Creation

Selected as a Best Art Book of the Year by the Sunday Times

Stonard traverses the sweep of human history, moving between cultures and hemispheres ... His book consists of myriad flashes of brilliance and inventiveness' Literary Review

'A worthy and richly illustrated successor to Ernst Gombrich's fabled The Story of Art' Sunday Times

'This bountifully illustrated book is a history of connections ... Lucid and thoughtful' Country Life

A fully illustrated, panoramic world history of art from ancient civilisation to the present day, exploring the remarkable endurance of humankind's creative impulse.

Some fifty thousand years ago, on an island in modern-day Indonesia, an early human used red ochre pigment to capture the likeness of a native pig on a limestone cave wall.

Around the same time, across the globe in Europe, another human retrieved a lump of charcoal from an old fire and sketched four galloping horses.

It was like a light turning on in the human mind.

Our instinct to produce images in response to nature allowed the earliest Homo sapiens to understand the world around us, and to thrive. Now, the art historian John-Paul Stonard has travelled across continents to take us on a panoramic journey through the history of art – from ancient Anatolian standing stones to a Qing Dynasty ink handscroll, from a drawing by a Kiowa artist from the Great Plains to a post-independence Congolese painting.

Lavishly illustrated throughout, with a mixture of black and white and full colour images, Creation is an ambitious, thrilling and landmark work that leads us from Benin to Belgium, China to Constantinople, Mexico to Mesopotamia. Journeying from pre-history to the present day, it explores the remarkable endurance of humankind's creative impulse, and asks how – and why – we create.

About the Author

John-Paul Stonard is a writer, art historian and member of the consultative committee of the Burlington Magazine, where he worked as an editor from 2005 to 2010. He completed a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art and has published widely in the fields of modern and contemporary art. His publications include Germany Divided: Baselitz and His Generation and Fault Lines: Art in Germany 1945-55. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Burlington Magazine and Apollo.