Arthur Melville was arguably the most innovative and modernist Scottish artist of his generation and one of the finest British watercolourists of the nineteenth century, yet he avoided categorisation. In 1943 that the Scottish Colourist John Duncan Fergusson confessed that although they never met, "his work opened up to me the way to free painting - not merely freedom in the use of paint, but freedom of outlook". This book offers a comprehensive survey of Arthur Melville's (1855-1904) rich and varied career as artist-adventurer, Orientalist, forerunner of The Glasgow Boys, painter of modern life and re-interpreter of the landscape of Scotland. His travels inspired spectacular watercolours and paintings. This book illustrates around sixty of his works, each with a catalogue entry, and an essay by Kenneth McConkey, which discusses Melville's art and career.

Recounting his life and achievements in old age, Sir John Lavery resorted to picaresque conventions - an orphan lad from Belfast, he discovered a talent for painting while working as a photographer's assistant, got himself to Paris by a series of misadventures, became a leading member of the Glasgow School, and ended up as a royal portraitist laden with international honours. His amusing, often apocryphal tale published in 1940 obscures the fact that the most important diary of Lavery's remarkable career lies in his painting. A friend of Whistler and Rodin, he was feted at the Venice Biennale and became a Royal Academician and Official War Artist. During these years, he was part of the international community at Tangier, where he established a winter studio. At the time of the struggle for Irish independence he painted portraits of the rebel leaders, including an extraordinary portrait of the patriot, Michael Collins, on his deathbed. A few years later an iconic image of his wife, Hazel, was used on the Irish currency. Winters in the 1920s were often spent in Florida or on the Riviera, savouring a Scott Fitzgerald lifestyle. Five years before his death in 1941, he set off for Hollywood to paint portraits of the stars. This new account is the result of painstaking research that adds greatly to our knowledge of the painter, the Edwardian art world and many of his distinguished contemporaries.

*Illustrating sixty pieces of art with golf as the central theme, this book brings together many unseen works from private collections across the UK *Published to accompany an exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery Edinburgh, from July 2014 to October 2014 The Art of Golf illustrates around sixty works from across the United Kingdom and shows how the noble game has been depicted in European art from the seventeenth century to the present day in a variety of media: paintings, prints, photographs, cartoons and posters. In his essay Michael Clarke, the exhibition curator, outlines the story behind the development of the game while art historian Kenneth McConkey places the works of the artist John Lavery in the context of the sport. The key image is the greatest golfing painting in the world, Charles Lees, The Golfers, 1847, which portrays in fascinating detail a match.

This title was first published in 2002. 'Memory and Desire' is a lavishly illustrated account of the art world in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. It calls upon rich resources of contemporary diaries, letters and art criticism, as well as the analysis of works of art to answer questions about how and why new artistic tendencies emerged and tastes changed. Eschewing the familiar narrative of an inevitable progress towards modernism, Kenneth McConkey considers a broad range of art and critical thinking in the period. Discussing the market for old master paintings, which rivalled those for modern art, and the question of how and why certain genres of art were particularly successful at the time, McConkey explores the detail and significance of contemporary taste. He draws upon the work of commercially successful painters such as John Singer Sargent, William Orpen, George Clausen, Alfred East, John Lavery and Philip Wilson Steer, and their critic-supporters to throw light upon current arguments about training, aesthetics, visual memory and the creation of new art. 'Memory and Desire' is a major contribution to our knowledge of this important period in British art.

This title was first published in 2002. 'Memory and Desire' is a lavishly illustrated account of the art world in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. It calls upon rich resources of contemporary diaries, letters and art criticism, as well as the analysis of works of art to answer questions about how and why new artistic tendencies emerged and tastes changed. Eschewing the familiar narrative of an inevitable progress towards modernism, Kenneth McConkey considers a broad range of art and critical thinking in the period. Discussing the market for old master paintings, which rivalled those for modern art, and the question of how and why certain genres of art were particularly successful at the time, McConkey explores the detail and significance of contemporary taste. He draws upon the work of commercially successful painters such as John Singer Sargent, William Orpen, George Clausen, Alfred East, John Lavery and Philip Wilson Steer, and their critic-supporters to throw light upon current arguments about training, aesthetics, visual memory and the creation of new art. 'Memory and Desire' is a major contribution to our knowledge of this important period in British art.

'Beauty lies in the light, as much in the atmosphere which surrounds things as in their actual form and fashion.' These words appear in Stanhope Forbes's Treatment of Modern Life in Art, and they stand as the credo of an extraordinarily accomplished generation of painters -- including Forbes, Lavery, Sargent and Sickert -- the British Impressionists.

This beautiful and comprehensive book surveys the exciting developments, debates and personalities amongst French, British and American painters of the period, and the ferment and challenge of their ideas and achievements to which we are grateful heirs. Artists such as Steer, Clausen, O'Conor and Laura Knight depicted an enormous number of urban and rural scenes, refining their ideas into an Impressionist style that is distinctly British.