A comprehensive bibliography and exhibition chronology of the world's greatest museum of the decorative arts and design. The Victoria and Albert Museum, or South Kensington Museum as it used to be known, was founded by the British Government in 1852, out of the proceeds from the Great Exhibition of 1851. Like the Exhibition, it aimed to improve the expertise of designers, and the taste of the public, by exposing them to examples of good design from all countries and periods. 2,500 publications have to date been produced by, for, or in association with the V&A. The National Art Library, which is part of the Museum, has prepared this detailed catalogue, supplemented by a secondary list of 500 other books closely related to the V&A. The 1,500 exhibitions and displays recorded include those held in the main Museum and at its branches, the Bethnal Green Museum (now the National Museum of Childhood) and the Theatre Museum, Covent Garden, and additionally those it has organized at external venues, in Great Britain and abroad. The exhibitions and publications are fully cross-referenced, and there are name, title and subject indexes to the whole work, as well as an explanatory introduction.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

The distinction between 'Artist' and 'Scientist', so plain to our twenty-first-century eyes, had not fully evolved in the early and middle nineteenth century. In fact, it can be argued that there was barely a division at all, but a community of interchange and understanding, and palpable, constructive friendships between artists and 'natural philosophers', as scientists were called in the early nineteenth century.A central purpose of this book is to show something of the pattern of interchange between artists and scientists. From this starting point the contributors have tackled a fascinating range of subjects - the roots of Humphry Davy's visions and visionary writing; the strong scientific undertow in the paintings of John Martin; John Constable's knowledge of the Beaufort Scale at the time he painted his sky studies; the genesis of the portrait collections of learned societies in nineteenth-century London; and the work of Harriet Jane Moore, a shadowy figure in the worlds of art and science, but the painter of a unique series of watercolour interiors of Michael Faraday's laboratory at the Royal Institution.