Malcolm Rogers Libros

This little volume gathers together the finest treasures of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, one of the oldest museums in America and one of the greatest encyclopedic museums in the world.Founded in 1870, the museum features Classical antiquities of exquisite beauty, rare and beautiful Egyptian works, Asian holdings unrivaled in the West, and an outstanding French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection. With notable examples of contemporary art and photography, and many of the most important works of American decorative arts, including an unsurpassed Revere silver collection, this tiny yet comprehensive book offers a visual feast of world art.

Drawn from the National Portrait Gallery in London, one of the great collections of photographs in the world, this exquisitely reproduced album features 150 prominent figures from Britain's past and present. This stunning collection of historic portraits--some famous, others rarelyseen--marks the 150th anniversary of the invention of photography, providing not only an engaging survey of its development from the earliest daguerreotypes onward, but also a fascinating pictorial Who's Who of British culture from Queen Victoria to Princess Di.Featuring a preface by Alan Fern, Director of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., this volume presents an unprecedented gathering of great portraits. There are major figures from literature, ranging from Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle, to D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, toGraham Greene and T.S. Eliot; scientists such as Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin; influential thinkers Bertrand Russell and John Ruskin; political figures including Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan; artists such as James Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, and David Hockney; and entertainmentfigures from Lillie Langtry and John Gielgud to the Beatles and Sting. And the photographers themselves assemble their own Who's Who of masters, including Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, Edward Steichen, Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, and Cornell Capa.Not the least of this book's charm is the delightfully informative commentary Rogers provides for each sitter and photographer, capsule biographies filled with amusing asides (Florence Nightingale, for instance, thought her portrait looked like "Medea after killing her children"). But thetrue appeal of the book, the attraction, is simply turning page after page and coming face to face with another figure of Britain's past, staring out at us in defiance of time, captured forever in the thinnest layer of chemicals.