibited in St Ives and became a member of the Penwith Society of Artists. His paintings were critically well received at a ground-breaking exhibition ‘Fifteen Cornish Artists‘ at Heal´s Mansard Gallery, London in 1951.
Moving away from St Ives, Early took up painting again, after a seven-year break, when living in Derby where he helped found the Derby Group of Artists. After his premature death in 1967, his life´s work effectively disappeared from view.
It was rescued from oblivion in 1994, with a major retrospective at the Belgrave Gallery in London. Further exhibitions and critical attention followed, and in this catalogue raisonne Dr Wilcox reveals Tom Early to be a rare visionary artist with a profound poetic gift.
ISBN 1 904537 23 5, Sansom & Company, 270mm x 210mm
160 pages, Many colour illustrations, Hardback
£30 Published 2005
By the Look of Things: The Life and Work of Robert Organ
JENNY PERY
For fifty years, the West Country artist Robert Organ ‘has been painting his life.’ Some of his canvasses depict the West-country valley where he lives; others find him revisiting his childhood Weston-super-Mare, or the coast of Dorset, where he charts the sun´s path over the sea in an attempt to capture the effect of light on water.
Trips to France have led to large landscape paintings and ‘conversation pieces’ - models strutting on the beach at Cannes, accordionists playing in dance-halls. A residency at Exeter´'s Royal Albert Memorial Museum produced a set of paintings of people and artefacts in the museum; another series focussed on birds and animals in a wildlife park.
The subject of old age - a theme rarely explored in painting - found Organ drawing and painting the residents of a local nursing home, and his unflinching portrayals of the aged, rich in colour, are humane yet movingly optimistic. With these ‘genre’ scenes go numerous portraits of friends and family, including David Attenborough, Charles Dance, Michael Gough, Seamus Heaney and Nevil Marriner. Another abiding theme is the still life: large table-tops spread with books and objects collected over the years.
ISBN 1 904537 05 7, Sansom & Company, 270 x 210mm
112 pages, Many colour and some b & w illustrations, Hardback
£30 Published 2003
Charles Simpson: Painter of Animals and Birds, Coastline & Moorland
JOHN BRANFIELD
Charles Simpson, in the early 1920s the leading figure in the St Ives art colony, produced paintings of great variety. In 1913 he married Ruth Alison, a promising student at the Forbes School and together they established the St Ives School of Art, where Ruth taught portraiture. Charles exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy: pictures of his wife and daughter Leonora students on the beach, huge impressionist canvases of the estuary in the early light.
Simpson was known for his pastoral paintings and large seascapes with gulls. The 22 paintings of The Herring Season record the activities of the fishing industry in St Ives; another series contains 80 paintings of birds found along the shore and cliffs.
Simpson moved to London in 1924, forging yet another career, as a fine painter of horse racing and hunting in Leicestershire and Yorkshire. He travelled by motorcycle to attend race meetings, open exhibitions of his hunting and racing pictures and to carry out commissions for horse-and-rider portraits.
He returned to Cornwall, living in Lamorna where he painted the coastline and his favourite subject - ducks on the stream or millpond.
ISBN 1 904537 43 X, Sansom & Company, 265 x 210mm
136pp, 74 colour illustrations + 70 b & w, Softback
£19.95 Published 2005
Ella and Charles Naper: Art and Life at Lamorna
JOHN BRANFIELD
Through their close friendships, Ella and Charles Naper helped define the Lamorna art colony in its heyday.
Ella learned handicrafts at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts under Frederick Partridge, a disciple of the great arts and crafts practitioner C R Ashbee and later joined his jewellery workshop at Branscombe in south Devon. There she developed and refined her feel for art nouveau.
Ella married Charles Naper, a young architect and painter. They moved to Lamorna in 1912, building Trewoofe at the head of the valley. They soon became part of the Lamorna Birch circle, making lifelong friendships with Laura and Harold Knight, Harold and Gertrude Harvey, and the lesbian painter Gluck.
