A History of Interior Design


Book Description

Delivers the inside story on 6,000 years of personal and public space. John Pile acknowledges that interior design is a field with unclear boundaries, in which construction, architecture, the arts and crafts, technology and product design all overlap.




The Storyteller's Thesaurus


Book Description

Writers, game designers, teachers, and students ~this is the book youve been waiting for! Written by storytellers for storytellers, this volume offers an entirely new approach to word finding. Browse the pages within to see what makes this book different:




The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Signs and Symbols: The Ultimate A–Z Guide from Alchemy to the Zodiac


Book Description

Unlock the lost and hidden meanings of the world's ancient and modern signs and symbols with the latest in the hugely popular series of 'Element Encyclopedias'. This is the biggest A-Z reference book on symbolic objects you'll ever find.




American Naive Paintings


Book Description

One of a series of systematic catalogues of the National Gallery of Art's collection, this comprehensive volume discusses in detail 310 objects that comprise one of the world's outstanding repositories of American naive paintings. Works by renowned folk artists such as Edward Hicks, Erastus Salisbury Field, and Ammi Phillips are represented in depth and placed in stylistic as well as historical context. This catalogue is an indispensable tool for historians of Amerian painting and folk art, and for students of American life and culture. Thorough documentation and commentary are provided for the first time on some of the most intriguing images produced in America in the past two hundred years.




The Rational Optimist


Book Description

For two hundred years the pessimists have dominated public discourse, insisting that things will soon be getting much worse. But in fact, life is getting better—and at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down all across the globe. Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people's lives as never before. In his bold and bracing exploration into how human culture evolves positively through exchange and specialization, bestselling author Matt Ridley does more than describe how things are getting better. He explains why. An astute, refreshing, and revelatory work that covers the entire sweep of human history—from the Stone Age to the Internet—The Rational Optimist will change your way of thinking about the world for the better.




American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century


Book Description

The energy and optimism of the new nation are abundantly apparent in this catalogue. It features some of the icons of American art, such as John Singleton Copley's The Copley Family and Gilbert Stuart's portraits of the first five presidents. Numerous paintings, including Benjamin West's Colonel Guy Johnson and Karonghyontye (Captain David Hill), are discussed from a new perspective, the result of information culled from letters, wills, and other previously unpublished documents. The author offers new interpretations of some works, among them Charles Willson Peale's portrait of the Baltimore couple Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming. The volume is richly illustrated, with carefully selected comparative illustrations.




Kyffin Williams


Book Description

Kyffin Williams RA (b.1918) is the central figure in contemporary Welsh painting and this book, the first monograph to be published on the artist, examines the full range of his work from the mid-1940s to the present day.From the outset of his career, Kyffin Williams took both the landscape and the people of North Wales as his subjects, and he has remained faithful to them for almost sixty years. He has realised, through his oil paintings, his watercolours and his drawings, the spirit of a mountainous landscape and its inhabitants that now form the cornerstone upon which we understand and visualise the essence of North Wales.Including an authoritative introductory essay by Ian Jeffrey, one of Britain's leading art historians, the book also profiles ten sites in North Wales where the artist has worked throughout his career. The inclusion of a range of location photographs by Nicholas Sinclair helps to explain both Williams' inspiration and how he interprets the world around him.Kyffin Williams encapsulates all aspects of Wales' most famous living artist and is consequently an invaluable resource for both scholars and art collectors.




Design: The Key Concepts


Book Description

This is the essential student’s guide to Design – its practice, its theory and its history. Respected design writer Catherine McDermott draws from a wide range of international examples.




Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century


Book Description

Heda's Banquet Piece, Frans Hals' Willem Coymans, and Rembrandt's Lucretia. Paintings by these and other masters attracted the American collectors P. A. B. Widener, his son Joseph, and Andrew W. Mellon, whose bequests form the heart of the National Gallery's distinguished and remarkably cohesive collection of ninety-one Dutch paintings.