David Ekserdjian

A choice of art books

Literary critics of a certain stripe may have been exulting over the death of the author for decades, but happily, in the world of art publishing, monographic studies of the careers and works of individual artists are still alive and kicking. Indeed, almost half of my festive selections fall into that category this year.

First, and by no means simply by virtue of its weight, is Judy Egerton’s George Stubbs, Painter: Catalogue Raisonné (Yale, £95), which effortlessly combines awesome scholarly authority with what in academic circles is, alas, a far rarer commodity — wit. Seen whole and supported by such eloquent advocacy, Stubbs emerges as a truly great artist, who has been held back by his Britishness and his subject matter. As Judy Egerton rightly observes, it was the subject of the Fitzwilliam’s ‘Gimcrack’ — a racehorse with jockey up — ‘whose seeming triviality had long caused more nervous art historians to twitch their petticoats’.

Another home-grown talent even more grievously in need of rescue is the hero of Nicholas Tromans’s David Wilkie: The People’s Painter (Edinburgh UP, £60). As the author explains, Wilkie — whose burial at sea was the subject of Turner’s ‘Peace’ — was ‘the most famous of all British artists during the first half of the 19th century’, but he has long since fallen from grace. One way of recapturing enthusiasm expertly marshalled here is by examining early responses to his art: when we read that Géricault wept before Wilkie’s ‘Chelsea Pensioners’, it is hard not to be struck by the frigidity of our own engagement.

Werner Hofmann’s Degas: A Dialogue of Difference (Thames & Hudson, £45) is concerned with an altogether safer bet, and has all the glossy production values one would expect from this publisher. The text, however, is both highly evocative and often boldly unexpected: it is a high-wire act to compare the woman bathing in Degas’s ‘The Tub’ with one of the damned in Rogier van der Weyden’s ‘Last Judgement’, but Hofmann brings it off with aplomb.

Both Bette Talvacchia’s Raphael and Peter Humfrey’s Titian (Phaidon, £24.95

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