Richard Shone Libros

. Tate Publishing, 1988 1st, clean copy, no markings, light shelf wear with a small mark on front cover, Professional booksellers since 1981

Near Fine. Dust Jacket Near Fine. 1st Edition/ This rare and vintage book is a perfect addition to any bibliophile's collection

The Books That Shaped Art History provides an invaluable roadmap of the field by reassessing the impact of the most important texts of art history published during the 20th century. Each of the sixteen incisive chapters, focusing on a single book, is written by a leading art historian, curator or one of the promising scholars of today. In bringing these cross-generational contributions together, the book presents a varied and invaluable overview of the history of art, told through its most enduring literature. Each essay - with writers including John Elderfield, Boris Groys, Susie Nash and Richard Verdi - analyses a single major work, mapping the intellectual development of its author, setting out the premises and argument of the book, discussing its position within the field of art history, and looking at its significance in the context both of its initial reception and its legacy. Enlivening debates and questioning the very status of art history itself, this is a concise and brilliant study of the discipline and an invaluable resource for anyone interested in visual culture and its histories.

Alfred Sisley is now recognized as one of the great landscape painters of the nineteenth century, and a leading figure in the Impressionist. English-born, he lived all his life in France, and the 61 colour illustrations in this book include the celebrated snow scenes of the Paris suburbs, his views of the flooded Seine at Port-Marly, and his paintings and colourful regattas on the Thames with Kenneth Clark described as embodying “the perfect moment of Impressionism”. Richard Shone has completely updated his essay, fist published in 1979, in the light if his major 1992 Phaidon monograph on Sisley, selected new colour plates and added extensive commentaries on the illustrations to the work of Alfred Sisley.

One of the aims of this book is to show the pervasive influence Post-Impressionists exercised on a host of other painters in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. The author also discusses the Post-Impressionists' debt to the pioneering achievements of their elders such as Monet and Renoir. By establishing their links with the immediate past and the value of their work for the future, Post-Impressionism appears not as an isolated phenomenon but as a movement of great variety, firmly situated in the tradition of European painting.