I just spent a week’s vacation in Italy. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, but I wish I could afford to take a fall trip to London as well. Just about every major museum in the English capital is holding an exhibition I would give my eye teeth to see. Instead I’m going to have to console myself back home in New York with the catalog for each show. Thankfully, these volumes are so handsomely and intelligently produced that paging through them is the next best thing to being there.
1. John Constable: The Making of a Master (V&A, $50), by curator Mark Evans, is the companion to an exhibition of the same name that runs until January 11, 2015, at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The book and the show focus on the great landscape painter’s debt to Old Masters such as Rubens, Rembrandt, and Claude Lorrain, and include his transporting oil sketches, painted in the open air, capturing the effects of weather and light on the English countryside.