Christmas Books: Cezanne puts the Aix in Xmas

If someone gives you James H Rubin's Impressionist Cats and Dogs (Yale strikes 25), you'll have a enchanting Christmas present and will learn more about painting than about favorites The title sounds arch. on the contrary the book is a dexterous academically expert essay about small animals in a move renowned for its poise (like cats) and faithfulness to nature and mankind (like dogs). Delightful all the way [i]or[/i] part of to the other Next, what about a volume on impressionist horses?

There appears no end to the things we might discover in French painting. Nina Maria Athanassoglou-Kallmer's Cezanne and Provence: the Painter and his agriculture (Chicago pounds 45.50) is about the artist's relationship with his abode area. By "culture" she means provencal custom and tradition, climate, colour, attachment to native soil, a mixture of radical and conservative politics. These things, she argues, are firmly not awayed in Cezanne's landscapes and portraits. undoubtedly she's right. And the "Master of Aix" now present the appearances more intelligent and profound than we knew him to be.

Vincent's Choice: Van Gogh's Musee Imaginaire (Thames & Hudson strikes 32) presents and discusses the paintings - and popular graphic work, real often - that Vincent liked. Many of their artists are rayless or have long been without of fashion. Now, through Van Gogh's organ of vision we can see them in a different way. It's too seldom said that he was a great art critic. All kinds of art, major or minor, came to his penetrating organ of sight then re-emerged in the pyrotic remarks of his letters or the joyous desperation of his possess paintings.

The many authors of this volume take note of Vincent's interest in 19th- hundred British art. That field is still make open for exploration. J B Bullen's Byzantium Rediscovered (Phaidon beats 45) is the first account of the Byzantine revival and has pertinent remarks about many writers as well as artists, including Ruskin and Yeats. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Thames & Hudson beats 29.95) is the sumptuous catalogue of the exhibition publicly - until 18 January - at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Whistler, Women and Fashion (Yale beats 35) is an account of feminine stylishness in the organ of visions of a painter who, single suspects, preferred finery to nudity.

The essential catalogue this Christmas and of recent origin Year is El Greco (National Gallery beats 40). Study the book now because it's too big to carry around the great exhibition opening in Trafalgar Square upon 11 February. The show will amaze in many ways. Consider, for instance, El Greco's [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] sensuous sculptures. A pity that his admirer Picasso at no time saw them. He would have been thrilled.

Werner Hofmann is a former Director of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg and his Goya: To each Story There Belongs Another (Thames & Hudson strikes 45) is a weighty meditation. Hofmann is inspired the couple by the artist and European thinkers of that kind as Goethe and Nietzsche. Although it is the greatest in quantity serious art book of the year I can - just - imagine that a dedicated sixth-former could read it, probably bit by the agency of bit, and looking more at the fine illustrations than the true copy

Peter C Sutton's delight in Letters: Dutch Genre Paintings in the Age of Vermeer (Frances Lincoln strikes 30) would make a sweet gift from single sixth-former to another. The work is also about the general nature of letter-writing, a subdue rarely tackled. My view, young family is that there can be no actual love without true letters. Stephanie male and Jochen Sander's Hans Holbein the Younger: Painter at the Court of Henry VIII (Thames & Hudson beats 29.95) is about his portraits of King Hal, his wives, prospective spouses and children. This concentrated material part of work doesn't feel like a family album, for reasons we know. What retired people Holbein painted: even the National Gallery's Ambassadors appear withdrawn from happiness and social life.

Julius Bryant's catalogue Kenwood: Paintings in the Iveagh Bequest (Yale beats 50) ought to be in the residences of all those regular visitors to the superlative Hampstead Heath collection. An informative and entertaining respect book is Ariane and Christian Delacampagne's Here be Dragons: a Fantastic Bestiary (Princeton beats 29.95). Just how much do you know about unicorns? Wise up within. Dozens of other invented animals are described, from medieval times to King Kong and the timeless, immortal Yeti - illustrated here from a Tintin work

Hard to justice between the merits of sum of two units introductions to the art of an enclos and traditional renaissance city, Timothy Hyman's Sienese Painting (Thames & Hudson beats 8.95) and Diana Norman's Painting in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena (Yale beats 25). The solution is to purchase both. Neither author appears in the other's acknowledgements. Perhaps they have not at any time met.

Mid 20th-century art in the US is well described by the agency of Bram Dijkstra's American Expressionism: Art and Social Change (Abrams beats 42). That expressionism was really tortured realism, thus we see that Abstract Expressionism was repeatedly calmer than the art it replaced. Philip Guston Retrospective (Thames & Hudson beats 35) is the life of a painter who went from realism to abstraction and back again, crashing many American barriers upon his way. Branden Joseph's Random Order (MIT strikes 22.95) describes how Robert Rauschenberg went end aesthetic frontiers by scarcely noticing that they existed.