In the early 1920s Ella set up the Lamorna Pottery with Kate Westrup, producing beautifully modelled ceramic figures. Charles Naper was an accomplished landscape painter, best known for his studies of the geometry of cliffs and the patterns and shapes of rock formations.
The enduring artistic legacy is Ella's elegant jewellery, today high regarded by connoisseurs and collectors.
- Strong Lamorna art colony interest
- Illustrations of art nouveau jewellery
ISBN 1 904537 04 9, Sansom & Company, 270mm x 210mm
112 pages, 43 colour and many b & w illustrations, Softback
£18.50 Published 2003
The Enchanted River: 200 Years of the Royal Watercolour Society
SIMON FENWICK
In the nineteenth century, the Royal Watercolour Society was at the heart of the British artistic establishment. Members included David Cox, Peter De Wint and Samuel Palmer to Edward Burne-Jones, William Holman Hunt, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John Singer Sargent. For much of the twentieth century, it was considered out of touch with developments in British art, until changing fashion brought about the re-establishment of the RWS as a significant force in contemporary British painting.
In an engaging narrative, Simon Fenwick records these changing fortunes, and the controversies, personal vendettas and financial crises which characterised much of its history. He tells how Jane Austen visited the 1813 exhibitions looking for portraits of characters from ‘Pride and Prejudice’; how Burne-Jones resigned from the Society in 1870 over complaints about ‘nudities’ in one of his paintings, and how, when Helen Allingham was elected to full membership in 1889, the President predicted that this would lead to ‘lady members shrieking at RWS meetings . and the breaking-up of the Society.‘
There is a full list of members.
ISBN 1 904537 10 3 hardback, ISBN 1 904537 15 4 softback, Sansom & Company, 270mm x 210mm
208pp, Many colour and black & white illustrations
Hardback £35, Softback £24.95 Published 2004
Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century
PHILIP VANN
Major survey of around 200 British artists working in one of the most demanding and revealing of all artistic genres. Philip Vann&s masterly text covers artists such as Francis Bacon, Gwen John, John Minton, Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer, Christopher Wood and others.
The core of the book is a detailed examination of 100 British self-portraits in the remarkable Ruth Borchard Collection. The earliest include work by Raymond Coxon, Ithell Colquhoun, Carel Weight and Anne Redpath from the first half of the century, but most are from the 1950s and ´60s, helping evoke an entire period in British art and its myriad developing strands.
All kinds of artistic influences are to be seen here - art school academicism, Camden Town, Expressionism, the Euston Road School, Kitchen Sink, continental Existentialism.
The Collection is full of revelations of once relatively obscure artists who have gone on to become critically appreciated, along with artists of stature who have been unfairly neglected.
Each portrait is accompanied by a text discussing the work in some detail, the artist's background and development and any relevant writings. In all, self-portraits by 220 artists are illustrated, mainly in colour.
ISBN 1 904537 08 1 hardback, ISBN 1 904537 11 1 softback, Sansom & Company, 285 x 245mm
308pp, 200 colour + 40 b&w illustrations
Hardback £45, Softback £29.95 Published 2004
The Golden Dream: A Biography of Thomas Cooper Gotch
PAMELA LOMAX
T C Gotch was the most individualistic member of the Newlyn art colony, a remarkable painter of great vision and founder member of the New English Art Club, where he a great friend of Whistler. But when divisions occurred in the NEAC, he favoured Newlyn realism to the impressionism of the London-based members.
By the mid-1890s, Gotch had found his artistic bearings, refining his realism into a form of 'imaginative symbolism', painting elaborate, intensely detailed and yet dream-like paintings which one critic likened to a blend of Pre-Raphaelitism and the Italian Renaissance. His Pre-Raphaelite Alleluia of 1896 was acquired by the Tate. In the following decades, he painted glowingly textured portraits of children and young women which many consider his finest work.
