Name: Portrait of a Muse
Brand: Gailey Andrew
Price: 40.0 USD
Availability: InStock

Gailey Andrew

Portrait of a Muse

$40.00

The first biography of Frances Graham, the muse of leading Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones for the last 25 years of his life. In a discreet, subtle, human way, her life is a study in power – artistic, social, political, familial, local – and all the more fascinating for being played out from a perennial position of weakness. 'The Portrait of a Muse' is the tale of a remarkable woman living in an age on the cusp of modernity. 75 illustrations.

Nigel Daly

The Lost Pre-Raphaelite

$40.00

When the author bought a falling down fortified house on the Staffordshire moorlands, he had no reason to anticipate the astonishing tale that would unfold as it was restored. A mysterious set of relationships emerged amongst its former owners, revolving round the almost forgotten artist, Robert Bateman, a prominent Pre-Raphaelite and friend of Burne Jones. He was to marry the granddaughter of the Earl of Carlisle, and to be associated with Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, and other prominent political and artistic figures.

But he had abandoned his life as an artist in mid-career to live as a recluse, and his rich and glamorous wife-to-be had married the local vicar, already in his sixties and shortly to die. The discovery of two clearly autobiographical paintings led to an utterly absorbing forensic investigation into Bateman's life.

The story moves from Staffordshire to Lahore, to Canada, Wyoming, and then, via Buffalo Bill, to Peru and back to England. It leads to the improbable respectability of Imperial Tobacco in Bristol, and then, less respectably, to a car park in Stoke-on-Trent. En route the author pieces together an astonishing and deeply moving story of love and loss, of art and politics, of morality and hypocrisy, of family secrets concealed but never quite completely obscured. The result is a page-turning combination of detective story and tale of human frailty, endeavor, and love. It is also a portrait of a significant artist, a reassessment of whose work is long overdue.

Nigel Daly is an antique dealer and house restorer.

Grylls Vaughan

Have You Come Far?

$27.50

We have all squirmed at an uncomfortable interview. Vaughan Grylls has squirmed at more than most. Having had more interviews in his lifetime than anyone should reasonably expect, Grylls, with exemplary powers of recall, recounts hilarious and often poignant years of painful interviews. They range from childhood interviews for schools, and then for colleges, for university jobs, for newspapers, and even for the sack. But Grylls has been on the other side of the desk as well, as a teacher and finally as the director of an art college, and this experience gives him a perspective on these excruciating rites of passage. In this entertaining and enlightening expose of the interview room, Grylls shows us all, at whatever age, what not to do.

Both an entertaining account of the life and work of a successful artist and educator who has held senior posts (and been interviewed for others) in both Ivy League and Cambridge Colleges as well as more modest institutions, and also a self-help book for anyone anticipating or planning for an interview. The life lessons are gently imparted with humor and sensitivity, while the critique of educational practice and the decline of the educational ideal is coruscating and vivid.

Davidson Keir

O Joy for me!

$30.00

Until the mid-eighteenth century, Britain’s barren mountains were regarded with fear by all thoughtful people. The romantic movement, with its cult of the ‘sublime’ and of the ‘picturesque’, modified this perception, and the mountainous regions of Wales, the Lake District, and even Scotland, became fashionable to visit and to admire for their ‘beauty, horror and immensity’.

But these tourists never left the well-beaten and recommended path. They did not venture into the hills themselves. Only miners and quarrymen, or shepherds with sheep to find, or pack-horse drivers did that. And when the first eccentric visitors asked to be guided to the summits the locals were amazed and bemused.

When Coleridge, wild, unconventional and physically fearless, arrived to join the Wordsworths in the Lakes in 1799, he immediately set out onto the high fells on his own. His records of these explorations, in his notes and in letters, particularly to his beloved but unattainable Sara Hutchinson, provide a totally new and modern appreciation and understanding of the mountain landscape.

Helvellyn, Skiddaw and most of the now popular summits were visited by him alone, without maps or any equipment beyond his notebook in which he scribbled his impressions and his reactions—‘O joy for me’ he jotted on first seeing Ullswater from the top of Great Dodd. It was not till the very end of the nineteenth century that solitary walking on the fells became acceptable, and then, almost overnight, universally popular and fashionable.

This book explores and explains the experiences of a true pioneer and one of Britain’s greatest and most remarkable creative spirits.

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Midway

$40.00

Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) was one of Scotland's leading twentieth-century public intellectuals, and famously one of its most brilliant and combative correspondents. His letters raise issues of particular and widespread interest both within Scotland and further afield. His correspondence with Stephen Bann, the English poet and academic, have a very special place in this context. These letters present in a clear and commensurable form the development of his ideas about poetry and art, and increasingly about sculpture and gardening, over this critical five-year period of his creative life.

The letters begin when Bann was still a student at Cambridge, and Finlay was living in considerable hardship in Edinburgh, though he already had a significant international reputation as a poet. They reveal in fascinating and intimate detail the poet's developing creative process, and also record his often turbulent relationship to the worlds of literature, art, and critical journalism. When he settles in Lanarkshire, he begins to develop the ideas that will result in the creation of the world-famous sculpture garden known as Little Sparta.

This book, edited, introduced, and annotated by Bann himself, is a unique and compelling self-portrait of the man who is now recognized not only as a great poet, but also as a major artist and one of the most original garden designers of modern times.

Stephen Bann is a poet, historian, and cultural critic. He is an emeritus professor of the history of art at Bristol University, and the author of numerous books and articles.