Updated 21 May 2010
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NEW TITLES: IN PRINT AND AVAILABLE
Rupert Lee
Painter, Sculptor and Printmaker
Denys J Wilcox
ISBN 978-1- 906593-45-2
270mm x 210mm
160 pages with colour throughout Hardback
£29.95
Publication May 2010
A man of extraordinary and diverse talents, Rupert Lee was a part of the great Slade generation that included Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Nevinson, Stanley Spencer and Edward Wadsworth. At the Slade Lee formed close friendships with Robert Gibbings and Paul Nash and made a significant contribution to the wood engraving revival in England between the wars.
The remarkably powerful series of paintings and drawings he produced whilst serving in the Trenches in the Machine Gun Corps showed him to be in sympathy with elements of Cubism and Vorticism. These works compare favourably with the well-known war pictures by his Slade contemporaries Nash and Nevinson, but have not been seen for over ninety years. He made many more drawings whilst he was recuperating from shell shock.
Between 1919 and 1922 Lee collaborated closely with Paul and John Nash producing wood engravings for the Sun Calendar Yearbook and The Poetry Bookshop. He began specialising in animal subjects and his paintings, wood engravings and sculptures were bought by such notable figures as Arnold Bennett, Roger Fry and Edward Marsh. He organised the important open-air sculpture exhibition on the roof gardens of Selfridges in 1930.
During his ten-year presidency of the London Group he was centrally involved with the development of modern art in Britain, helping raise the profile of young emerging artists like Henry Moore and Victor Pasmore. A formative member of the Surrealist movement in England, he was Chairman of the 1936 International Surrealist exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries and worked tirelessly to promote the work of modern painters and sculptors.
Drawing from a unique archive of the artist’s papers and correspondence, this first study of Rupert Lee’s life and work reveals an artist of outstanding versatility and a key player in the story of early twentieth century British art.
Denys J Wilcox’s critical writings include The London Group: 1913-1939 – The Artists and their Work, a monograph on Margaret Geddes (1998) and a book on Tom Early, published by Sansom & Company in 2005. He has written for Apollo, The Burlington Magazine and The London Magazine.
Objects of Affection: Pre-Raphaelite Portraits by John Brett
Christiana Payne and Ann Sumner
ISBN 978-0704-427-35-8
245mm x 190mm
120 pages
73 colour illustrations
Softback £12.95
Published by the Barber Institute of Fine Arts and distributed by Sansom & Company Ltd from May 2010
John Brett is best-known for his early Pre-Raphaelite paintings, The Stone-Breaker and Val d’Aosta, and his late seascapes of the coast of Scotland, Wales and the West Country.
This catalogue of the Barber Institute exhibition (which tours to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and the Fine Art Society, London) concentrates on his portraiture. The great Victorian art critic John Ruskin, for a period his mentor, discouraged Brett from figure painting, and his portraits – often intimate depictions of his family, friends and lovers -- have remained relatively obscure. We can now see that his best portraits have a meticulous delicacy, analogous to the style of his famous landscape paintings.
They are typical of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in this respect and reminiscent of the drawings of Holman Hunt, Millais and the Rossetti brothers.. From the literary and artistic worlds his subjects included Arthur Hughes, Emily Patmore and Christina Rossettti.
The catalogue includes work from the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain, previously unseen work in private collections and a selection of Brett’s portrait photography – Brett was a pioneer in the medium.
There are essays by Anne Sumner, Director of the Barber Institute and Christiana Payne of Oxford Brookes University.
ALSO AVAILABLE: John Brett’s paintings of the sea and shore.
John Brett: A Pre-Raphaelite in Cornwall [ISBN 1 904537 51 0] by Charles Brett, Michael Hickox and Christiana Payne is available at £19.95
'A Terrible Beauty': British Artists in the First World War
Paul Gough 
The work of Britain’s war artists has been well documented, but Dr Paul Gough’s penetrating survey throws new light on their motivations, responses to the conflict and their unique, and widely varying, interpretations of the effects on the combatants.
Profusely illustrated, with many familiar but also less familiar images.
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New insights into the work of the major and lesser-known artists of the First World War, including David Bomberg, Muirhead Bone, Sidney Jones, Henry Lamb, Adrian Hill, Paul Maze, John Nash, Paul Nash, Nevinson, Orpen, William Roberts, William Rothenstein, Stanley Spencer, Harold Williamson and Wyndham Lewis
Paul Gough is also author of Stanley Spencer: Journey to Burghclere on the creation of his great public work of art, the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Hampshire.
