How and why did painters centre sensory experience, enchanting emotions and cultural landscapes in South Asia? "A Splendid Land" is the first book to address this question through dazzling paintings made over a period of two hundred years that extends from Mughal to colonial India. The works have never been published or exhibited in the United States.

Founded in 1948, Hirmer Publishers soon established a name for art books produced to the highest standards. Over the past decade they have become equally well-known in English-speaking countries, with a reputation as one of the most prestigious publishers in this field. This survey of English titles from 2010 to 2020 encompasses a wealth of subjects across the centuries, from antiquity to the modern age.  

The 300th birthday of Empress Maria Theresia provides an opportunity to examine her outstanding interest in the fine arts. At the invitation of the reforming monarch a large number of painters, sculptors and other artists in Austria and abroad found a wealth of work opportunities. Correspondingly, this era has left its mark on the countries of the former Habsburg monarchy to this day.

With their overwhelming wealth of forms, prints of designs of historic ornaments are a source of boundless inspiration for graphic artists and designers. They also allow collectors and art historians to reliably date works and classify styles. This cornucopia of design, published here for the first time in English, contains the finest images from the famous, hitherto out-of-print, and seminal work by Rudolf Berliner.

When the exhibition that sparked the publication of this book opened in the artist’s home-town of Montpellier towards the end of 2010, it was hailed as the »rebirth of a 19th Century master« and the rediscovery of a great painter. Amazingly, this volume is the first comprehensive retrospective of the life and works of the artist.

The outstanding painting A Girl Reading by Camille Corot (1796–1875) is placed in the context of a selection of Corot’s paintings and drawings providing a key to his creative output in the genre of figure painting.