Tim Barringer

Nicholas Robbins

T. J. Barringer

Gillian Forrester

Jennifer Raab

Sophie Lynford

Thomas Cole (1801-1848) is widely acknowledged as the founder of American landscape painting. Born in England, Cole emigrated in 1818 to the United States, where he transformed British and continental European traditions to create a distinctive American idiom. He embraced the picturesque, which emphasized touristic pleasures, and the sublime, an aesthetic category rooted in notions of fear and danger. Including striking paintings and a broad range of works on paper, from watercolors to etchings, mezzotints, aquatints, engravings, and lithographs, this book explores the trans-Atlantic context for Cole's oeuvre. These works chart a history of landscape aesthetics and demonstrate the essential role of prints as agents of artistic transmission. The authors offer new interpretations of work by Cole and the British artists who influenced him, including J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, revealing Cole's debt to artistic traditions as he formulated a profound new category in art. the American sublime.

Thomas Cole's Trans-Atlantic Inheritance

Picturesque and Sublime

A close look at the work, relationship, and shared influences of two masterful 20th-century artists "The camera," said Orson Welles, "is a medium via which messages reach us from another world." It was the camera and the circumstances of the Second World War that first brought together Henry Moore (1898-1986) and Bill Brandt (1904-1983). During the Blitz, both artists produced images depicting civilians sheltering in the London Underground. These "shelter pictures" were circulated to millions via popular magazines and today rank as iconic works of their time. This book begins with these wartime works and examines the artists' intersecting paths in the postwar period. Key themes include war, industry, and the coal mine; landscape and Britain's great megalithic sites; found objects; and the human body. Special photographic reproduction captures the materiality of the print as a three-dimensional object rather than a flat, disembodied image on the page.

Nicholas Robbins

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