John Player Art of Cricket

Martin Secker & Warburg in association with Imperial Tobacco Limited, London, first edition, 1983. Laminated illustrated wrappers, 4to, 28 cm,. xi, 250 pp, 32 colour plates, 120 black-and-white ills. 163 entries. From the preface: "It would have been surprising if the national ..had not left its stamp upon English art, especially when one considers the beauty and the grace of cricket: yet its manifold reflections in painting, the graphic arts and sculpture have hitherto received very little attention, let alone systematic study. It is the purpose of the present book to try to remedy this deficiency, and at the same time to offer to the cricket - lover and the art - lover alike what we believe to be a unique anthology of illustrations, many of which have never been published before. We have confined our attention, in the main, to cricket art in Great Britain, although some consideration has been given to a few pictures and drawings relating to cricket as played on the Continent and in America..The book is principally concerned with the art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and therefore we have not included more than a token representation of modern .. The Catalogue supplies details concerning almost all the examples of cricket art discussed in the introductory narrative. It also includes further works especially paintings - which had to be omitted from our historical account. It makes no claim to completeness, but it does comprise nearly all the examples of cricket art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that we have found most interesting. We have, however, excluded a large number of representations of cricket subjects and portraits of cricketers which seemed to us to fall more into the category of the historical record than of the work of art. " Published to coincide with an exhibition held at the Fine Arts Society Galleries in London, the York Art Gallery and the University Art Gallery at Nottingham. Near Very Good.