The year 2002 marks the bicentenary of the death of George Romney, one of the key figures in British art in the late 18th century. A chief rival of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough - and for much of his career more fashionable than both - he was known both as a portraitist and as a draftsman. His countless studies for literary and mythological pictures, made in private moments but which he never had time to paint, are executed in a bold, spontaneous style that mark him as one of the first Romantics.
Focusing on George Romney's significant yet overlooked contributions to 18th-century British portrait painting, this extensive three-volume catalogue features nearly 2,000 illustrations and over 1,800 entries. Alex Kidson's two-decade research effort clarifies attributions, distinguishing genuine works from those previously misattributed. Drawing on primary sources like account books and sketchbooks, as well as contemporary reviews, Kidson reestablishes Romney's status alongside Reynolds and Gainsborough, aiming to elevate his recognition in art history.
Adrian Wiszniewski (born in Glasgow in 1958) remains best known as one of the 'New Glasgow Boys', who shot to prominence in the mid-1980s with huge, exuberant figure paintings as redolent of fantasy and myth as they were attuned to the workings of contemporary thought and everyday life. Acquisitions by the Tate in 1985 and the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1986 led to his work being acquired by many public collections in the UK and internationally. Between 1986-87 he was artist in residence at the Walker Gallery, Liverpool. Since then his work has developed in many different directions. He has brought the same creative energy of his paintings to printmaking, sculpture, installations, furniture and interior design and writing, regarding the exploration of new media as a central part of the art of communicating fresh ideas. Impossible to predict, his work breaks new ground when least expected, while always retaining its unique and unmistakeable graphic stamp. This book, with over 100 illustrations of the most important work, is the first to provide an overview of Wiszniewski's art over thirty years of continuity and change. Ten essays mix chronological survey with thematic discussion to identify both the core elements and the more distinctive features of the artist's surprisingly consistent creative personality.
After a period of 'darkness' when Liverpool - the second city of the British Empire- lacked the kind of annual public art exhibition enjoyed by many of Britain's other provincial centres, light dawned in 1871 when a group of town councillors gambled with public funds to create the first Liverpool Autumn Exhibition. Hailed a success, the exhibition would go on to become an annual event and a cultural institution, the Royal Academy of the North of England.0From 1877 the history of the Autumn Exhibition was intertwined with that of Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery, but it was during its first six years of growth that its immense popularity was sealed. This new study anatomises those six little-known Victorian art exhibitions, and assembles images of the key, and representative, works that were seen and sold in them
