The novelist Henry James arrived in Venice as a tourist, and instantly fell in love with the city – particularly with the splendid Palazzo Barbaro, home of the expatriate American Curtis family. This selection of letters covers the period 1869-1907 and provides a unique record of the life and work of this great writer.Includes historical photographs and a foreword by Leon Edel, Henry James's biographer.

The preeminent award-winning literary critic of the era shares his dazzling observations of the American twenties.Here is the raw side of the U.S.A., the mad side of Hollywood, the literary infighting in New York, the gossip and anecdotes of an astonishing cast of characters, the jokes, the profundities, the inanities. Here is Edmund Wilson, the slim young man in Greenwich Village sallying forth to parties in matching ties and socks, hobnobbing with such giant word...

Henry James brilliantly combines comedy, tragedy, romance, and melodrama in this tale of a wealthy American businessman in Paris. Determined to marry Claire de Cintré, a scintillating and beautiful aristocrat, Christopher Newman comes up against the machinations of her impoverished but proud family in a dramatic clash between the Old World and the New. A co-production with the BBC, starring Diana Rigg, Matthew Modine, and Brenda Fricker.

  John William Waterhouse was an English painter famous for working in the Pre-Raphaelite style. His early works were not Pre-Raphaelite in nature, but were of classical themes in the spirit of Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton. He painted several decades after the break-up of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Borrowing stylistic influences not only from the earlier Pre-Raphaelites but also from his contemporaries, the Impressionists, his artworks were known for their depictio...

The American artist John Singer Sargent, widely considered the leading portrait painter of his generation, is celebrated for his paintings of Edwardian era luxury, landscape paintings and Impressionistic masterpieces. Delphi’s Masters of Art Series presents the world’s first digital e-Art books, allowing digital readers to explore the works of great artists in comprehensive detail. This volume presents Sargent’s complete paintings in beautiful detail, with concise introductions, hu...

The secret histories of the world’s most famous masterpiecesCaravaggios, Rembrandts, Monets—the works of immortal artists such as these are indelibly imprinted in the public mind; they are priceless masterpieces whose beauty, artistry, and emotional impact have inspired admiration, awe, and envy through the centuries. Yet behind many of these brilliant paintings and sculptures are fascinating, unique histories.In Scandals, Vandals, and da Vincis, a...

Cherished for their linear grace, the divine and mythological masterpieces of Botticelli are the epitome of the golden age of Florentine art. Delphi’s Masters of Art Series presents the world’s first digital e-Art books, allowing digital readers to explore the works of great artists in comprehensive detail. This volume presents Botticelli’s complete works in beautiful detail, with concise introductions, hundreds of high quality images and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1...

"Quite simply one of the best books of the year." —Michael Dirda, The Washington PostBen Downing's Queen Bee of Tuscany brings an extraordinary Victorian back to life. Born into a distinguished intellectual family and raised among luminaries such as Dickens and Thackeray, Janet Ross married at eighteen and went to live in Egypt. There, for the next six years, she wrote for the London Times, hobnobbed with the developer of the Suez Canal, ...

"The charm of certain vacant grassy spaces, in Italy, overfrowned by masses of brickwork that are honeycombed by the suns of centuries, is something that I hereby renounce once for all the attempt to express; but you may be sure that whenever I mention such a spot enchantment lurks in it." —Henry JamesIn these essays on travels in Italy written from 1872 to 1909, Henry James explores art and religion, political shifts and cultural revolutions, and the nature of tra...

To Be Read at Duskis a Short classic victorian ghost story by English Author Charles Dickens. Best read on you own by the crackling fireside by candlelight for an excellent and atmospheric ghost story. Five couriers talking amongst themselves outside a convent on the summit of the Great St Bernard Pass are overheard by the narrator as two of their group's members relate short ghost stories; one of a woman who abandons her husband for a man who had previously appeared in her nightmares, and...

Vincent van Gogh’s life and work are so intertwined that it is hardly possible to observe one without thinking of the other. Van Gogh has indeed become the incarnation of the suffering, misunderstood martyr of modern art, the emblem of the artist as an outsider. An article, published in 1890, gave details about van Gogh’s illness. The author of the article saw the painter as “a terrible and demented genius, often sublime, sometimes grotesque, always at the brink of the pathological.” Very ...

Women Painters of the World From the Time of Caterina Vigri, 1413-1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the Present Day This edition features  • illustrations  • a linked Table of Contents   CONTENTS Preface:     "On the Scope of the Present Volume." By the Editor. Chapter I:     "Women Painters in Italy since the Fifteenth Century." By Walter Shaw Sparrow Chapter II:  "Ea...