The Devil and Dr. Barnes traces the near-mythical journey of a man who was born into poverty, amassed a fortune through the promotion of a popular medicine, and acquired the premier private collection of works by such masters as Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, and Picasso. Ostentatiously turning his back on the art establishment, Barnes challenged the aesthetic sensibilities of an uninitiated, often resistant and scoffing, American audience. In particular, he championed Matisse, Soutine, and Modigliani when they were obscure or in difficult straits. Analyzing what he saw as the formal relationships underlying all art, linking the old and the new, Barnes applied these principles in a rigorous course of study offered at his Merion foundation. Barnes's own mordant words, culled from the copious printed record, animate the narrative throughout, as do accounts of his associations with notables of the era--Gertrude and Leo Stein, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey among them--many of whom he alienated with his appetite for passionate, public feuds. In this rounded portrait, Albert Barnes emerges as a complex, flawed man, who--blessed with an astute eye for greatness--has left us an incomparable treasure, gathered in one place and unforgettable to all who have seen it.

    Learn how to choose and mix colors, and create a multitude of effects using only one set of tubes. Discover how to make your own equipment, set up a "studio" space, and use household materials to save money. Beginners can follow processes stage-by-stage, while more experienced artists can dip in and out for help with specific problems. A unique section on how to develop your art and take it to a wider public is full of professional secrets which can bring you success much more quickly. “Try it” and “Fix it” panels placed throughout the book suggest ways of practicing and developing new skills, and avoiding or correcting common painting errors.

    Such is the case with Coco Chanel, whose life offers one of the most fascinating tales of the twentieth century—throwing into dramatic relief an era of war, fashion, ardent nationalism, and earth-shaking change—here brilliantly treated, for the first time, with wide-ranging and incisive historical scrutiny.Coco Chanel transformed forever the way women dressed. Her influence remains so pervasive that to this day we can see her afterimage a dozen times while just walking down a single street: in all the little black dresses, flat shoes, costume jewelry, cardigan sweaters, and tortoiseshell eyeglasses on women of every age and background. A bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume is sold every three seconds. Arguably, no other individual has had a deeper impact on the visual aesthetic of the world. But how did a poor orphan become a global icon of both luxury and everyday style? How did she develop such vast, undying influence? And what does our ongoing love of all things Chanel tell us about ourselves? These are the mysteries that Rhonda K. Garelick unravels in Mademoiselle.Raised in rural poverty and orphaned early, the young Chanel supported herself as best she could. Then, as an uneducated nineteen-year-old café singer, she attracted the attention of a wealthy and powerful admirer and parlayed his support into her own hat design business. For the rest of Chanel’s life, the professional, personal, and political were interwoven; her lovers included diplomat Boy Capel; composer Igor Stravinsky; Romanov heir Grand Duke Dmitri; Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster; poet Pierre Reverdy; a Nazi officer; and several women as well. For all that, she was profoundly alone, her romantic life relentlessly plagued by abandonment and tragedy.Chanel’s ambitions and accomplishments were unparalleled. Her hat shop evolved into a clothing empire. She became a noted theatrical and film costume designer, collaborating with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Luchino Visconti. The genius of Coco Chanel, Garelick shows, lay in the way she absorbed the zeitgeist, reflecting it back to the world in her designs and in what Garelick calls “wearable personality”—the irresistible and contagious style infused with both world history and Chanel’s nearly unbelievable life saga. By age forty, Chanel had become a multimillionaire and a household name, and her Chanel Corporation is still the highest-earning privately owned luxury goods manufacturer in the world. In Mademoiselle, Garelick delivers the most probing, well-researched, and insightful biography to date on this seemingly familiar but endlessly surprising figure—a work that is truly both a heady intellectual study and a literary page-turner.

    The result is a profound visual/verbal dialogue of short prose pieces and large-format color images that brings to life this sometimes brutal and incredibly beautiful part of the country. Awarded the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University for this project in 2005, the authors write: “Our interest in this part of the world is contemporary but also includes its history and a mix of stories that have passed down over the years, stories that resonate with the land in interesting ways.”It is an evocative work concerned with “moments that describe the beauty, power, tragedy, and cultural complexity of the place itself: the way the land has been used, the way people have lived on it, and the visual record that has been left behind.”

