#000546
An Introduction to Great Artists
Mary Forrester
A compact, illustrated introduction to the Western canon of painting, aimed at the newcomer rather than the specialist. In a slim volume Mary Forrester profiles a parade of major artists — Giotto, Fra Angelico, the Van Eycks, Botticelli, Leonardo, Dürer, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, El Greco, Rubens, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Constable, and Monet — pairing brief biographical and stylistic essays with color plates. The result is a gateway book: enough context to place each master in his moment, enough reproduction to let the eye do the rest. Published in the mid-1960s as part of a wave of accessible popular art surveys, it makes no claim to scholarly depth, but it offers the beginning viewer a friendly, well-chosen orientation to roughly six centuries of European painting, from the early Italian Renaissance to the threshold of Impressionism.
more…less ▴
The author
Mary Forrester is credited as the author of this popular art survey; like many writers of mid-century introductory art books, she is remembered chiefly through the work itself rather than a large public profile. The book presents her as a clear, unfussy guide for general readers.
The book
An Introduction to Great Artists was published in 1965 as a short illustrated volume — roughly 124 pages — with a color frontispiece and plates throughout. Its structure is straightforward: a sequence of concise chapters, each devoted to one master, tracing the line from Giotto and the early Renaissance through Rembrandt and Velázquez to Constable and Monet.
How it reads
As an introduction it holds up as far as it goes. The selection is conservative and canonical — all European, all men, all pre-modern — which reflects the settled taste of the period rather than how art history is framed today, with its wider attention to women artists, non-Western traditions, and the twentieth century. Taken for what it is, a beginner's orientation, it remains a pleasant and legible on-ramp.
For more context
For a fuller and more current survey, pair it with Gombrich's The Story of Art or Janson's History of Art.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Mary Forrester
- Year
- 1965
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Colorado