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Pallas Athene publishes attractive, intelligent, beautiful non-fiction, focussing on art, such as the series Lives of the Artists. We also publish books about travel, history, illustration, literature, nature and food. Subjects include John Ruskin, William Blake, Venice, Rome, Paris, Michelangelo, Oscar Wilde, William Turner, Carpaccio, Tintoretto, Velazquez, Caravaggio, Monet, Shakespeare, Friedrich, the nineteenth century, the pre-Raphaelites, Rodin, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Manet, van Gogh, Hogarth, Julia Margaret Cameron, George Stubbs, Aubrey Beardsley and Edward Burne-Jones.

 

Lives of Caspar David Friedrich, by Goethe, Kleist, Carus and Schubert

Lives of Caspar David Friedrich, by Goethe, Kleist, Carus and Schubert

£12.99

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Paperback – 145 x 115 mm – 144 pages

Sixty-five pages of colour illustration

ISBN 9781843682547

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), one of the great visionaries of European art, spent all his life in Northern Germany, apart from four years studying in Copenhagen, and his output appears to consist almost entirely of German landscapes. But far from being parochial, he was, in the words of the French sculptor David d’Angers, the artist who ‘discovered the tragic in landscape’. His paintings assemble minutely observed elements of nature into compo­sitions that celebrate the riches and the melancholy of a cosmos fully imbued with the divine, while never losing an almost hallucinatory engagement with reality. For all their clarity, they are the quintessence of Romanticism.

Almost too familiar today, to Friedrich’s contemporaries these extraordinary paint­ings were astonishing and challenging. This volume records the reactions of some of the most prominent figures of German Romanticism: Kleist, Brentano and Arnim (in a witty series of dialogues between gallery visitors alternately bewitched and bewildered by Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea), the painter and physiologist Carus, the psychologist Schubert, the Russian poet and translator Zhukovsky. A piece by Goethe and his colleague Heinrich Meyer records the somewhat baffled admiration of the earlier generation; and Friedrich’s own Commandments of Art breathes the almost overwhelming passion with which he approached his vocation. An introduction by the leading scholar Johannes Grave situates Friedrich’s art and its reception in the context of the Romantic movement both in Germany and in Europe as a whole.

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Anecdotes of William Hogarth, written by himself

Anecdotes of William Hogarth, written by himself

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Recollections of Henri Rousseau, by Wilhelm Uhde

Recollections of Henri Rousseau, by Wilhelm Uhde

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Lives of Tintoretto, by Vasari, El Greco, Aretino, Calmo, Franco and Ridolfi

Lives of Tintoretto, by Vasari, El Greco, Aretino, Calmo, Franco and Ridolfi

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Auguste Rodin, by Raine Maria Rilke

Auguste Rodin, by Raine Maria Rilke

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Looking at Manet, by Émile Zola

Looking at Manet, by Émile Zola

£9.99