Payne Christiana Boeken

An exhibition catalogue focusing on the Ashmolean's rarely seen reserve collection of Pre-Raphaelite drawings and watercolours.

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. 219pp. Yale Agrarian Studies Series. Review copy with reviewer's neat stamp inside cover. Some pencil & ink marking of the text. Front cover has bend to lower corner. Good tight binding. Fading to spine.

Artists in Britain have long been fascinated by the sea, the spectacle of waves crashing on the shore, and the destructive power of the ocean. Since the early nineteenth century, the sea has been an important focus for painters relishing the challenge of working directly from nature, often in inhospitable conditions. Such work has gained a new importance reflecting current concerns about climate change and rising sea levels.Danger is a recurrent theme; Morland, Danby, Brett and Langley emphasized the human costs of shipwrecks, Turner concentrated on elemental fury, and Constable on the sea's breezy freshness. Late nineteenth century depictions seem more benign, portraying the sea as a source of leisure and health. Moore, James, and Laurence all feature.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, naturalists, poets and artists were united in their love of trees. William Gilpin began his influential 'Remarks on Forest Scenery' (1791) with the bold statement that 'It is no exaggerated praise to call a tree the grandest, and most beautiful of all the productions of the earth.' Illustrated books and tree portraits celebrated the beauty, antiquity and diversity of individual, and particularly ancient specimens. A wide range of drawing manuals showed artists and amateurs how to express their 'character' and 'anatomy', as if they were human subjects. Paintings of woodland scenes provided welcome relief from city life, and studies of exotic trees reflected the growth of tourism and empire. The arrival of new species from all over the world aroused much excitement and scientific activity. At the same time, the native trees - oak, ash, beech, elm - acquired new resonance as emblems of the rural countryside. Many of Britain's most important landscape painters, including Paul Sandby, John Constable, Samuel Palmer, Edward Lear, and the Pre-Raphaelites, made themselves experts in the drawing and painting of trees.

Art catalogue to accompany exhibition on the subject of Fire. will feature works by historical artists and contemporary artists

For as long as we have walked the earth, it has provided an endless source of inspiration for artists striving to capture nature?s majesty. The British landscape tradition runs so deep it has come to represent our national consciousness at its most idealistic, ?England?s green and pleasant land?. Earth explores how attitudes towards the landscape have evolved over the centuries; from the pastoral idylls of the eighteenth century, through representations of the Romantic Sublime, to present-day confrontations of the climate emergency and appreciation for the natural world that has grown in the wake of the global pandemic.00Alongside illustrations from over fifty historic and contemporary artists are essays exploring; our dependence on the ?bountiful earth? as the ultimate provider through the works of Edward Calvert, Samuel Palmer and Stanley Spencer, by Christiana Payne; landscape as a spiritual, ritual and emotional space, from the perspective of Emma Stibbon, spanning works by artists such as Richard Long and Anya Gallaccio to JMW Turner and Eric Ravilious; and the long tradition of artists? use of earth as material, from a simple tool to ecological symbolism, by Nathalie Levi.00Earth surveys the representation of our environment across four centuries, inviting us to consider our planet in all its abundance, precarity and preciousness