A dictionary of art and artists [antikvár]

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION The purpose of this Dictionary is to act as a companion to the inquiring gallery visitor, and, we hope, to serve as a useful quick reference book. We have restricted the scope to the arts of painting, sculpture, and en-graving in Western Europe and North America, and to a period begin-ning about the year 1300 and continuing up to the present day. One good reason for this restriction is that we are almost totally ignorant of the arts of other periods and places; since writing this book we have come to realize that we have a restricted knowledge of the field we have under-taken to cover. Like the companion Dictionary of Music in this series we have to combine articles on technical terms and processes with bio-graphies of as many artists as possible, and we decided to try to cover all the technical terms, processes, and artistic movements as fully as we could, even at the expense of biographies. There have been many thousands of painters and sculptors in the last six centuries and most of them are in that monument of scholarship Thieme and Becker's Allgemeines Kiinstlerlexikon in forty-odd large volumes. There is one exception to our desire to give a definition for all technical terms, and that is when it is already adequately defined - even in the technical sense - in a normál English Dictionary (we have used the Concise Oxford): examples of this are 'Vignette', 'Diorama', or 'Re-table'. Where a definition seemed to us not to cover a common usage in the arts we have given it here. In the biographical articles our aim has been threefold. We have tried, first, to give the dates of birth and death, or known activity, and such other dates as seemed important for an understanding of an artist's career. Next, we have tried to give the reader somé idea of what his works look like, usually by relating them to other and perhaps better-known artists by means of frequent cross-references. Thirdly, we have given, in most cases, a list of museums which have pictures or sculpture by him. These lists are not intended to be exhaustive or critical. We have obviously tended to include museums in Great Britain or the United States and to omit those in Russia or, say, Bulgaria. For equally obvious reasons we have not mentioned pictures in priváté collections unless they are crucial to the artist's development, but this is very rare indeed. As far as we know, the pictures stated to be in a given museum are in that museum, but this is less simple than it sounds, for many museums are still recovering from the War and no modern catalogue is available, while others - such as the National and Tate Galleries in London -seem to play a constant game of musical chairs with their possessions.