Tate Master Oils

Learn how to paint in the fantastic medium of oil. Taking inspiration from iconic paintings in the Tate Collection, discover the techniques of the masters and improve your own painting skills with 30 guided projects. Master brushwork and form with Cézanne; thin and blend with Turner and Whistler; and play with texture with Richter and Riley.

Andrew Graham-Dixon unveils the long-kept secret of Britain's rich and vital visual culture.

In this study, first published in 1979, Landow contends that Hunt’s version of Pre-Raphaelitism concerned itself primarily with an elaborate system of painterly symbolism rather than with a photographic realism as has been usually supposed. Like Ruskin, Hunt believed that a symbolism based on scriptural typology – the method of finding anticipations of Christ in Hebrew history – could produce an ideal art that would solve the problems of Victorian painting. According to Hunt, this elaborate symbolism could simultaneously avoid the dangers of materialism inherent in a realistic style, the dead conventionalism of academic art, and the sentimentality of much contemporary painting. George Landow examines Hunt’s work in the context of this argument and, drawing on much unknown or previously inaccessible material, shows how he used texts, frames, and symbols to create a complex art of mediation that became increasingly visionary as the artist grew older. This book is ideal for students of art history.

A novel investigation into art pedagogy and constructions of national identities in Britain and Ireland, this collection explores the student-master relationship in case studies ranging chronologically from 1770 to 2013, and geographically over the national art schools of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Essays explore the manner in which the Old Masters were deployed in education; fuelled the individual creativity of art teachers and students; were used as a rhetorical tool for promoting cultural projects in the core and periphery of the British Isles; and united as well as divided opinions in response to changing expectations in discourse on art and education. Case studies examined in this book include the sophisticated tradition of 'academic' inquiry of establishment figures, like Joshua Reynolds and Frederic Leighton, as well as examples of radical reform undertaken by key individuals in the history of art education, such as Edward Poynter and William Coldstream. The role of 'Modern Masters' (like William Orpen, Augustus John, Gwen John and Jeff Wall) is also discussed along with the need for students and teachers to master the realm of art theory in their studio-based learning environments, and the ultimate pedagogical repercussions of postmodern assaults on the academic bastions of the Old Masters.