Anyone who has read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz and pored over the wonderful illustrations, knows that the most magical part of a great children’s book can often be the pictures. Carefully selected from world-famous childhood stories that date to the 19th century, 229 drawings and paintings spotlight the immeasurable talent of leading illustrators such as Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway, N. C. Wyeth, Edmund Dulac, Jessie Wilcox Smith, and many others. Brimming with images that will capture the hearts of the young and young at heart, this collection is sure to inspire the imaginations of artists, designers, and crafters everywhere.

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SLEEK. CHIC. NOTORIOUSLY GUARDED. WELCOME TO THE SECRET WORLD OF COCO CHANEL.

Justine Picardie’s definitive biography explores the dark mysteries hidden beneath the shimmering surface of a fabled fashion icon. Unveiling remarkable details about Coco Chanel’s traumatic childhood and her flight into unconventional adulthood, this beautifully constructed portrait reveals her passionate and painful past, her turbulent loves and losses, her quest for fame and fortune, and how she transformed herself into her own most powerful creation.

Feared and revered by her contemporaries, Chanel died in 1971, but her legacy lives on as an enduring global brand. Drawing on interviews with her last surviving friends and relatives, and unprecedented archival research, Justine Picardie brings Chanel out of hiding, unpicking the seams between reality and myth, and telling a timeless story that uncovers the true art and heart of fashion.

This special new edition has been extensively revised and updated, and offers a uniquely authoritative account of the greatest designer in the world. Adding fresh insights and discoveries, it comes complete with a compelling array of previously unseen images from the Chanel archives.

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Justine Picardie spent years puzzling over the truth about Coco Chanel, peeling away the accretions of romance and lies. Since its publication in 2010, hers has become the definitive Chanel biography. With a new foreword and previously unseen images, this new edition delves even deeper into the life and legacy of this eternally alluring woman.

Coco Chanel was an extraordinary inventor – she conjured up the little black dress, bobbed hair, trousers for women, contemporary chic, best-selling perfumes, and the most successful fashion brand of all time – but she also invented herself, fashioning the myth of her own life with the same dexterity as her couture.

While Chanel was supreme innovator and vendor of all things elegant and beautiful, what lies beneath her own glossy myth is far darker. Throwing new light on her passionate and turbulent relationships, this beautifully constructed portrait gives a fresh and penetrating look at how Coco Chanel made herself into her own most powerful creation.

Justine Picardie brings the mysterious Gabrielle Chanel out of hiding, to celebrate her great achievements. She examines Chanel’s enduring afterlife, as well as her remarkable life, uncovering the consequences of what she covered up, unpicking the seams between truth and legend, yet keeping intact the real fabric of her past.

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• Britain’s industrial age is often perceived through a black-and-white filter as the ‘funereal’ age of coal pollution and bleak working class slums. This catalogue will dispel that perception, demonstrating how the industrial revolution transformed colour, and focus on the central role it played in art, culture and technology
• As opposed to approaches favouring a long history of colour, the catalogue focuses on the second half of the 19th century and argues that this was a crucial chromatic turn, which has been significantly ignored by prominent historians of colour and previous publications
• Several essays in the catalogue offer new research into key chromatic events of the period including the 1862 International Exhibition
• Accompanies an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum from 21 September 2023 to 18 February 2024

Contrary to the monochrome vision of Queen Victoria’s mourning dresses and the coal-polluted streets of Charles Dickens’ London, Victorian Britain was, in fact, a period of new and vivid colours. The Industrial Revolution had transformed the Victorians’ perception of colour and, over the course of the second half of the 19th century, it became the key signifier of modern life.

Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design charts the Victorians’ new attitudes to colour through a multidisciplinary exploration of culture, technology, art and literature. The catalogue explores key ‘chromatic’ moments that inspired Victorian artists and writers to think anew about the materiality of colour. Rebelling against the bleakness of the industrial present, these figures learned from the sacred colours of the past, the sumptuous colours of the Middle East and Japan and looked forward towards the decadent colours that defined the end of the century.

Section 1: Glowing Colour: Introduction; Ruskin and Colour Pedagogy; Turner, Ruskin and the Lure of Venetian Colour; The Colour of the Middle Ages; Unweaving the Rainbow: Nature’s Colours in Art and Fashion; Pretty Plant Photographers or Pioneering Women?; Object in Focus: Hummingbird Necklace by Harry Emanuel;

Section 2: Colour for All: The Aniline Revolution; The International Exhibition of 1862; Object in Focus: Technical Analysis of the Great Bookcase; Sculpture and Race; The Colours of the Ancient Past; Orientalism; Object in Focus: Joseph and his Brethren by Owen Jones; India and Colour;

Section 3: Colour for Colour’s Sake: The Colours of Decadence: Yellow, Green and Blue; Object in Focus: St. Mark’s Venice by James McNeill Whistler; Queering Colour; Object in Focus: Tanagra; Object in Focus: Japanese Boardgame; Loie Fuller.

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