A swag of books relating to the visual arts have appeared on the new book’s shelf this week; from the sublime to the sublime!

Van Eyck to Durer : the influence of early Netherlandish painting on European art, 1430-1530 by Till-Holger Borchert

Thames & Hudson, 2011

Yet another beautiful book from Thames and Hudson, this one demonstrating the influence Netherlandish painting had on the art of other parts of Europe over 100 remarkable years.

Watteau : the drawings by Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat

Royal Academy of Arts, 2011

I sometimes think that I love drawing more than most other forms of visual art, the freshness and sense of spontaneity that can be conveyed by a pencil or piece of chalk can seem almost magical!

Sir John Gilbert : art and imagination in the Victorian age edited by Spike Bucklow and Sally Woodcock

Ashgate/Lund Humphries, 2011

I have confessed in a previous post to my unfashionable fondness for art of the Victorian era, but it would appear that the worm is turning and this somewhat reviled era is increasingly the subject of more appreciative scrutiny. Sir John Gilbert worked from the intimacy of book and journal illustration through to grand historical paintings and landscapes, and this series of essays seeks to to reassess a remarkable body of work that has been sidelined for too long.

The Chester Dale Collection by Kimberly A. Jones, Maygene Daniels

National Gallery of Art, 2010

The great spirit of American philanthropy is very much in evidence in this book highlighting some of the extraordinary paintings in the Chester Dale Collection, bequeathed to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1962. Dale, with the strong guiding hand of his first wife Maud, built up one of the world’s finest private collections of “modern” French art, and I won’t even begin to list the artists represented; easier to name those not present!

Something rather beautiful from our own Picture Collection