ISBN 1 904537 21 9, Sansom & Company, 270mm x 210mm
192 pages, Many colour and b & w illustrations, Softback
£24.99 Published 2004
Painting at the Edge: British Art Colonies 1880-1930
EDITOR LAURA NEWTON
The first collective study of Britain's far-flung coastal art colonies in Newlyn, St Ives, Lamorna, Walberswick, Staithes, Cullercoats, Cockburnspath and Kirkcudbright. It comes at a time of renewed interest in the artists who worked in these late-nineteenth-century colonies.
The artists were often linked through mutual friendships made during study at the Parisian ateliers and summers spent in the French art colonies of Grez-sur-Loing or Pont-Aven. Each of the British colonies was sited in a small community dependent on fishing or farming and far enough away from urban centres to retain much of their old customs and way of life.
The authors trace the development of the colonies in the twentieth century, when styles and subjects changed, sometimes sparked by the decline of the fishing industry, the influx of middle-class tourists and the encroachment of industrialisation. Many of the paintings produced at the eight colonies were concerned with rendering a 'truthful' depiction of a particular time and place, and can now be seen as a celebration of various unique aspects of a British way of life that was fast disappearing.
ISBN 1 904537 29 4 hardback, ISBN 2 904537 26 X softback, Sansom & Company, 270mm x 210mm
Colour illustrations throughout, and many archive photographs
Hardback £35, Softback £24.95 Published 2005
A Vision of Landscape: The Art of Glyn Morgan
RONALD BLYTHE
Monograph on the Essex-based 'English Romantic' painter, greatly influenced by his teacher, Cedric Morris. Introduction by Ronald Blythe, with 29 colour reproductions of the artist's work.
250mm x 280mm 32 pp 29 colour illustrations ISBN 1 900178 48 6 Softback £9.99
Alfred Wallis: Primitive
SVEN BERLIN
Reprint of the classic study of the life of the retired fisherman-cum-painter whose 'primitive' depictions of boats, harbours and St Ives houses brought him recognition as one of the most original British artists of the twentieth century.
It tells the story of how Wallis, who started painting only in his ´70s, was 'discovered' in the 1920s by artists Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood and became an icon of the modernist movement in Britain.
Despite being the darling of the cognoscenti, Wallis died in a Penzance workhouse in 1942, and Sven Berlin´s passionate plea for the more sympathetic treatment of the old and infirm, published in Cyril Connolly´s Horizon magazine shortly after Wallis´s death, is reproduced here for the first time.
245mm x 185mm 144pp 10 colour + 37 b & w ISBN 1 900178 18 4 Softback £12.95
Arthur Wragg: Twentieth-century Artist Prophet and Jester
JUDY BROOK AND OTHERS
Arthur Wragg, unlike fellow illustrators David Low and 'Vicky', has been relegated to a footnote in the story of British twentieth-century art. And yet his Psalms for Modern Life was reprinted ten times within three years of being published in 1933.
He was commissioned to design the first cover for the socialist magazine, Tribune, and his trenchant social and political cartoons were in constant demand from national newspaper and magazine editors. Contemporaries - Vera Brittain, Beverley Nichols and Hannen Swaffer among them - considered him a major civilising force. Wragg was also a fine commercial artist, his work ranging from advertisements for such clients as Abdulla Cigarettes between the wars to a series of outstanding record sleeves for Argo/Decca in the 1960/70s.
Judy Brook's memoir of this gentle pacifist reveals the man behind the forgotten reputation - humane, self-doubting, humorous, yet driven by a fierce anger at the social injustice, human folly and commercial greed he saw all around him. It was an anger that produced a series of powerful, searing illustrations for his own books, such as Jesus Wept and Thy Kingdom Come, and commissions for others, including Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol, for which he drew on his experience as a prison visitor.