978-1-906593-00-1
SOFTBACK
336pp
£29.99
PUBLISHED
Trevor Frankland: Between Clarity and Mystery
Simon Fenwick
This first monograph on Trevor Frankland reproduces well over 100 of his works. They cover every aspect from student days to the present day, including those behind the development and construction of his domestic landscape which has been described as ‘an illusion in a sculptured place’.
Simon Fenwick’s text follows the artist from his childhood in Middlesbrough, describing the rather unusual circumstances that led not only to a career as an artist but also to the realisation of an early ambition to study at the Royal Academy Schools and eventually to be elected President of the Royal Watercolour Society.
Frankland was a visiting lecturer at Hornsey School of Art during the political ‘sit in’ of 1968, described in some detail in this book, which had an unforeseen beneficial effect on his work, eventually leading to his first one-person show.
His interest in the occult and involvement in freemasonry have much in common with that of many artists of the early twentieth century, reinforcing his belief that composition and structure carry the soul of an artwork.
Extensive overseas travel has had a strong influence on Frankland’s use of particular objects and choice of formal structures, leading to frequent re-use rather like an actor appearing in a variety of roles.
Throughout the text it is clear that the artist views his involvement in art not just as a studio event but also as an holistic activity governing every aspect of his life.
ISBN: 978-1-906593-20-9
290 x 210mm
160pp, profusely illustrated with over 100 illustrations
Softback
£20
PUBLISHED
Tessa Newcomb
Philip Vann
Born in Suffolk in 1955, daughter of the painter Mary Newcomb,Tessa Newcomb’s art arises from piercingly clear, pristine perceptions of the everyday and natural worlds. The drawings she continually makes – such as on riotously weedy Suffolk allotments, observing curious, even bizarre happenings in manicured Parisian squares or alongside Venetian canals, and while ambling or cycling among the clear light and spacious landscapes of East Anglia – are a rich imaginative source for her paintings. Tessa sees her art as inseparable from ordinary life. Each of her paintings seems to tell a secret story. Their eerily beautiful atmospheres and curiously juxtaposed imagery recall the art of Christopher Wood (1901-1930). Among her sources of inspiration, she counts ‘watching slow, atmospheric films’, early 20th-century urban photography, ‘going places and rail journeys’ and reading poetry.
This well-illustrated book – partly based on the author’s conversations with Tessa Newcomb – is the first survey of this artist of singular vision, with a keen, popular following. It reveals how her subtly multi-layered paintings are illuminated by an interior radiance, an awareness of what she calls ‘Spaces and Silences’, and a rare, magical poignancy.
ISBN: 978-1-904537-94-6
270 x 210mm
144pp, profusely illustrated with colour and black and white illustrations
Hardback £29.95
PUBLISHED: FEBRUARY 2010
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
SOCIAL, SAVAGE, SENSUAL
THE SCULPTURE OF RALPH BROWN 
This book presents a critical overview of the work of Ralph Brown, a British artist much admired by Henry Moore,who has worked within the tradition of figurative sculpture for over sixty years. It explores Brown’s connections to historical and contemporary sculpture, taking in humanist and ‘social realist’ themes of the 1950s, his exploration of movement through space at the turn of the decade, his extensive exploration of the relief sculpture and, finally, the sensual and sexualised body from the 1960s onwards.
Alongside extensive illustrative documentation and photographs, a range of sculpture scholars and other key commentators provide a reassessment of Brown’s work: Gillian Whiteley presents an overview of Brown’s sculpture, Jon Wood focuses on an important early period spent in Paris, John le Carré comments from the collector’s perspective and Rungwe Kingdon offers an insight into the world of casting the artist’s work.
Published to coincide with a series of major exhibitions of his work, biographical information, extracts from important articles and essays and inventories of exhibitions, public commissions and collections complete the study, providing a wealth of material for further scholarly research.
ISBN 978-1-904537-95-3
300 x 245 mm
168pp
Hardback
£45
FORTHCOMING TITLES
TUVAQ
Inuit Art and the Modern World
Ken Mantel
ISBN 978-1- 906593-42-1 (sb)
ISBN 978-1-906593-59-9 (hb)
270mm x 210mm
264 pages with colour throughout
Softback £29.95
Hardback £39.95
Sansom & Company
Publication 1 June 2010
Inuit artefacts from the Canadian Arctic first came to Britain in 1738 when ivories collected in Hudson Strait were acquired by Hans Sloane and later gifted to the British Museum. 200 years later, modern Inuit carvings began to have an impact here when the art dealer Charles Gimpel staged an exhibition of Inuit art in celebration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.
Tuvaq: Inuit Art and the Modern World tells how British interest in Inuit art has grown in the past fifty years. Encouraged by a handful of committed enthusiasts and aided by a Heritage Lottery Fund Collecting Cultures award, a major public collection has now been established at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge.
