The offering of gifts – state, religious and personal – is a practice nearly as ancient and widespread as human culture itself. At courts throughout the Islamic world, the exchange of lavish gifts intimately linked art with diplomacy, religion and pe...

Despite his untimely death in 1667 at the age of thirty-seven, Gabriel Metsu left a substantial oeuvre of history paintings, portraits, still lifes, and a large number of exquisite genre scenes. These charming depictions of kitchen maids, elegant you...

The giving of gifts both delights the recipient and pleases the giver. Practised in all societies, gift exchange has a history as long as humanity. This gloriously illustrated catalogue is the first investigation of gift-giving and its impact on the...

A canonical figure in American painting, George Inness (1825-1894) is widely admired as the pioneer of the landscape aesthetic known as Tonalism, which is distinguished by soft focus and diaphanous layers of paint. This is the first book about the ar...

In 1891, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) traveled to Tahiti in an effort to live simply and to draw inspiration from what he saw as the island's exotic native culture. Although the artist was disappointed by the rapidly westernizing community he encountered...

One of America's foremost art dealers, Richard Gray, and his wife, art historian Mary L. Gray, have amassed an unparalleled collection of paintings, drawings, and sculpture representing seven hundred years and featuring more than 115 dynamic and impo...

Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667) employed an unusual variety of styles, techniques, and subjects, making him a particularly difficult artist to characterize. From his early days in Leiden until his death in Amsterdam at the height of his career, his unparal...

Not for sale in Estonia! Originally developed as an aid to professional herbalists, botanical illustration quickly blossomed into an art form in its own right. The first flower books were intended as medicinal guides, or else illustrated volumes th...

The appearance during the first millennium A.D. of small, exquisitely carved artefacts of walrus ivory in the Bering Strait region marks the beginning of an extraordinary florescence in the art and culture of North America. The discovery in the 1930s...

Masks are an ancient tradition of the Alutiiq people on the southern coast of Alaska. Alutiiq artists carved the masks from wood or bark into images of ancestors, animal spirits, and other mythological forces; these extraordinary creations have been...