A Brief History of Painting

Painting moves out of the soft glow of the gallery into the fresh, sometimes revisionary light of the twenty-first century in this authoritative and engaging history of art from ancient days to modern times. Insightfully, it explores the links to tradition and the breaks with artistic heritage. With a contemporary eye it looks again at the apogees in painting’s history and revisits those moments on canvas, on paper, or plaster that altered forever the direction of the art. With an extended and lively introduction by the award-winning art historian and best-selling author Matthew Collings and text by art historian Roy Bolton, this chronicle illuminates where painting has been in the past four thousand years and where it may be going in the future. Each of the book’s 150 illustrations, beautifully reproduced in full color, is accompanied by terse and incisive commentary on both the subject of the painting and its artist. Each illustration, too, marks a significant point in the course of painting’s history out of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Italy; through the Renaissance and seventeenth century; from Classicism to Romanticism, from Impressionism to Modernism. Comprehensive in scope yet economically written, this handsomely designed guide informs as it delights.