This volume contains four books in "Variations on Twelve Themes", "The Language of Painting", "Materials and Methods of Painting", and "Looking at Paintings." This invaluable reference for anybody interested in the arts is illustrated throughout with hundreds of full-color and black & white pictures.
Sir David Towry Piper CBE FSA FRSL (21 July 1918 – 29 December 1990) was a British museum curator and author. He was director of the National Portrait Gallery & Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford.
Under the pseudonym Peter Towry, Piper wrote a number of novels, including Trial by Battle (1959), a story based on his experiences as an officer in the Indian army, training in Bangalore and then seeing action against the Imperial Japanese Army in Malaya during World War II. He was subsequently a prisoner of war in Japan for three years.
A number of different people writing about different specific items of art from their own perspectives, followed by biography and history of the picture.