245mm x 185mm 184pp 8 colour + 100 b & w illustrations ISBN 1 900178 87 7 Softback £14.95
Ben Hartley
BERNARD SAMUELS
Ben Hartley, who died in 1996, was an outstandingly gifted painter who sought nothing but obscurity. But he spent his life making pictures of beautiful, vivid colour, humour and a feeling of joy touched with poignancy.
He lived a solitary life in Devon, always struggling with poor health and making little effort to show his work. In the 1970s he was introduced to Bernard Samuels, director of Plymouth Art Centre, who set about exhibiting and selling the work, while respecting the artist's wish for privacy.
Hartley spent the last years of his life in Presteigne, a small town on the Welsh border with Herefordshire. He died in 1996, leaving a bequest of some 900 gouaches and over 300 notebooks full of beautiful drawings.
This is the first monograph on the artist. It covers the brief story of his very simple way of life, devoted to country life and the art of the French post-impressionists, in particular Bonnard and Matisse.
Sixty of the artist's finest gouaches are illustrated in colour, along with many black & white reproductions from his notebooks, showing the sources of the paintings.
276mm x 219mm 152pp 60 colour + 80 b & w illustrations ISBN 1 900178 73 7 Softback £20
Bernard Meninsky
JOHN RUSSELL TAYLOR
The first significant study of the life and work of this visionary painter, who was central to the great generation of twentieth-century Anglo-Jewish artists. Always difficult to classify, the dark atmospheric landscapes, the tenderness of his mother and child series, and the magic of the pastoral world of his later years relate both to the spirit of Picasso and to the English Neo-Romantics.
Meninsky's essay, 'The Appreciation of Drawing', is reproduced as an appendix.
230mm x 225mm 144pp 17 colour + 53 b & w ISBN 1 872971 05 9 Hardback £29.95 [Redcliffe]
Britain´s Art Colony by the Sea
DENYS VAL BAKER
New edition, with introductory essay by David Wilkinson, of the classic study of the St Ives art colony in the 1950s.
Until Val Baker's book, surprisingly little had been written about the art of St Ives. Written from the inside, and 'as it happened', this long out-of-print book is an intimate portrait of the artist community in perhaps its most celebrated period, the two decades following the Second World War.
Traditional painting, epitomised by the glowing canvases of John Park and Charles Simpson, still flourished alongside the innovations of the modernist school led by Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth and which brought international recognition.
The crafts, too, featured in Val Baker's book, from Bernard Leach's celebrated pottery on the hill to innumerable smaller studios in St Ives and other locations in west Cornwall, along with locally made furniture, metalwork and textiles.
The book's re-publication today serves as a reminder of those heady days, profiling both the famous and the near-forgotten, set in their historical context by David Wilkinson's introduction which shows how St Ives has continued to flourish, to the point at which art is now as vital as mining and fishing were in the past.
230mm x 180mm 112pp 60 b & w illustrations of artists and their work ISBN 1 900178 13 3 Softback £9.99
Bryan Pearce: The Artist and His Work
JANET AXTEN AND OTHERS
Naïve painter Bryan Pearce is a remarkable phenomenon of the St Ives art scene. Although severely limited in his learning ability since childhood, when phenylketonuria was diagnosed, he was encouraged by his mother Mary to begin painting in his twenties. He has for nearly 50 years been celebrated for his depictions of his home town, its streets, parish church and harbour in oil, conte, pen & ink and pencil.
This book, with more than 120 illustrations in full colour, was published to accompany a major retrospective exhibition. The illustrations show the diverse range of his work and the wide subject matter from the tentative watercolours of the early 1950s, through the unique self-assured oil paintings, including his distinctive 'all-round' studies of the harbours of west Cornwall, to the extraordinarily sophisticated designs and dramatic colours of his most recent conte drawings.
With an introduction by Professor Charles Thomas, the book contains new essays from William Cooper, William Leah and Janet Axten, with a study of the artist's working techniques by Rose Rands. Earlier writings on the artist by Alan Bowness, Peter Lanyon, H.S. (Jim) Ede and William Leach are reproduced, along with an extensive and revealing interview given by the artist's mother in 1973.
