Forty: 29 books

Gauguin’s paintings are redolent of the South Sea islands, full of exotic women, vibrant flora, and brilliant color. In addition, his scenes range from normal life in France’s Brittany, to Provence where he painted and lived briefly with Vincent van Gogh, to French Polynesia. Eugène Henri Paul...

Georges Seurat was one of the most important Post-Impressionist painters to lead the way toward the modern era in art. He is best known for developing pointillism, an exacting and time-consuming technique whereby tiny dots of paint are combined to create a composition. His work is stylized and considered,...

The Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel—sometimes called Peasant Bruegel—was the first great artist to paint scenes of ordinary peasant life and show the common man and woman as they went about their daily tasks and amusements. He is credited with bringing a humanizing spirit to painting— something...

Hans Memling was one of the greatest artists working in northern Europe in the late medieval period. He made his home and his name in the city of Bruges, Belgium, where he lived and worked for almost 30 years. Often described as a Flemish Primitive, he almost singlehandedly transformed Bruges into...

Edgar Degas began as a classical painter of genre history scenes and died as one of the greatest and most innovative names in French art—although as with so many other artists, he did not receive a great deal of recognition in his lifetime. Along the way his style changed completely from strict...

Ando Hiroshige is considered by many as the last of the great creative masters of the traditional Japanese woodblock print. His skill has won him worldwide fame and artistic influence, along with his contemporary, Katsushika Hokusai. Both artists widened the range of subjects they covered to encompass...

Katsushika Hokusai is the most famous of a sequence of names used by a versatile and long-lived Japanese artist who worked in many genres and schools, evolving a unique style that made him known then as well as now as a true master. He was an unusual and restless man who slipped boundaries and made...

Monets gift was to show the world a different way of seeing and interpreting everything around us. He brought his canvases to life with dabs and swoops of color put together to give an impression of the scene. He is the ultimate Impressionist: not only did one of his paintings inspire the label “Impressionist”...

With their 70th anniversary just around the corner, the D-Day landings have lost none of their impact. Even today the vestiges of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall speak of the huge undertaking necessary for the Allies to gain a foothold in Normandy. In this beautiful new full-color book, the reader goes “on-site”...

Although American by birth and heritage, James McNeill Whistler spent most of his life in western Europe, particularly in Paris and London, where he lived his life in a swirl of controversy over his art and his often self-aggrandizing behavior, which tainted his associations with fellow artists and...

The speed of the German Blitzkrieg in 1940 and the relative ease with which they brushed aside Allied defenses meant four years of occupation. But in June 1944—this time with American forces—the Allies finally returned for a rematch. The destruction of German forces in Normandy’s Falaise pocket,...

The only part of the British Isles that can answer the question 'What was it like to be invaded and occupied in World War 2?’ are the holiday islands of Jersey, Alderney, Guernsey and Sark. Left undefended in 1940, they fell like ripe plums into German hands. Thereafter they were turned into...

This is an insight into the most feared army of World War II. The Japanese Imperial Army grew from 1.5 million men in 1939 to 5.5 million men by the end of the war. Their highly successful campaigns in the Far East and the Pacific at the beginning of World War II were every bit as spectacular as those...

70 years ago, on 7 June 1944, the British 7th Armored Division landed in Normandy, halfway through a wartime journey that had started in north Africa. Formed on 16 February 1940, it adopted the Jerboa as its divisional sign—and while many units that fought in the desert call themselves by the...