    Peter Stark offers a harrowing saga in which a band of explorers battled nature, starvation, and madness to establish the first American settlement in the Pacific Northwest and opened up what would become the Oregon trail, permanently altering the nation's landscape and its global standing.Six years after Lewis and Clark began their journey to the Pacific Northwest, two of the Eastern establishment's leading figures, John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson, turned their sights to founding a colony akin to Jamestown on the West Coast and transforming the nation into a Pacific trading power. Author and correspondent for Outside magazine Peter Stark recreates this pivotal moment in American history for the first time for modern readers, drawing on original source material to tell the amazing true story of the Astor Expedition.Unfolding over the course of three years, from 1810 to 1813, Astoria is a tale of high adventure and incredible hardship in the wilderness and at sea. Of the more than one hundred-forty members of the two advance parties that reached the West Coast—one crossing the Rockies, the other rounding Cape Horn—nearly half perished by violence. Others went mad. Within one year, the expedition successfully established Fort Astoria, a trading post on the Columbia River. Though the colony would be short-lived, it opened provincial American eyes to the potential of the Western coast and its founders helped blaze the Oregon Trail.

    Among his renowned portraits, "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" stands alongside "Madame X" and "Lady Agnew of Lochnaw" as one of Sargent's immortal images. This painting depicts four young sisters in the spacious foyer of the family's Paris apartment, strangely dispersed across the murky tones and depths of the square canvas, as though unrelated to one another, unsettled and unsettling to the eye. "The Daughters" both affirms and defies convention, flouting the boundaries between portrait and genre scene, formal composition and quick sketch or snapshot. Unveiled at the Paris Salon of 1883, it predated by just two years the scandal of "Madame X" and was itself characterized by one critic as "four corners and a void"; but Henry James came closer to the mark when he described the painter as a "knock-down insolence of talent," for few of Sargent's works embody the epithet as well as "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit." Drawing on numerous unpublished archival documents, scholar Erica E. Hirshler excavates all facets of this iconic canvas, discussing not only its significance as a work of art but also the figures and events involved in its making, its importance for Sargent's career, its place in the tradition of artistic patronage and the myriad factors that have contributed to its lasting popularity and relevance. The result is an aesthetic, philosophical and personal tour de force that will change the way you look at Sargent's work, and that both illuminates an iconic painting and reaffirms its pungent magnetism.

    Award-winning author Mary Cable recreates - in all its human and natural drama - the three-day debacle that began on the night of Sunday, March 11, 1888. We meet the heroes and villains alike as they struggle through the mounting snow and icy winds to keep the wheels of civilization from grinding to a halt. The Blizzard of 88 is a moving and dramatic history in the tradition of David McCullough's classic The Johnstown Flood.

    Often architectural treasures in themselves, they were constructed in styles that befitted the riches they stored, from Neoclassical temples to Baroque palaces to Jeffersonian athaeneums. Both public in purpose and intensely private in feel, they have served the noble role of preserving and disseminating that key cultural artifact of mankind - the book - and in doing so, their role has been central to the nourishment and development of the world's great civilizations. To this day the great libraries of the world remain extraordinary environments for scholarship and enlightenment." "Here, for the first time, architectural photographer Guillaume de Laubier takes the reader on a privileged tour of twenty-three of the world's most historic libraries, representing twelve countries and ranging from the great national monuments to scholarly, religious, and private libraries: the baroque splendor of the Institut de France in Paris; the Renaissance treasure-trove of the Riccardiana Library in Florence; the majestic Royal Monastery in El Escorial, Spain; the hallowed halls of Oxford's Bodleian Library; and the New York Public Library, a Beaux-Arts masterpiece. Also included are the smaller abbey and monastic libraries - often overlooked on tourist itineraries - each containing its own equally important collections of religious and philosophical writings, manuscripts, and church history. Through color photography one can marvel at the grandeur of the great public libraries while relishing the rare glimpses inside scholars-only private archives." The accompanying text by journalist and translator Jacques Bosser traces the history of libraries from the Renaissance to the present day, vividly describing how they came to serve the famous men of letters of centuries past and the general public of the ni

    While observing his paintings we see a panorama of his life story-a story that is now considered a legend. Van Gogh is the incarnation of the suffering, misunderstood martyr of modern art, the emblem of the unconventional artist.

