{"title":"Books by Julius Bryant","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781848222335","title":"Designing the V\u0026A","description":"The building of the Victoria and Albert Museum, begun in 1857, is the most elaborately designed and decorated museum in Britain. This book is the first to consider the V\u0026amp;A as a work of art in itself, presenting drawings, watercolours and historic photographs relating to the museum’s 19th-century exteriors and interiors. Much of this visual material is previously unpublished and is outside the canon of Victorian art and design.   The V\u0026amp;A’s first Director, Henry Cole, conceived the museum’s building as a showcase for leading Victorian artists to design and decorate. This book reveals for the first time the ways in which Cole’s expressed policy to ‘assemble a splendid collection of objects representing the application of Fine Arts to manufacture’ was applied to the fabric of the building, as he engaged leading painters such as Frederic Leighton, G.F. Watts and Edward Burne-Jones, as well as specialists in decoration such as Owen Jones and Morris and Company, to decorate and design for a building raised by engineers using innovatory materials and techniques.   This book represents a fascinating, untold chapter in the history of British 19th-century art, design, architecture and museums, and provides an essential key to understanding the evolution of the museum’s early collections and identity.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56307872465269,"sku":"9781848222335","price":39.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781848222335_b9f27212-2b84-4ab9-bbea-592c168037a9.jpg?v=1786029744"},{"product_id":"9781848226180","title":"Enriching the V\u0026A","description":"By 1862, just a  decade after its launch as a study collection for art and design, the Victoria and Albert Museum had become a reference resource for collectors, scholars and  art-market experts.  Enriching the  V\u0026amp;A, the final volume in a trilogy of books on the museum’s 19th-century  history, describes how the young museum’s rapid growth in the following  decades was driven more by collectors, agents and dealers, through loans,  gifts and bequests, than by the combined expertise, acquisitions policies and  buying power of its directors and curators.   The V\u0026amp;A soon became a collection of  collections, embodying a new age of collecting that benefitted from the  break-up of historic institutions and ancestral collections across Europe, and imperial expeditions in Asia and Africa. The industrial  revolution had created a new social class with the resources to buy from the  expanding art market, especially in the decorative arts. Many were touched by  a new moral imperative to collect for the home, however humble, and to share  their specialist knowledge and enthusiasm by lending to the new public  museums.   Enriching the V\u0026amp;A explores the  formative influence on the museum, and on pioneering fields of scholarship,  of the V\u0026amp;A’s leading Victorian and Edwardian benefactors. It also shares  uncomfortable truths about the sources of some objects from the age of  empires and shows how the meanings of things can change through the  transformation of private property into public museum collections.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308311654773,"sku":"9781848226180","price":39.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781848226180_9819a211-6a91-493a-9db4-1469e6715a65.jpg?v=1786029007"},{"product_id":"9781848223493","title":"Creating the V\u0026A","description":"Creating the V\u0026amp;A tells the definitive story of the formative years of London’s world-renowned Victoria and Albert Museum and the gathering of its early collections in the decade between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the death of Prince Albert in 1861.   The story of the V\u0026amp;A’s genesis is often centred on the first director and first curator (Henry Cole and J. C. Robinson), and their competing agendas for design reform and connoisseurship. And yet there is an untold story of how the young royal couple for whom it is named were highly instrumental in the establishment of the museum, as public supporters and large-scale lenders before a permanent collection was in place. The book is also full of fascinating and colourful stories of the strategies deployed to harvest treasures on the market as the young museum sought to fill its rapidly expanding buildings and compete with the British Museum and the Crystal Palace.   For anyone interested in the history of collecting and curating, and for all fans of this legendary London museum, Creating the V\u0026amp;A explains how the foundational collections established parameters which still inform the museum’s collecting policies, role and identity today.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308426539381,"sku":"9781848223493","price":39.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781848223493_7e9233c7-b532-4ddc-9836-4f66406041cf.jpg?v=1786029762"},{"product_id":"9781848227132","title":"The Great Exhibition in Art","description":"The Great Exhibition of 1851, the first World's Fair, is generally thought of as a giant trade fair, a showcase for empires and industry. However, it was also conceived to address a deep-rooted problem with British taste, which favoured European art and design over British. Julius Bryant's richly illustrated new book, which draws on the vast visual resources of the V\u0026amp;A's collections, establishes the centrality of works of fine art amongst the objects on show at the Great Exhibition. It also highlights the ways in which contemporary artists were commissioned to depict and record the Exhibition’s building and displays for reproduction in commemorative publications. Through reproductions of period images from definitive official publications, commercial guides, souvenirs, music scores, poems and satirical periodicals, the book brings to life the 19th-century visitor’s experience of the first World’s Fair. It documents Prince Albert’s vision for the Exhibition alongside the planned and actual routes as recorded in official engravings, maps and guidebooks; the opening and closing ceremonies as depicted in prints; the official visual record of the Exhibition; and souvenirs, popular press and ephemera. It concludes by examining the legacy of the Great Exhibition, including the founding of an institution which shared the Exhibition's mission to educate the public about art, design and taste: the Victoria and Albert Museum.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56420084121973,"sku":"9781848227132","price":39.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781848227132.jpg?v=1791213081"},{"product_id":"9781917564021","title":"Kenwood and the Iveagh Bequest","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 1925 Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh bought Kenwood, the magnificent 18th-century mansion of the 6th Earl of Mansfield on Hampstead Heath. The empty house was just what Iveagh needed to provide a gallery for the best of the art collection he had formed between 1887 and 1891 for his palatial home in Mayfair. Through the Iveagh Bequest Act of 1929 he left his collection to the nation, where it remains on display at Kenwood. This catalogue reproduces in glorious full colour Lord Iveagh's bequest of paintings, discusses each work, and in addition discusses the wider collection on display at Kenwood, the spectacular white villa of Hampstead Heath.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57086695965045,"sku":"9781917564021","price":30.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-julius-bryant.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}