Your perfect Christmas may well involve the aroma of a good cigar, the taste of vintage port, and a fat picture book. If so, you’ll like
The Rose Window: Splendour and Symbol by Painton Cowen (Thames & Hudson £39.95). Marvellous colour photographs dominate, though an informative text explains the history and symbolism of what is often the most impressive feature of a gothic church — the round window usually at the west end and filled with richly decorated stained glass. With this large but not unwieldy book on your knees, a pleasing holiday is assured.
Another potential present has a longer text, but the illustrations are just as impressive. The subject is more seasonal, too, since Marina Belozerskaya’s Luxury Arts of the Renaissance (Thames & Hudson £60) examines the kind of spectacularly crafted objects — engraved armour, tapestries, utensils in gold and silver and such like — that were often commissioned as elaborate and ruinously expensive gifts. For some, its price might well put the book into the same category.
A small book intended to entertain and enlighten adults, Beyond the Naked Eye by Jill Dunkerton and Rachel Billinge (National Gallery £9.95) would fascinate younger readers, too. It consists of hugely magnified details of paintings, their source and position revealed only at the end. As you struggle to identify where a running figure or horseman comes from, the illustrations will certainly raise a smile or two. So will Kenneth Baker’s George IV: A Life in Caricature (Thames & Hudson £24.95), which reproduces some of the amazingly rude cartoons lampooning one of the most dissolute, libidinous monarchs in British history. The king and his behaviour were monstrous, the perfect targets for Cruikshank and Gilray’s acid wit and scalpel-sharp pens. Baker, from whose collection most of these cartoons come, not only provides an historical account of the period but also equips each cartoon with a helpful commentary identifying the figures and explaining the symbolism.
Sometime in the early 19th century, cartoonists stopped drawing the monarch and British cartooning entered a period of numbing politeness. It prevailed until the 1960s, when Gerald Scarfe started to portray the Queen and members of the royal family. His drawing of her and the duke perched on a clapped-out stallion, its single tiny testicle the head of Harold Wilson, seemed very shocking then. It’s reproduced in Scarfe’s whopping Drawing Blood (Little, Brown £35), a hugely entertaining picture book that surveys his career so far; it has more pictures than text.
Someone who likes more text than pictures would be much better off with an artist’s biography, of which many have been published this year, including George Stubbs and the Wide Creation by Robin Blake (Chatto £25), Matthew Sturgis’s Walter Sickert: A Life (HarperCollins £30), Sue Prideaux’s Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (Yale £25), Alex Danchev’s George Braque: A Life (H Hamilton £35) and Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keefe (Norton £25). Excelling all these, however, is Hilary Spurling’s Matisse the Master (H Hamilton £25), the second volume of her definitive biography. It is a superb read, and presents fresh and revealing material at every turn — such as Matisse’s interest in the French film industry, from which he borrowed models and the sexily exotic costumes in which he liked to paint and draw them.
Thirty-nine pen drawings by Matisse, all of them done during a single year, are reproduced full-page in the slender and attractive Henri Matisse: Drawings 1936 (Thames & Hudson £24.95). All of them are breathtakingly confident; a few are mildly erotic. Erotic is not remotely the word for Lucian Freud’s relentlessly scrutinised women, many of whom appear in Lucian Freud 1996-2005 (Cape £50). It brings up to date the fatter volume about the painter published 10 years ago, and it makes me ask questions about whether the painter, now 83, is finally losing his touch.
Freud’s patiently posing women couldn’t be more different from the nudes of Gustav Klimt. Rainer Metzger’s delightful Gustav Klimt: Drawings and Watercolours (Thames & Hudson £19.95) includes some intensely sexy drawings of women that make plain the artist’s desire for them with every caressing line. Year by year, books multiply about Klimt and the other artists who made fin-de-si ècle Austrian art so remarkable. One of the most recent, Klimt, Schiele, Moser, Kokoschka: Vienna 1900 edited by Marie-Amélie zu Salm-Salm (Lund Humphries £50), mines an almost exhausted seam, though it does pay unusually close and welcome attention to the influential Koloman Moser, better-known as a designer than painter.
Books about impressionism now belong to Christmas as inevitably as repeats of Morecambe and Wise, and it is amazing that authors can find something new to say. Pamela Todd manages to do this in The Impressionists at Home (Thames & Hudson £19.95), which explores the daily domestic round of the leading figures (and some minor ones). Some of the illustrations were new to me, the most unusual of them a photograph of Monet sitting in his vast limousine waiting for his chauffeur.
Now to the book that has given me the greatest visual pleasure. It is Ukiyo-e edited by Gian Carlo Calza (Phaidon £59.95). The title is Japanese for “pictures of the floating world” — popular images, most of them colour woodcuts, of the fleeting, sensuous pleasures of life. There are stunningly beautiful pictures of actors and courtesans, prostitutes, landscapes and flowers, most created in the 18th and 19th centuries, when Japan was closed to the West. Contact was re-established in the 1850s, resulting in a European vogue for everything Japanese, not least prints such as these. Degas borrowed from them, Van Gogh copied them, and almost every important European artist was in some way influenced by them. That crucial influence is the subject of Lionel Lambourne’s engrossing Japonisme: Cultural Crossings between Japan and the West (Phaidon £39.95). The comparative illustrations are enlightening and occasionally startling, and some don’t have much to do with the art. What about the photograph of the Duke and Duchess of Connaught and their children at home, c1890, dressed in full Japanese fig and taking part in the tea ceremony?
Available at Sunday Times Books First prices on 0870 165 8585
Top five
THE ROSE WINDOW
by Painton Cowen
Thames & Hudson £39.95
Informative and handsomely illustrated look at gothic churches’ rose windows
LUXURY ARTS OF THE RENAISSANCE
by Marina Belozerskaya
Thames & Hudson £60
Tapestries and other spectacularly crafted objects
MATISSE THE MASTER
by Hilary Spurling
H Hamilton £25
Second volume of the definite biography, full of fresh insights at every turn
GUSTAV KLIMT
by Rainer Metzger
Thames & Hudson £19.95
Collection of Klimt’s drawings and watercolours of some very sexy women
UKIYO-E
edited by Gian Carlo Calza
Phaidon £59.95
Collection of visually arresting images from Japan’s floating world
Bestsellers
1 A Picture of Britain by David Dimbleby (Tate) 43,897
2 Turner, Whistler, Monet edited by Katherine A Lochnan (Tate) 24,541; 3 Frida Kahlo edited by Emma Dexter and Tanya Barson (Tate) 17,548
4 Caravaggio: The Final Years 1606-1610 edited by Ferdinando Bologna and Vincenzo Abbate (Electa Napoli) 14,294
5 National Gallery Companion Guide by Erika Langmuir (National Gallery) 10,162
