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Sewn as issued, pictorial wrappers with flaps. Very fine. London, V & A Publications, 2004. 4to. 28,7 x 25 cms. 168 pp. Illustrated with colour photographs throughout. With bibliography and index. (Publisher:) "This book tells the story of design and the decorative arts in Britain from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the eighteenth century. It is the story of a remarkable transformation, which embraced design and the decorative arts in all their rich diversity. At the start of the sixteenth century, Britain played a peripheral role in the affairs of Europe. The great centres of European design and decorative art, as of wealth and power, lay to the south and to the east. It was beautiful things created in the workshops of Venice and Florence, Antwerp and Paris that were coveted in Britain, not those made in London or Edinburgh. Two hundred years later, in Queen Anne's reign, all this had changed. Britain was well on the way to becoming Europe's most successful commercial economy and British design and decorative art were no longer provincial. From furniture to fabrics, prints to pottery, British designers and craftspeople began to match their most eminent European rivals. Lavishly illustrated and unmatched in its coverage, this book explores design and the decorative arts from a number of points of view. It assesses their place in the wider history of Tudor and Stuart Britain. It examines style, the question of how things looked. It asks who led taste; who decided what was to be considered beautiful, fashionable and desirable. It looks at how fashionable things - from houses to clothing - were used. It asks what was new, examining new products and innovations in the ways they were made. Together, the chapters provide a fascinating picture of design and the decorative arts in Tudor and Stuart Britain. Written and edited by Michael Snodin and John Styles of the Victoria and Albert Museum, with additional contributions from a number of specialists who have worked at the Museum, the book complements the Tudor and Stuart sections of the V&A's new British Galleries, 1500-1900. It benefits from the V&A's unequalled resources for the study of design and the decorative arts. Over three hundred colour illustrations are drawn mostly from the Museum's collections".
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