 Janson's History of Art: The Western Tradition Hardcover: 1184 pages; Pearson; 8th edition (Jan 22, 2015) Janson’s History of Art: The Western Tradition, reissued 8th edition presents the same content as the text’s 8th edition, published in 2010, now reimagined for digital learning via Revel, and also available through the Pearson Custom Library. While remaining current with new discoveries and scholarship, the Reissued Eighth Edition maintains its focus on the object, its manufacture, and its visual character, and continues to consider the contribution of the artist as a key element of analysis. Throughout, the authors engage students by weaving a compelling narrative of how art has changed over time in the cultures that Europe has claimed as its heritage.
 Nineteenth-Century European Painting: From Barbizon to Belle Époque by William Rau – Hardcover: 684 pages; Antique Collectors Club Dist; Slp edition (Feb 16, 2013) A fresh approach to nineteenth-century European painting; lusciously illustrated, it offers a comprehensive overview of the century's artistic innovation. This extensive survey also includes biographies for each of the artists. Nineteenth-Century European Painting: From Barbizon to Belle Époque represents a comprehensive guide to the range of stylistically diverse genres of nineteenth-century European painting.
 Dictionary of British Art Vol 5, 1880-1940 by J. Johnson, A. Greutzner – Hardcover: 568 pages; Antique Collectors Club Dist; 1st edition (Dec 18, 2007) Unlikely to be challenged as the standard work on the subject, British Artists 1880-1940 includes entries for a staggering 41,000 British artists who exhibited at forty-nine of the major exhibition centres and commercial galleries throughout England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland between the years 1880-1940.
 Ottocento: Romanticism and Revolution in 19th Century Italian Painting by Roberto J.M. Olsen – Hardcover: 292 pages; Philip Wilson Publishers (Nov 22, 2003) Note: Cover painting is artist James Whistler by Giovanni Boldini.
The Ottocento (literally "eight hundred"), or the nineteenth century, witnessed the creation of a united Italy. This century, which was the age of nationalism throughout Europe, gave birth to modern Italy as a definable political entity after a long period of regional fragmentation and foreign domination. The political struggle for unification was known as the Risorgimento, meaning to rise up again (evoking similar powerful alliterative like renaissance and resurrection). The term was chosen because Italians hoped that their land might overcome internal political divisions and regionalism to regain the prominent place in Western Civilization it had enjoyed during the Roman and Renaissance times, when the Italic peninsula had been a rich and vital center.
The Ottocento was an epoch of major upheavels and drastic changes, or revolutions, in the fabric of Italian thought and society, not least in the area of the arts, especially painting.
One of the major themes of this exhibition is that the art of the epoch reveals a national consciousness long before Italy's actual political unification in 1870. A second them is that Italian artists were not as isolated as formerly thought (as a perusal of the biographies of the artists included in the exhibition as well as those of other Ottocento artists reveals). They participated in broader European crosscurrents, though always painted with a decidedly Italian timbre. When they adopted overly Italianate subjects and styles, it was frequently as an intentional regional and/or nationalistic statement. Sometimes to avoid censureship they employed Italian historical subjects as a guise for contemporary political issues. A third theme of the exhibition is that the entire century, and thus the risorgimiento itself, was motivated vy a romantic spirit. A seminal factor was the city of Rome, a cosmopolitan centre from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries for native and foreign artists alike. Even in the second half of the nineteenth century, when artists also visited Paris, then preeminent in the art world, and travelled extensively throughout Europe, Rome remained an artistic mecca and an eloquent muse.
 Roman Painting by Roger Ling – Paperback: 261 pages; Cambridge University Press (Mar 29, 1991) This book provides a general survey of Roman wall painting from the second century B.C. through to the fourth century A.D., tracing the origins, chronological development, subjects, techniques, and social context of this art which had considerable influence upon European artists of the Renaissance and Neo-Classical periods. It deals particularly with the paintings from the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and its main purpose is to provide an up-to-date summary of the subject in light of the most recent research. This is the first general history of Roman painting written specifically for English-language readers.
 French Realist Painting and the Critique of American Society, 1865-1900 by Laura L. Meixner – Hardcover: 336 pages; Cambridge University Press; 1st edition (Jun 30, 1995) French Realist Painting and the Critique of American Society, 1865-1900 examines public reception of contemporary French painting in post-Civil War American society and demonstrates how a variety of audiences, from small capitalists to workers, used foreign images to politicize their claims to cultural lives. Analyzed from class and regional perspectives, popular responses to Realist and Impressionist painting, recorded in the daily press and radical journals, are shown to have articulated conflicting attitudes toward equality as well as doubts about the fate of democracy in an industrialized society. At another level, French genre and landscape, which had been associated with the 1848 revolution and the rise of the Third Republic, also provoked American thinkers to critique their national culture and reconceptualize definitions of democratic art. The methods of art history, reception theory, and social history merge in this study to explain how Americans came to see themselves in foreign art, and how the public gave these images meaning independent of official art criticism and their original French contexts.