280mm x 260mm 144pp 120 colour illustrations
Catalogue raisonne of the oil paintings and extensive bibliography.
ISBN 1 900178 08 7 Hardback £29.95
George Sweet: Painter, Teacher and Friend
JUDITH GREENBURY
George Sweet, fellow Slade student and friend of the Euston Road painters William Coldstream and Claude Rogers, was an inspiring teacher of art from the late 1930s until 1960. As head of the Fine Art department at the West of England College of Art in Bristol, he brought a wide and cosmopolitan experience to his life classes. Judith Greenbury's memoir is a 'remembrance of things past' of her time as a student in the closing years of the Second World War. She vividly recalls George Sweet's stimulating classes and the flavour of art school life in war-torn Bristol.
George Sweet was a figurative painter in the realistic and painterly Anglo-French tradition, taught by the formidable Slade Professor Henry Tonks in the heady 1920s. Although he showed at the Royal Academy and the RWA, with the occasional one-man show at Browse & Darby (the Saatchi Collection buying three large nude paintings from his last show there, in 1996), Sweet did not seek to promote himself or his work. This profile, with three dozen reproductions of figure, landscape and still-life paintings and drawings by George Sweet, will bring to a wider audience the work of an artist who deserves to be more widely known than a natural reticence allowed in his own life-time.
210mm x 165mm, 134pp 30 colour + 10 b & w illustrations ISBN 1 900178 81 8, Hardback £14.50
Josef Herman´s Drawings and Studies
PETER DAVIES
Josef Herman is best remembered for his ‘dignity of labour’ themes, epitomised by the celebrated studies of Welsh miners and Mediterranean peasants. This new collection of drawings reveals other pre-occupations which might surprise many who thought they knew his work well. They range in time over 50 years, from the Glasgow nudes of the war years, to later mother and child and landscape studies.
The drawings are illuminated by Peter Davies´ commentary, an introductory essay which sets the work in the wider context of a remarkable life's output, and full biographical and bibliographical notes.
230mm x 220mm 112pp 62 drawings ISBN 1 872971 50 4 Hardback £14.95 [Redcliffe]
Liverpool Seen: Post-War Artists in the City
PETER DAVIES
Explores the rich and varied work of Liverpool's post-war painters and sculptors, and the under-rated contribution they have made to the city's vibrant cultural life.
The author shows how they have created art with an unmistakable local dialect but which has addressed the broad stylistic and thematic issues ranging from the painterly abstraction of the 1950s to the figurative revival of the 1980s.
Artists discussed in some detail include Arthur Ballard, Maurice Cockrill, Arthur Dooley,Adrian Henri, Nicholas Horfield, George Mayer-Martin, Sam Walsh and Dick Young.
245mm x 177mm 232pp 12 colour + 75 b & w illustrations ISBN 1 872971 27 X Hardback £19.95 [Redcliffe]
Mixed Palette: the painting lives of Frank Ward and Kathleen Walne
DAVID BUCKMAN
Biography of the two artists from their art student days in Ipswich in the 1930s, life in Chelsea either side of the war and their settling in Brighton in the 1960s. There are chapters on Kathleen Walne's time with the charismatic Lucy Wertheim at her gallery in Burlington Gardens, London in 1934, Frank Ward's teaching at Camberwell, and their friendships with fellow-artists in Chelsea, notably Theo Garman and the Epstein family.
235mm x 210mm 88pp 34 colour + 40 b & w ISBN 1 900178 01 X Softback £9.50
Peter Coker
FRANCES SPALDING AND FREDERICK GORE
In the 1950s, Peter Coker was among the group of artists, with John Bratby, Jack Smith, Derrick Greaves and Edward Middleditch, who were dubbed the 'Kitchen Sink Group'. This monograph concentrates on Coker's landscape works, with the aim of raising them from the obscurity into which they have fallen compared with his better documented work.
