Updated 11 June 2009
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NEW TITLES: IN PRINT AND AVAILABLE
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
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
Published
FORTHCOMING TITLES
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.
244 x 172mm
360pp
softback £24.95
hardback £35
PUBLICATION SEPTEMBER 2009
Pristine Perceptions: The Art of Tessa Newcomb
Philip Vann
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.
Born in Suffolk in 1955, daughter of the painter Mary Newcomb, 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 £24.95
PUBLICATION: SEPTEMBER 2009
