Sister Wendy is back with this expanded version of her popular book, which features more than 450 masterpieces, 150 oversized details from key paintings, and 250+ photos, drawings, and documents that place paintings in their historical context. Chronicles the history of eight hundred years of Western painting, from the Byzantine era to post-modernism, highlighting styles, techniques, media, artists, and themes.

"I am so hackneyed to the touches of the painters pencil, that I am now altogether at their beck ... no dray moves more readily to the Thill, than I do to the Painters Chair." - George Washington, 16, 1785
When George Washington was born, the New World had virtually no artists. Over the course of his life, a cultural transformation would occur. Virtually everyone regarded Washington as America's indispensable man, and the early painters...

Urban realism, snow-covered streets of New York, boxing matches, children on the banks of a river, the painters of the Ash Can School preferred realistic images. Their paintings are a true hymn to noise and sensations. This unconventional movement enabled the birth of a true national artistic identity which broke free from the establishment. The Ash Can School resolutely promoted the affirmation of the modernist current of American art. Edward Hopper,...

Since the early 1970s graffiti writers have covered subway cars with massive and intricate tags. This resolutely rebellious form of expression is here analysed by Margo Thompson who places graffiti artists in relation with contemporary gallery art.

"In his works, Hopper poetically expressed the solitude of man confronted to the American way of life as it developed in the 1920s. Inspired by the movies and particularly by the various camera angles and attitudes of characters, his paintings expose the alienation of mass culture. Done in cold colours and inhabited by anonymous characters, Hopper's paintings also symbolically reflect the Great Depression. Through a series of different reproductions...

Painter of languid, elegant, Edwardian beauties and sharply dressed gentlemen, John Singer Sargent was the ultimate society painter. He knew everyone who was anyone and was on personal terms with many of them, including Edward VII and the U.S. presidents Roosevelt and Wilson. This social standing was justified. Sargent was one of the greatest portrait painters ever, able to convey the personality and style of his sitters-comparable to the great Velázquez...

Lively, scholarly, beautifully illustrated study of the 8 artists who brought a compelling new realism to American painting, 1870 to 1913. Henri, Glackens, Sloan, Luks, 4 more. 142 black-and-white illustrations. Bibliography. Introduction.

During the last six years of his life, John Orne Johnson "J.O.J" Frost produced more than 120 paintings that are a vivid account of life before the Civil War in the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts. With no artistic training, he began to paint at the age of seventy, using house paint and wallboards to preserve the seaport's unique history and heroic role in the American Revolution. Some critics deemed J.O.J. Frost to be one of the nation's preeminent...

Marcel is a creature with one eye and pink shoes and he lives in a shell. Detailed paintings illustrate the scenes as he describes his day around the house. Follow Marcel the Shell as he introduces his neighbors, favorite activities, and home.