Published in association with Abbotts Hall Art Gallery.
255mm x 210mm 54pp 16 colour + 27 b & w ISBN 1 872971 81 4 Softback £9.95 [Redcliffe]
Piers and Seaside Towns: An Artist´s Journey
JUDITH GREENBURY
In the late 1990s, artist Judith Greenbury set out on a pilgrimage to capture in watercolour the essence of the best of Britain's piers that have survived the ravages of time and neglect.
This sumptuously illustrated book is the record of that pilgrimage, from Eastbourne to Llandudno, Clevedon to Tenby, Cromer to Blackpool.
250mm x 275mm 96pp 60 colour + 20 b & w illustrations ISBN 1 900178 63 X Hardback £19.95
Poet and Painter: Letters between Gordon Bottomley and Paul Nash 1910-46
INTRO: ANDREW CAUSLEY
Paul Nash wanted at the start of his career to be a poet as well as a painter. Bottomley was a poet and a discerning collector of paintings and drawings. Their correspondence coincides with the maturing of the modern movement, which stood for the exclusiveness of different forms of artistic expression.
The book bears witness to the staying power of Pre-Raphaelitism and illuminates the ambivalent, relatively uncritical response in England to the modern movement. It questions the need to confront new forms and ideas, the penalties of isolation and most relevant to the two friends - how much does age and personal development influence choices at radical artistic turning points?
230mm x 155mm 296pp 27 b & w illustrations ISBN 1 872971 15 6 Hardback £14.95 [Redcliffe]
Restless Lives: The Bohemian World of Rodrigo and Elinor Moynihan
JOHN MOYNIHAN
A biographical account, seen through their son´s eyes, of the marriage and artistic careers of two Slade students who went on to establish their reputations as important twentieth-century British artists. They counted among their friends and colleagues many of the major artists from the 1930s and the post-war years, including Coldstream, Pasmore and Rogers, John Minton, Francis Bacon and Stanley Spencer, all of whom feature prominently in these pages. The book memorably evokes the world of Slade parties and bohemian life centred on the Colony club.
Rodrigo Moynihan´s experiments in objective abstraction, and some of his most notable portrait commissions, of the young Princess Elizabeth, Prime Minister Clem Attlee, and group portraits of the RCA teaching staff and the directors of Penguin Books, are dealt with in some detail.
200pp 17 colour + 82 b & w illustrations ISBN 1 90017844 3 Hardback £24.99
Singing from the Walls: The Life and Art of Elizabeth Forbes
JUDITH COOK, MELISSA HARDIE AND CHRISTIANA PAYNE
The Newlyn artist Elizabeth Forbes (1859-1912) for long suffered the fate of women artists of her generation, living in the shadow of her husband, Stanhope Forbes. This first major study of her life and work gives a more rounded view of this fine artist and moving spirit in the Newlyn artist colony around the end of the nineteenth century. In her most characteristic work, her studies of children and domestic interiors, she is clearly the match of her male colleagues painting their more grimly realistic depictions of life in the Cornish fishing community. The authors also reveal the wide range of her work and its strong imaginative and poetic element, as in the sumptuous illustrations in her book, King Arthur's Wood.
Elizabeth Forbes also emerges as an accomplished print-maker, encouraged by the flamboyant James McNeill Whistler and Walter Sickert. Her early drypoints (she was to abandon the medium when she married) drew inspiration from Whistler's etchings with their spare, elegant effects and consummate manipulation of technique, while many of her paintings could, like Whistler's, be described as symphonies in colour.
Elizabeth was central to the cultural and artistic life of the Newlyn community, running with her husband the celebrated Newlyn School of Painting. She died, at the height of her powers, in her early fifties. She was an enigmatic, appealing personality, whose story was a moving and ultimately a sad one.
