The Wedding Day In Literature And Art Microform A Collection Of The Best Descriptions Of Weddings From The Works Of Teh World S Leading Novelists And Poets Richly Illustrated With Reproductions Of Famous Paintings Of Incidents Of The Nuptial Day

When Will returns to Medicine River, he thinks he is simply attending his mother’s funeral. He doesn’t count on Harlen Bigbear and his unique brand of community planning. Harlen tries to sell Will on the idea of returning to Medicine River to open shop as the town’s only Native photographer. Somehow, that’s exactly what happens. Through Will’s gentle and humorous narrative, we come to know Medicine River, a small Albertan town bordering a Blackfoot reserve. And we meet its people: the basketball team; Louise Heavyman and her daughter, South Wing; Martha Oldcrow, the marriage doctor; Joe Bigbear, Harlen’s world-travelling, storytelling brother; Bertha Morley, who has a short fling with a Calgary dating service; and David Plume, who went to Wounded Knee. At the centre of it all is Harlen, advising and pestering, annoying and entertaining, gossiping and benevolently interfering in the lives of his friends and neighbours.

Performing Menken uses the life experiences of controversial actress and poet Adah Isaacs Menken to examine the culture of the Civil War period and what Menken's choices reveal about her period. It explores the roots of the cult of celebrity that emerged from crucible of war. While discussing Menken's racial and ethnic claims and her performance of gender and sexuality, Performing Menken focuses on contemporary use of social categories to explain patterns in America's past and considers why such categories appear to remain important.

A nineteenth century French priest discovers something in his mountain village at the foot of The Pyrenees which enables him to amass and spend a fortune of millions of pounds. The tale seems to begin with buried treasure and then turns into an unprecedented historical detective story - a modern Grail quest leading back through cryptically coded parchments, secret societies, the Knights Templar, the Cathar heretics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and a dynasty of obscure French kings deposed more than 1,300 years ago. The author's conclusions are persuasive: at the core is not material riches but a secret - a secret of explosive and controversial proportions, which radiates out from the little Pyrenees village all the way to contemporary politics and the entire edifice of the Christian faith. It involves nothing less than... the Holy Grail.

This book is the first modern study of James Barry, the finest of all British painters in the "grand manner." Born in Cork, Barry settles in London in 1771 after five years of study in France and Italy financed by Edmund Burke. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1773 and appointed professor of painting nine years later. In 1799, however, after fiercely denouncing its policies, he became the first and only artist to be expelled from the Academy. His paintings include several that rank with the nest contemporary work, and his murals at the Royal Society of Arts form perhaps the most important cycle of history paintings in Great Britain. Although history painting was theoretically the most exalted of artistic genres, it had traditionally received little support in England, where portraiture and landscape dominated. In the face of indifferent patronage, Barry struggles to establish an art worthy of the noble heritage of classical Greece and Renaissance Italy. He passionately believed in art's mission to instruct, and to this end he saw himself as an embattled spokesman for social, political and religious reform. William Pressly reveals the degree to which Barry's view of his role shaped the character of his art and examines how his works, through rooted in traditional sources, creatively depart in both form and content from conventional academic practice. He also assesses the artist as a portrait painter, including his use of portraiture within the context of historical subjects, and as one of the few late eighteenth-century British painters to work as an original printmaker. The book contains the first complete catalogue of Barry's paintings and of his surviving drawings and prints. William L. Pressly is associate professor of the history of art at Yale University. Published for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art.

"Why is it really that architects wear black?" was a question put to Cordula Rau by an automotive industry manager during an architectural competition. Even though she herself is an architect, and wears black, she did not have an answer on the spot. So she decided to ask other architects, as well as artists and designers. She has been collecting their handwritten replies in a notebook since 2001. In 2008, this collection of autographs appeared as a small publication – obviously bound in black. For the purpose of the new edition, this legendary collection was expanded by new notable, amusing, pragmatic, and quirky reasons: "Please read – and don’t ask me why architects wear black!". (Cordula Rau)

The Dutch painter Jan Steen (1626-1679) has long enjoyed a reputation for his dissolute life, redeemed only by a keen eye for the follies of his contemporaries and an exquisite ability to capture his observations in paint. Steen's paintings of unruly households, rambunctious revels, and wily seductresses have come to define our image of the delicious and immoral excesses of the Golden Age. But rather than simply recording the illicit pleasures of Dutch burghers and peasants, Steen transformed them into ambitious genre paintings that rival the peasant epics of Bruegel the Elder and jest with the genteel idylls of Vermeer and Terborch. By placing Steen within Dutch society and culture of the seventeenth century, Mariet Westermann shows how the contradictions and parallels between his life and his art were essential to his innovative achievements. In a detailed analysis of his career and audience, she suggests how Steen became a comic painter and why his pictures appealed to prosperous urban connoisseurs. Documented throughout with seventeenth-century jokes, poems, and plays, The Amusements of Jan Steen gives the first full account of Steen's creative relationship to comic literature and performance.