"Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington (1 September 1789 ? 4 June 1849) was an Irish novelist....[She and her husband] met Count D'Orsay (who had first become an intimate of Lady Blessington in London in 1821)... It was in Italy, on 1 December 1827, that Count D'Orsay married Harriet Gardiner, Lord Blessington's only daughter by his former wife. The Blessingtons and the newlywed couple moved to Paris towards the end of 1828, taking up residence...

A pioneering work in the movement to free art from its traditional bonds to material reality, this book is one of the most important documents in the history of modern art. Written by the famous nonobjective painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), it explains Kandinsky's own theory of painting and crystallizes the ideas that were influencing many other modern artists of the period. Along with his own ground-breaking paintings, this book had a tremendous...