In this ground-breaking book, authorities on Inuit art from both sides of the Atlantic provide fascinating insights into how Canadian Government-supported co-operatives have created a market place for emerging artists. Their work transcends ‘native art’ and at its best is art of great quality sought by collectors worldwide.
Articles cover the Canadian gallery, co-operative and auction scene, while the great collection of sculpture put together by the British collector Bill Johnstone is discussed, as are the noted Claude Baud and Musée des Confluences collections in France.
A perceptive chapter looks at the contemporary Inuit art scene, in which the traditional emphasis on naturalistic depictions of Arctic wildlife is giving way, in the emerging generation of artists, to more present-day concerns.
Tuvaq, designed to appeal to committed collectors of Inuit art and to anyone interested in the contemporary art scene, has over 250 colour illustrations. The images and text are a tribute to the Inuit, their traditions and talents.
The book’s lead author, Ken Mantel, has been a passionate supporter of Inuit art for 30 years, both through the Narwhal Gallery, established in 1982, and the Narwhal Inuit Art Education Foundation which was registered as an educational charity in 1999. The book is a collaboration between NIAEF and the Scott Polar Research Institute and its publication coincides with the first exhibition of the newly expanded SPRI Inuit Art Collection in summer 2010.
Rachel Nicholson
Alan Wilkinson
ISBN 978-1- 906593-46-9
295 x 235mm
144 pages
Full colour throughout
Hardback £29.95
Sansom & Company
Publication July 2010
At her first London exhibition in June 1980, Rachel’s father, Ben Nicholson, commented on Still Life on Navy Blue, 1979: ‘I had never realised she could paint so well. I would have been happy to have painted that one myself.’ With the daunting heritage on her father’s side of two generations of Nicholson artists, and, as the daughter of Barbara Hepworth, a famous sculptor, Rachel freed herself from ‘the anxiety of influence’ and created a distinctive and unmistakable style of her own.
Still lifes, the subjects of Rachel’s earliest work from 1975, were a favourite motif of Ben’s and of his father, William Nicholson. Although landscapes and St Ives townscapes were later to play an increasingly important role, ‘The still life,’ she remarked, ‘was more built in, more inherited.’ In this first monographon the artist, Alan Wilkinson traces the development of her work from still lifes, land- and seascapes, townscapes, to the inside/outside views from her own flat in St Ives, from the houses and flats of friends, and the series of views from the Tate St Ives restaurant. He discusses the most important formative influence on her work: the still lifes and landscapes of Ben Nicholson.
In the Wilkinson/Nicholson interview, Rachel reminisces about her life in Hampstead from 1934 to late August 1939, when her parents, with the triplets, moved to Carbis Bay on the outskirts of St Ives. The main section of the interview focuses on her career as an artist and on her working methods. ‘Critical views’ consists of four previously published assessments. The sixteen, engaging ‘Appreciations’ were written especially for this book by friends, collectors, art dealers and three present and past Tate curators. Certain words and concepts recur: peace, quiet, quietness, simplicity, balance, calm and freshness of vision. They define the accessibility and captivating charm of Rachel Nicholson’s work.
ARTS AND CRAFTS METALWORK IN CORNWALL
1890s-1970s
Colin Pill
ISBN 978-1- 906593-58-2
270mm x 210mm
128 pages with colour throughout
Softback
£24.99
Publication mid-summer 2011
This is the first major study of the range and richness of Arts and Crafts metal work in Cornwall. Colin Pill (co-author of the ground-breaking Newlyn Copper – Arts and Crafts Metalwork from Newlyn) looks at the most important and influential of the individual craftsmen and companies that flourished for nearly 80 years from the 1890s to the late 1970s. He compares and contrasts their different influences, designs, styles and techniques and their impact on the rest of the country. The text is illuminated by beautiful and rare photographs and illustrations of a wide range of Cornish art metal work.
- Celebrates and showcases Cornish art metalwork which had its roots in the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late nineteenth century.
- Offers biographies of the key craftsmen and companies, their backgrounds, influences, style and workmanship in a variety of metals including: copper, brass, pewter, wrought iron, silver and enamel.
- Helps collectors identify specific makers’ work, their marks and monograms.
- Features the Newlyn Industrial Class (Newlyn Copper and Newlyn Silver and Enamel); the Cornish Wrought Metal Company and J & F Pool of Hayle; Herbert Dyer of Mousehole; Archibald Carne of Truro; Francis Cargeeg and The Eustace Brothers of Hayle.
Colin Pill is a Chartered Landscape Architect, and art copper worker with Cornish roots, who is an expert in the field of Arts and Crafts metalwork. He is the co-author of the book Newlyn Copper – Arts and Crafts Metalwork from Newlyn published by Sansom and Company in 2008.