What Art Can Tell Us About Love

Discover the love affairs that inspired art's greatest masterpieces.

Whether in the throes of passion, enduring the pain of unrequited love, or basking in the joy of a wonderfully supportive friendship, What Art Can Tell Us About Love explores the myriad ways love has influenced artists, shaped the work they created, and altered the course of art history.

Beautifully illustrated with full-colour photographs of more than 70 artworks, this guide looks at how artists have painted, sketched and modelled their lovers - and how the theme of love has found its way into a broad range of works, from landscapes to still-life and self-portraits.

Artists include: Caravaggio, Georgia O'Keeffe, Sarah Bernhardt, Picasso, Rembrandt, Frida Kahlo, Tamara de Lempicka, Clifford Prince-King, Chagall, Lotte Laserstein and Niki de Saint Phalle.

What can art tell us about love? Holding a light to the secret desires and long-standing love affairs that inspired famous artists from Rembrandt to Frida Kahlo, this thoughtfully curated book by art historian Nick Trend is as fascinating as it is gorgeous Red magazine
Trend structures his accessible and entertaining book according to degrees of complexity, from husband-and-wife 'teams' to illicit lovers and secret affairs to strange threesomes and unrequited passions. His insights are always illuminating . . . [and he] makes it huge fun to know all the gossip -- Bel Mooney Mail on Sunday
Entertaining . . . Nick Trend's exuberant new book, What Art Can Tell Us About Love [is] a canter through art history's brush with the romantic, the erotic and the heartbroken, from Botticelli's Venus to Pauline Boty's collages for Peter Blake -- Francesca Peacock Daily Telegraph
Trend has authored a book of love stories, and how love can be fulfilled in different circumstances . . . This is a book that relates to people, how relationships are formed to survive or die, from first meetings to last embraces . . . remarkable relationships depicted in art, are unveiled with fascinating insights in Trend's book; insights that add far more than academic understanding that contribute to one's appreciation of these artists' great works -- Rosalind Ormiston The Arbutarian
When in love, or looking for it we turn instinctively to music, poetry and films. But, contends Nick Trend, we would do better to look at paintings . . . Trend spans the amorous range, from the unrequited and secret entanglements to love triangles and serial lovers, and his selections are illuminating not just about the paintings that grew from these charged circumstances but also about the states they describe . . . art, Trend elegantly demonstrates, is love's preservative. -- Michael Prodger New Statesman

Nick Trend is a journalist and art historian. As Chief Culture Editor for the travel desk of the Daily Telegraph, he has spent nearly three decades writing about the world's art treasures and has produced guides to many of the greatest museums and art collections. He has also worked on the curatorial staff at the National Gallery in London and has a degree in English Literature from Cambridge and a PhD in Art History from the University of East Anglia.

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