255mm x 195mm 240pp 50 colour + 120 b & w illustrations Comprehensive catalogue raisonne
Hardback ISBN 1 900178 72 9 £37.50 Softback ISBN 1 900178 77 X. £24.95
The Affectionate Eye: The Life of Claude Rogers
JENNY PERY
Claude Rogers was an important figure for five decades, both as painter and teacher of art. With Victor Pasmore and William Coldstream, he founded the Euston Road School of Drawing and Painting in 1937, and later taught at Camberwell when the Euston Road painters regrouped after the war. Here, and later at the Slade, he had a considerable influence on the development of figurative painting in Britain.
In his painting, Rogers pursued a rigorous realism based on visual fact. He enjoyed painting the 'unpaintable' - emergency hospital cases, burning stubble fields, landscapes rushing past beneath aeroplane wings.
230mm x 153mm, 256pp 30 colour + 62 b & w ISBN 1 872971 37 7 Hardback £19.95
The Innocent Eye: Primitive and Naïve Artists in Cornwall: Alfred Wallis, Bryan Pearce, Mary Jewels and others
MARION WHYBROW
The author contrasts 'primitive' and 'naïve' painting through the life and work of two of Cornwall's uniquely distinctive artists. With his fiercely unsophisticated paintings the near-illiterate mariner Alfred Wallis became the unlikely darling of the 1930s modernists grouped around Ben Nicholson, while Bryan Pearce's serene, naively crafted depictions of St Ives have also taken their place in the pantheon of twentieth-century British art.
A chapter on the self-taught Mary Jewels throws new light on the life of a much neglected artist, first encouraged by Cedric Morris and later collected by Augustus John.
The survey concludes with brief profiles of a dozen other artists whose individual visions have enriched the life of this celebrated artists' community.
235mm x 185mm 160pp 24 colour +112 b & w ISBN 1 900178 96 6 Softback £14.99
The Journey: The Search for the role of Contemporary Art in Religious and Spiritual Life
SISTER WENDY BECKETT, GARY FABIAN MILLER, RUPERT MARTIN AND OTHERS
Published with the Usher Gallery, Lincoln, The Journey explores the evolving relationship of contemporary art with spiritual thinking. The book documents and illustrates related commissions undertaken by 14 contemporary artists, and includes their personal statements.
The artists illustrated are Roger Ackling, Craigie Aitchison, Stephen Cox, Richard Devereux, Jennifer Durrant, Garry Fabian Miller, Jon Groom, Sue Hilder, Eileen Lawrence, Richard Long, Leonard McComb, Glen Onwin, Peter Randall-Page and Keir Smith.
240mm x 200mm 128pp 18 colour + 44 b & w ISBN 0 948265 99 X Softback £14.95 [Redcliffe]
The Last Days of Hilton: The gouaches of Roger Hilton 1973-75
ADRIAN LEWIS
Short biography and critical assessment of Roger Hilton´s work, in which the author focusses on the rich complexity and cultural significance of the artist's later work in gouache.
In this wide ranging critical re-evaluation, the author considers Hilton's identification with French nineteenth-century models of bohemianism and cultural resistance, his response to 'child art' and his desire to break down the distinctions between art-making and other forms of graphic communication.
225mm x 205mm 96pp 24 colour + 50 b & w ISBN 1 900178 05 2 Softback £11.95
The Magic Shuttle: The Story of Tom Early - St Ives and after
EUNICE CAMPBELL AND OTHERS
The life and work of a remarkable artist of singular vision commemorated in this profile by Eunice Campbell, with contributions from fellow artists in his St Ives years and later.
'A unique painter who leads us through landscapes of fierce intensity and terrifying loneliness without ever seeming to be aware of our wonder at walking within a dream he has made.' - Sven Berlin
245mm x 170mm 80pp 30 colour + b & w illustrations ISBN 1 872971 78 4 Softback £7.50 [Redcliffe]