Landscape, Innovation, and Nostalgia: The Manton Collection of British Art

Business leader and arts patron Sir Edwin A. G. Manton (1909and#8211;2005) and his wife Florence, Lady Manton, assembled an outstanding collection of 18th- and 19th-century British art. A gift to the Clark Art Institute from the Manton Foundation in 2007, their collection features more than three hundred oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, including works by John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Gainsborough, and William Blake.

In a series of wide-ranging essays, prominent scholars consider the major works and themes in the collection, relating them to larger issues within the field of British studies. Individual essays are devoted to Constable's oil sketches, cloud studies, and magisterial painting The Wheat Field; the growth of the watercolor tradition; print portfolios and narrative series; Thomas Rowlandson's satiric drawings; and Gainsborough's use of experimental materials as revealed through recent scientific analysis. The volume concludes with an illustrated checklist of the works in the collection.

This group of British prints from an exceptional private collection captures the tumultuous aesthetic and political climate of the years surrounding World Wars I and II.

This group of 40 prints from the exceptional Daniel Cowin Collection captures the tumultuous aesthetic and political climate of the years surrounding World Wars I and II. An essay by Jonathan Black addresses the impact of World War I on two notable British printmakers, Edward Wadsworth and C. R. W. Nevinson. A text by Jay A. Clarke delves into the linocut movement of the 1920s and andrsquo;30s, investigating how the role of style and politics impacted this movement as well as the previously unexplored position of women printmakers and the interplay between gender, craft, and decoration. Influences of Futurism, Cubism, and the short-lived but vibrant abstraction of the Vorticist movement saturate the powerful color images, which are accompanied by artist biographies. This publication illuminates the struggle of these radical printmakers as they navigated a conservative market and the harsh economic and political realities of their time.

Jay A. Clarke is the Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Clark Art Institute.and#160;Jonathan Black is a senior research fellow in the history of art at Kingston University in London.and#160;