 Painting in Spain 1500-1700 (Yale University Press Pelican History of Art) by Jonathan Brown – Paperback: 290 pages; Yale University Press (1998) El Greco, Ribera, Velzquez, Murillothese are but a few of the great artists of Spain's golden age of painting. This authoritative and handsome book-an enlarged and revised version of the author's Golden Age of Painting in Spain surveys the development of painting in Spain during this fascinating period, focusing on the interaction between art and the prevailing socioeconomic and political conditions.
|  Art in Britain 1660–1815 by David H. Solkin – Hardcover: 378 pages; Paul Mellon Centre BA; 1st edition (Dec 1, 2015) Art in Britain 1660–1815 presents the first social history of British art from the period known as the long 18th century, and offers a fresh and challenging look at the major developments in painting, drawing, and printmaking that took place during this period. It describes how an embryonic London art world metamorphosed into a flourishing community of native and immigrant practitioners, whose efforts ultimately led to the rise of a British School deemed worthy of comparison with its European counterparts.
Within this larger narrative are authoritative accounts of the achievements of celebrated artists such as Peter Lely, William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, and J.M.W. Turner. David H. Solkin has interwoven their stories and many others into a critical analysis of how visual culture reinforced, and on occasion challenged, established social hierarchies and prevailing notions of gender, class, and race as Britain entered the modern age. More than 300 artworks, accompanied by detailed analysis, beautifully illustrate how Britain’s transformation into the world’s foremost commercial and imperial power found expression in the visual arts, and how the arts shaped the nation in return.
 Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century by Angus Trumble, Andrea Wolk Rager – Hardcover: 420 pages; Yale Center for British Art; 1st edition (Mar 26, 2013) The Edwardian age was as brief as the Victorian era that preceded it was long. It has been depicted as an indolent summer afternoon of imperial and elite complacency, but also as a period of rapid political, economic, and artistic change, culminating in the First World War. This magnificent book explores themes of power, nostalgia, and a contrasting lightness of touch that characterized the period. Issues of creation, consumption, and display are examined through a range of objects, including portraits by Sargent and Boldini, diamond tiaras and ostrich-feather fans, jewel-like Autochrome color photography, and a spectacular embroidered gown that belonged to the American-born Vicereine of India.
 Irish Rural Interiors in Art by Claudia Kinmonth – Hardcover: 320 pages; Yale University Press (May 31, 2006) This book offers a fascinating view of many aspects of Irish rural life from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth century. Illustrated with more than 250 images, many of which have not been published before, the book evokes the hardships and celebrations of laborers and farmers, men and women, the old and the young as depicted in oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints, postcards, and cartoons. Most of the illustrations show people engaged in indoor activities at home, but schools, shops, pubs, and doctors’ surgeries are also included. Claudia Kinmonth draws on extensive knowledge of the material culture of rural life to present a new social history of Irish country people. Working within a broadly chronological framework, the author addresses such themes and patterns of rural life as the architecture of houses, where people slept, cooking over the open hearth, rural dress, display, childcare, work within the home, the arrangement of marriages, weddings, wakes, and celebrations. The book also explores why Irish and foreign artists depicted rural interiors and sets their work in the context of art history.
 European Art of the Eighteenth Century by Daniela Tarabra – Paperback: 384 pages; J. Paul Getty Museum; 1st edition (Aug 11, 2008) This latest volume in the Art Through the Centuries series presents the most important artists and artistic concepts of the eighteenth century. While the Baroque style, with its emphasis on emotionalism and naturalistic forms, had dominated the seventeenth century, a new sensibility, the Rococo, emerged in the early years of the next century.
 The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers by T. J. Clark – Paperback: 406 pages; Gardners Books; 2nd edition (Dec 31, 1999) Reader review: As a student of nineteenth century French painting, I think this may in fact be the finest book ever written on Parisian painting in the time of Haussmanization. Clark manages to offer an intelligent Marxist-based claim about class and the emerging Parisian landscape in the 60's without losing sight of the paintings themselves. While most scholars feel the genius of this book lies in his wonderful discussion of "what couldn't be seen in Olympia", I find the first chapter "Environs of Paris" equally fascinating in its discussion of Manet's Exposition Universelle of 1867. A MUST read for any lover of Parisian history or Manet.
 Painting of the Golden Age: A Biographical Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century European Painters by Adelheid M. Gealt – Hardcover: 800 pages; Greenwood Press (Sep 30, 1993) For this compendium of well-summarized biographies of about 300 painters active in the 1600s, Gealt (curator, Indiana Univ. Arts Museum) selected artists based on their "importance... contributions... amount of scholarship available... and the inherent quality of their oeuvre." Given these criteria, the selected artists are largely Italian and Dutch/Flemish, with a smattering of other nationalities. Each essay (ranging from one to eight pages) concentrates on biographical facts, training, and discussions of major works and style. Completing each entry are a list of additional works keyed to location (though no clear criteria for inclusion are given) and a bibliography keyed to a master bibliography. A secondary work, but useful at an undergraduate level both for the summary biographies and as an introduction to the mostly English-language literature. — Jack Perry Brown, Art Inst. of Chicago Lib. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
 British Painting: The Golden Age by William Vaughn – Paperback: 256 pages; Thames & Hudson (Jun 17, 1999) From Hogarth's first works around 1730 to the death of Turner in 1851, Britain's status as an artistic nation was dramatically transformed.
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Painting in Sixteenth Century Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto
The Last Romantics: The Romantic Tradition in British Art: Burne-Jones to Stanley Spencer
Adolph Menzel 1815-1905: Between Romanticism and Impressionism
