A History of Art for Beginners and Students

Readers with no formal training in the fine arts were the audience Clara Erskine Clement had in mind for this 1887 survey, issued by Frederick A. Stokes. The title page advertises painting, sculpture, and architecture, but this volume covers sculpture alone; companion volumes take the other two. Nine chapters carry the subject from Egypt and Assyria through Greece, ancient Italy, the medieval centuries, Renaissance Italy, and the workshops of Germany, France, England, and Spain, closing with Canova, Thorwaldsen, and sculptors living in her own day. Clement writes plainly and without hurry, more interested in helping a beginner see the work than in pressing an argument, and the edition carried a full index and numerous illustrations. Her dates are Victorian and some have since been revised, but as a first map of Western sculpture it still reads clearly.