This landmark scholarly biography of Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497-1543), court painter to Henry VIII, is the first in more than a century. From his early days in Augsburg and Basel to his lasting impact on British art and culture, this definitive account breathes new life into Holbein’s story, shedding light on the artist whose paintings would shape perceptions of the Tudor court for five hundred years.

Written in accessible, engaging prose, the book explores Holbein’s famous portraits of Tudor figures-Henry VIII, his queens, would-be wives, and leading courtiers such as Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell-and examines iconic works, including The Ambassadors. Beyond biography, it situates Holbein’s art within the broader context of Tudor Britain, tracing the birth of collecting, connoisseurship, and art history itself.

Beautifully illustrated, with rarely seen paintings from private collections, this volume weaves the latest research-including new archival discoveries and scientific analysis-into a fresh examination of Holbein’s life and work.

Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

This book uncovers the overlooked material practices that were crucial to architectural production in the eighteenth century. Centred on the architecture of England and Ireland, it examines the facing materials that define the distinctive character of cities and regions.

Focusing on the final stages of construction-the external façade and interior finishes in stone, plaster, and wood-Architecture and Artifice combines archival research with insights from architectural conservation to reveal the hidden techniques behind these structures. It explores the lives of craftsmen, uncovering the unwritten standards that guided their work and argues for the agency of materials and craft in shaping the meanings of eighteenth-century buildings.

Featuring a cast of lesser-known craftsmen alongside new perspectives on iconic structures such as Chatsworth, the Cambridge Senate House, and Dublin’s Parliament House, the book introduces a wealth of previously unpublished archival material uncovering the intricate processes and people behind the era’s most enduring buildings.

?Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Between 1760 and 1840, exotic plants were imported from across Britain’s empire and were lavishly depicted in periodicals and scientific treatises as specimens collected alongside other objects of natural history. Mark Laird’s provocative new book-part art history, part polemic-weaves fine art, botanical illustration, and previously unpublished archival material into a political and ethical account of Britain’s heritage, showing how plants were not only integral to English gardens of the Georgian and Victorian eras but also to British culture more broadly.

The Dominion of Flowers shines with captivating cross-cultural plant stories. The book opens with the Seymers’ exotic Butterflies and Plants and Pulteney’s catalogue of Dorset’s native wildflowers. It then moves to the German artist John Miller and his illustrations for Lord Bute’s Botanical Tables and concludes by tracing Britain’s fascination with New Zealand’s unique flora, first depicted in Mary Delany’s collages.

Copiously illustrated with almost two hundred works, and drawing on Laird’s genealogical research into his own family’s colonial past, this volume foregrounds Indigenous ideas about “plant relations” in a study that brings the trans-oceanic movement of plants and people alive.

?Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Westminster Abbey was one of the most powerful churches in Catholic Christendom before transforming into a Protestant icon of British national and imperial identity. Celebrating the 750th anniversary of the consecration of the current Abbey church building, this book features engaging essays by a group of distinguished scholars that focus on different, yet often overlapping, aspects of the Abbey’s history: its architecture and monuments; its Catholic monks and Protestant clergy; its place in religious and political revolutions; its relationship to the monarchy and royal court; its estates and educational endeavours; its congregations; and its tourists. Clearly written and wide-ranging in scope, this generously illustrated volume is a fascinating exploration of Westminster Abbey’s thousand-year history and its meaning, significance, and impact within society both in Britain and beyond.

As a courtier, figure of fashion, and object of erotic fascination, Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) transformed the professional identities available to English artists. By making his portrait sittings into a form of courtly spectacle, Van Dyck inspired poets and playwrights at the same time that he offended guardians of traditional hierarchies. A self-consciously Van Dyckian lineage of artists, many of them women, extends from his lifetime to the end of the eighteenth century and beyond.
 
Recovering the often surprising responses of both writers and painters to Van Dyck’s portraits, this book provides an alternative perspective on English art’s historical self-consciousness. Built around a series of close readings of artworks and texts ranging from poems and plays to early biographies and studio gossip, it traces the reception of Van Dyck’s art on the part of artists like Mary Beale, William Hogarth, and Richard and Maria Cosway to bestow a historical specificity on the frequent claim that Van Dyck founded an English school of portraiture.

Challenging the dominant characterization of Edward Burne-Jones as an escapist who withdrew from the modern world into imaginary realms of his own creation, this groundbreaking book argues that he was engaged in a fundamentally radical defiance of the age, protesting against imperial aggression, capitalist economic inequality, and environmental destruction in the wake of the industrial revolution.
 
Harnessing the utopian power of embodied aesthetic encounters, Burne-Jones drew inspiration from the medieval concept of dreams as visionary states of transformation. Therefore, his art functioned not as a retreat, but as a vehicle for revolutionary awakening. Often characterized as a painter, this book re-centers Burne-Jones’s practice in the decorative arts, demonstrating that he consistently interrogated the boundaries of artistic media, in keeping with wider debates over the role of the arts in the nineteenth century.
 
The first scholarly monograph solely devoted to Burne-Jones since 1973, The Radical Vision of Edward Burne-Jones offers a thorough re-examination of his work, illuminating his radical defiance of the artistic, social, and political hierarchies of nineteenth-century Britain.