    It's an insightful artistic philosophy that boils down the many technical principles of composition into a single master rule that's easy to remember and apply: Never make any two intervals the same.You can make every painting more interesting, dynamic and technically sound by varying intervals of distance, length and space, as well as intervals of value and color. The rule also applies to balance, shape and the location of your painting's focal point.Greg Albert illustrates these lessons with eye-opening examples from both beginning and professional artists, including Frank Webb, Tony Couch, Kevin Macpherson, Charles Reid, Tony Van Hasselt and more.You'll discover that the ONE RULE is the only rule of composition you need to immediately improve your work - the moment your brush touches the canvas.

    This work helps you learn to analyse paintings in terms of colour shapes of value, hue and intensity - the elements that make a painting. It also includes before/after examples to illustrate how use the rules for good composition.

    The images that comprise Crewdson’s new series, “Beneath the Roses,” take place in the homes, streets, and forests of unnamed small towns. The photographs portray emotionally charged moments of seemingly ordinary individuals caught in ambiguous and often disquieting circumstances. Both epic in scale and intimate in scope, these visually breathtaking photographs blur the distinctions between cinema and photography, reality and fantasy, what has happened and what is to come.Beneath the Roses features an essay by acclaimed fiction writer Russell Banks, as well as many never-before-seen photographs, including production stills, lighting charts, sketches, and architectural plans, that serve as a window into Crewdson’s working process. The book is published to coincide with exhibitions in New York, London, and Los Angeles.

    Now in her ninety-fourth year, this timely celebration sheds new light on the myriad attributes and personal qualities she brings to the nation. From fortitude in the face of adversity to standing as the nation's ambassador all over the world, no one could doubt the work ethic that powers this remarkable woman, even into her nineties. Equally, her love of family - from her rock of over sixty years' marriage, Prince Philip, to her great grandchildren - shines through. But what are the secrets of her success? How does she still approach her day-to-day with such vitality and aplomb, even when culture and society are changing rapidly all around her?The Queen on fame: When an MP commented that it must be a strain meeting so many strangers all the time, the Queen smiled, 'It is not as difficult as it might seem. You see, I don't have to introduce myself. They all seem to know who I am.'The Queen on fashion: In the late sixties when Mary Quant and the mini skirt came to epitomize all that was fashionable, Princess Anne suggested her mother might also consider shortening her hemline. The Queen was adamant, 'I am not a film star.' The Queen on family: As Great Britain's most famous great grandmother, it is no surprise that the Queen values family life. 'Marriage gains from the web of family relationships between parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, cousins, aunts and uncles.'In this book Karen Dolby unpicks the key elements that make the Queen so special to - and so loved by - the nation and presents a guide to how you too could put into practice some of Her Majesty's traits to help overcome adversity, find inner strength and present yourself as wonderfully considered and calm, even when all about you seems in chaos.

    Staff nursing in a ward where she's challenged by an inventory driven ward sister, she reckons it's time to swap such trivialities for life as a district nurse.Independent thinking is one thing, but Jane's about to find that the drama on district can demand instant reaction; and without hospital back up, she's usually the one having to provide it. She meets a rich cast of patients all determined to follow their own individual star, and goes to Edinburgh where Queen Victoria's Jubilee Institute's nurse training is considered the cr me de la cr me of the district nursing world.Call Me Sister recalls Jane's challenging and often hilarious route to realizing her own particular dream.

    They have become cultural icons, standing not only for different kinds of art but also for different ways of living. Matisse, known for his restraint and intense sense of privacy, for his decorum and discretion, created an art that transcended daily life and conveyed a sensuality that inhabited an abstract and ethereal realm of being. In contrast, Picasso became the exemplar of intense emotionality, of theatricality, of art as a kind of autobiographical confession that was often charged with violence and explosive eroticism. In Matisse and Picasso , Jack Flam explores the compelling, competitive, parallel lives of these two artists and their very different attitudes toward the idea of artistic greatness, toward the women they loved, and ultimately toward their confrontations with death.