Print Publications

This year’s publications offer an abundance of innovative approaches and groundbreaking research. We have been proud to see distinguished authors return to the list and delighted to welcome outstanding first projects. Many of this year’s books make important contributions to our core subject areas, while others provide exciting journeys into new territory.

Portraiture emerged as a key theme this year, with a re-creation of the courtly spectacle of Van Dyck’s portrait sittings; an exploration of the eerie and sometimes shocking portrait drawings of Frank Auerbach; and a vivid study of the concept of ‘liveliness’ and its ability to move, impress and delight –in portraiture and beyond – in Tudor and Jacobean visual and material culture.

Architectural history has always been an important strand of the Centre’s publishing programme, and this year we added to this with an investigation into the developments in industrial production and innovation that led to Manchester becoming the world’s first industrial city, and a study of the articulation of British global power and prestige through the medium of the Edwardian Baroque style.

We also published a suite of books that examine some of the compelling and provocative ways in which art operates at moments of great change: from James Gillray’s satirical prints, which reflected and shaped an age of political and social turmoil, to the novel modes of artistic production that destabilised the political legitimacy of the East India Company; and from the eighteenth-century political revolutionaries who translated their principles into landscape design in a period of rebellion, to the ways in which the technological development of colour helped shape a national identity in twentieth-century Britain.

This year we also expanded our digital ‘bookshelf’ on the Yale A&A ePortal by adding studies on eighteenth-century conversation pieces; sugar and slavery; Orientalist painting; Ford Madox Brown; and the interplay of modernism and modernity in British art before 1914. We are delighted to see these important out-of-print titles reaching wider audiences in this new format.