Loyd Grossman

This book provides a compelling overview of how stained glass can play a significant role in our visual culture and heritage. While the closure of traditional church buildings has endangered the future of this well-loved discipline, throughout the centuries, stained glass has had a capacity to adapt, with its unique ability to use colour and light to uplift our senses. The conservation of historic windows and creation of contemporary work at Barley Studio over the last 50 years provides an ideal platform to examine stained glass today, with insights from the authors’ personal experience as designers, conservators, and educators. The book begins by examining Barley Studios conservation and restoration work, focusing on the unique schemes of medieval windows at St Nicholas Church, Stanford-on-Avon, Northamptonshire and St Mary’s Church, Fairford, Gloucestershire. It then considers Helen Whittaker’s work, demonstrating the variety of techniques used to engage a contemporary audience. It discusses the key design factors that stimulate her creative approach and reflects on the connections between traditional and contemporary stained glass. The range of perspectives presented within this book draws attention to and celebrates the power of this unique art-form and reveals how it can reflect changes in popular tastes and trends.

This brilliant vignette of seventeenth-century Rome, its Baroque architecture, and its relationship to the Catholic Church brings to life the friendship between a genius and his patron with an ease of writing that is rare in art history. By 1650, the spiritual and political power of the Catholic Church was shattered. Thanks to the twin blows of the Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years War, Rome--celebrated both as the Eternal City and Caput Mundi (the head of the world)--had lost its preeminent place in Europe. Then a new Pope, Alexander VII, fired with religious zeal, political guile, and a mania for creating new architecture, determined to restore the prestige of his church by making Rome the key destination for Europe's intellectual, political, and cultural elite. To help him do so, he enlisted the talents of Gianlorenzo Bernini, already celebrated as the most important living artist--no mean feat in the age of Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velazquez.

An Elephant in Rome is a book for those who love the endless fascination of the Eternal City and want a deeper and more entertaining tale of how it came to be.

At the time of his death in 1820, Benjamin West was the most famous artist in the English-speaking world and celebrated throughout Europe. From humble beginnings in Pennsylvania, he had become the first American artist to study in Italy, and within a few short years of his arrival in London had been instrumental in the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts and been appointed history painter to King George III. However, West's posthumous reputation took a critical mauling, and today he remains one of the most neglected and misunderstood of Britain's great 18th-century artists. As Loyd Grossman asserts in his new book, West was in the vanguard that created neoclassicism and romanticism, and among the first painters to represent the exciting and inspirational qualities of contemporary events, as opposed to events from the biblical, classical or mythological past. Most significantly, his best-known painting, The Death of General Wolfe, was a thrilling, revolutionary work that played a role in changing the course of art. In a lively, immersing text that situates West in the midst of Enlightenment thinking about history and progress, Grossman explores both why Wolfe has exercised such a magnetic grip on our imaginations for almost 250 years, and how, with this artwork, West helped to lay the foundations of a modern attitude that has affected the way we live and think ever since. AUTHOR: Loyd Grossman, OBE is a broadcaster, historian and journalist. He has presented a wide range of TV programmes, fromThrough the Keyhole and MasterChef to Loyd on Location andHistory of British Sculpture. He is Chairman of the Heritage Alliance and the Churches Conservation Trust, Deputy Chairman of the Royal Drawing School and President of the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies (NADFAS). He was appointed OBE in 2003 and received a doctorate in the history of art from the University of Cambridge. SELLING POINTS: . The first book to assess the artist Benjamin West's contribution to ideas of modernity and progress with his history painting . Provides new insights into West's most famous painting, The Death of General Wolfe . Engagingly written by a well-known US-born, UK-based broadcaster and journalist 125 colour

One of a series of books which look at the art of cookery in Britain at different periods in history. The recipes, which have been adapted for the modern kitchen, provide a taste of the times and the book also includes information on food, cooking equipment, kitchen designs, serving of meals and the development of etiquette.