In this collection of British drawings, about sixty artists are represented, including most of the significant draftsmen of the time. The introduction gives a history of the drawings in the Huntington collection and a commentary on the style and character of the artists included in the catalogue.

Early British Drawings in the Huntington Collection, 1600-1750

Arts & Photography

Wark, Robert R.

History & Criticism

Huntington Library Press

The Huntington collection of drawings by Thomas Rowlandson is generally regarded as the largest and most comprehensive at present in a public museum. The collection offers an unrivaled opportunity for the study of this prolific artist's range of interests and the development of his technique. As a line draftsman and humorist, Thomas Rowlandson was probably the finest England has ever produced. Certainly he had a wider command of comic devices and comes closer to exploiting their full potentialities than any other British artist. He is also wonderfully inventive in discovering and expressing the comic aspects of a great variety of everyday situations. His reputation as a humorist, though, should not obscure his achievement in other fields: he is a charming landscapist and genre artist, and a skillful portraitist. All these facets of Rowlandson's work are well represented in this volume, which reproduces and catalogues all of the Huntington drawings, including those from A Tour in a Post Chaise and The English Dance of Death, both previously published by the Huntington. In his introductory essay, Robert Wark discusses Rowlandson's art and illustrates the various aspects of his work by relating them to selected drawings that are reproduced in full color. The book will be of immense value to the student of art history, and the layman will be delighted by the vigor and sheer virtuosity of Rowlandson's work.

Drawings by Thomas Rowlandson in the Huntington Collection

ROWLANDSON, Thomas

Huntington Library Pr

A handsomely illustrated catalogue of the collection of British silver in the Huntington Art Collections.

British Silver in the Huntington Collection

The Huntington collection of British art includes not only the unrivaled full-length, life-size portrait paintings, but also many examples of the less familiar, more informal, but charming side of British portraiture—the drawings. In this book, twenty-five of these drawings are reproduced, each accompanied by a facing page of commentary. There are works in pencil, pen, wash, pastel, watercolor, and various combinations thereof. Some are presentation works intended to fill a more private and intimate function than the life-scale portraits in oil. Some are preparatory studies for works of art. Some are casual sketches made for the artist's own enjoyment or as a record of a memorable face. The drawings are representative examples of the work of twenty-five artists. They range in date from the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth and vary enormously in style and purpose. They include "plumbagos," miniatures in pencil done by the masters of the form, Loggan and Forster; drawings done in pencil and wash by Cosway, Lawrence, and Harlow; drawings by Greenhill and Gardner; and drawings used as preliminary studies for portraits to be done in oils by Ramsay, Fuseli, and Mortimer. Together with Wark's text, they demonstrate the quality of British achievement, the variety in types, and the fascinating complexity in appeal.

British Portrait Drawings, 1600-1900: Twenty-Five Examples from the Huntington Collection

This handsome gift volume reveals the stories behind the Huntington's best-known paintings, The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough and Pinkie by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Purchased by Henry E. Huntington in the 1920s, the two masterpieces have resided together in the railroad magnate's mansion-turned-art gallery in San Marino, California, for more than seventy years. Who were the children in these paintings and why did these leading artists choose them as subjects? These and many other intriguing questions are answered by renowned art historian Robert R. Wark. Sixteen color plates feature Pinkie and the Blue Boy as well as other related paintings.

Best Loved Paintings: Pinkie and Blue Boy

Ten representative works of art in the world-renowned Huntington collection illustrate the richness and versatility of British painting during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Artists at this time employed many styles, borrowing from ancient Greece, India and China, from the Byzantine, and from the just-closing Rococo period. Nearly 100 colour illustrations place the ten primary pictures in artistic context.

The Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Art: 10 British Pictures, 1740-1840

Individual Artists

The ten pictures presented here offer vivid proof of the richness and versatility of British painting during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. All are in the Huntington collection, and in discussing them the author has brought into perspective a fascinating period in European art. At no previous time, he says, "is there such a radical variety of forms produced by artists working at the same time under the same circumstances." The history of art epochs prior to the 18th century is largely the study of a series of clearly defined styles, each of them remarkably consistent throughout Europe. In the second half of the 18th century, however, there is a fundamental departure from this orderly procession, and nowhere is this departure more apparent than in England. We find not one style but many; artists borrow from ancient Greece or from India and China, from the Byzantine or from the just-closing rococo period. Nor is it unusual to find these variations in style within the work of a single artist. Sir Joshua Reynolds, for instance, uses widely different approaches in two Huntington paintings; the portrait of Mrs. Siddons, majestically enthroned between her two shadowy attendants, draws heavily on Classic and Renaissance symbolism, while that of Lavinia, Countess Spencer, is simply the charmingly intimate portrayal of a mother and her little boy. The ten pictures are presented in chronological order, from Hogarth's Bishop Benjamin Hoadly (about 1739) to Turner's The Grand Canal, Venice (1837). Some such as Pinkie and The Blue Boy, are well known; others, such as Richard Wilson's River Scene with Bathers, will be less familiar. All have been chosen for the light they cast on a period of profound change, which starts as English painting takes leave of the rococo, and ends in the beginnings of modern art.

The Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Art: Ten British Pictures 1740-1840

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