"Vincent van Gogh's story is one of the most ironic in art history. Today, he is celebrated the world one over as one of the most important painters of all time, recognized with sell-out shows, feted museums, and record prices of tens of million of dollars at auction. Yet as he was painting the canvases that would subsequently become these sell-out modern masterpieces, van Gogh was battling not only the disinterest of his contemporary audiences but...

"This is what we long for: the profound pleasure of being swept into vivid new worlds, worlds peopled by characters so intriguing and real that we can't shake them, even long after the reading's done. In his earlier, award-winning novels, Dominic Smith demonstrated a gift for coaxing the past to life. Now, in The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, he deftly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape...

Vincent van Gogh's artistic career only lasted from about 1880 to 1890. During that time, he produced over eight hundred paintings and a huge collection of drawings. Virtually self-taught, van Gogh developed his own individual style, which continues to inspire many today. Few artists of his time regarded him as a great painter, but during the twentieth century, decades after his death, he ranked among the most popular of artists. His works reveal...

"This book begins with a single premise: that Vermeer painted images not only of extraordinary beauty, but of extraordinary strangeness. To understand that strangeness, Bryan Jay Wolf turns to ways of seeing that first developed in the seventeenth century. In a series of provocative readings, Wolf presents Vermeer in bracing new ways, arguing for the painter's immersion in - rather than withdrawal from - the intellectual concerns of his day." "The...