The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars – A Times Best Art Book of 2022

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The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars – A Times Best Art Book of 2022

The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars – A Times Best Art Book of 2022

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Frances Spalding is an art historian, critic and leading authority on 20th-century British art. Her books include acclaimed biographies of Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, John Minton, Duncan Grant, Gwen Raverat and John and Myfanwy Piper, as well as a biography of the poet Stevie Smith. She is Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, a Fellow of the Royal

The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars

The Real and the Romantic' is a valuable if somewhat impressionistic review of British art between the two world wars with a decent selection of illustrations and an easy style that makes it a pleasure to read. Cashel is not a real person, of course, although Boyd does his best to convince us that he is. The book is presented as a biography, complete with footnotes, pieced together from a bundle of letters, notes, maps and photographs which apparently fell into Boyd’s hands several years ago. It’s not a new idea, but it’s very cleverly done here and I can almost guarantee that you’ll be googling things to see if they’re true, even while knowing that they can’t possibly be! Cashel Ross was amongst other things, a soldier, writer and felon who fought at Waterloo. He died in 1882 but left very little evidence of his life, a few autobiographical notes, letters and bills etc. Not having enough information to complete a biography William Boyd has written a fictional account of his life based on that material. He is to become a commissioned army officer in the East India Company in Madras, but taking a moral stand in Ceylon has him return to explore Europe, and to write about his travels. In Pisa and Lerici, he meets and gets to know Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord 'Albe' Byron and Claire Clairemont, becoming privy to the tangle of intrigue and rivalries within the group. He encounters the love of his life in Ravenna, unavailable, a passionate love which will endure, despite barely seeing each other through the years once he leaves Italy. Whilst becoming a successful author, he is swindled by his publisher, which lands him in debtor's prison, only to embark on a new life in America on release, then go on a expedition to find the source of the Nile, there he meets Richard Burton. He is to get caught up in a Greek antiquities scandal as the Nicaraguan Consul in Trieste, this puts hims in such danger that he goes in hiding in Venice.

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Alan Bennett recalls in the film how he discovered Ravilious through a reproduction Train Landscape in a school classroom in the mid-1940s. The watercolour painting formed part of a series of 'Chalk Figures' completed after his last one-man show in the spring of 1939, and although never formally exhibited, the Leicester Galleries in London arranged for the sale of three of them into public collections. Literature, music and songs of the Tudor and Jacobean period were in vogue, and helped to lead artists from T. S. Eliot to Michael Tippett away from the lushness of the Victorians to a leaner mode of expression. The 21st century has seen a surge of interest in English art of the interwar years. Women artists, such as Winifred Knights, Frances Hodgkins and Evelyn Dunbar, have come to the fore, while familiar names – Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Stanley Spencer – have reached new audiences. High-profile exhibitions have attracted recordbreaking visitor numbers and challenged received opinion. In The Real and the Romantic, Frances Spalding, one of Britain’s leading art historians and critics, takes a fresh and timely look at this rich period in English art. In The Romantic we follow the life of Cashel Greville Ross who, you might be forgiven for thinking, was a real person, such is the mastery of Boyd's work. Ross begins life ignominiously enough but he makes the most of the opportunities that come his way. Although I can't help thinking that things happen to Mr Ross rather than him making them occur. In fact when he does have an idea of how to proceed in life it invariably means disaster to some extent.

Romantic by William Boyd review – a fine ‘whole life The Romantic by William Boyd review – a fine ‘whole life

The hero of the novel spends his early childhood in Ireland and his birth is surrounded with mystery… Now he is in England and goes to school there… He runs away from home… He is a young brave soldier… He’s wounded in the battle… He is a lieutenant in the Indian army… He is obliged to leave… The historical events described are sketched not painted, and are with the exception of the 3rd Kandian War familar to me: Boyd's sketches offered nothing new cf. The Flashman Papers. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. The truth behind Eliza’s insistence that she is better off now is clear to see in her music, the proof being very much in the pudding with her new album, A Real Romantic. This is nine songs of smoky R’n’B performed in the basement of a Camden bar, of jazzy beats and blurry vocals, a patchwork collage of living and loving in London, the city where Eliza was born and bred. “I see people come from other places and they’re culturally overwhelmed by London”, she explains, “it’s addictive, it’s a special special city and nothing can replace it.” Two strong women become central to the story; Contessa Raphaella Rezzo; and widow Mrs Frances (Frannie) Broome. Both women are interesting but from their character descriptions, and their actions, it becomes difficult to differentiate between the two, who occupy different parts of the world, and the narrative. Boyd uses the description ‘cavaliere servante’ to describe Raphaella.Chapter 5 explores the movement towards more abstract modern art, looking at Work by Wyndham Lewis, Winifred Nicholson and then Ben Nicholson’s slow move from realist to more abstract art. Winifred Knights The Deluge is mentioned here, but just this single work by this artist. As is inevitable in an overview of a period such as this, I kept feeling that the analysis of artist’s work was too fleeting, and it was also sometimes difficult to follow an artist’s inclusion in a particular chapter rather than another. This made it an engaging read, and renewed my intention of reading monographs on more of the artists discussed, so I am glad to have read this book. However, although more limited in scope, I found both Sybil Cyril: Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews, Artists Together, 1920–1943 by Jenny Uglow and Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris more satisfying reads. After a brief introduction, setting out Spurling’s vision of the plurality of British visual art in the inter-war period, she sets out trends and movements in twelve chapters. Veteran biographer Frances Spalding, known for her insightful books on the early British Modernists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry, turns her penetrating gaze on the interwar years' I felt that I knew what Boyd was going to describe, and how the life of the protagonist would turn out. I was also conscious that in a (literary) world that has changed enormously in the last twenty years, the characterisations were a bit dated and focused on too limiting a view of history. An early example when a young man is seduced by a randy housekeeper was flat. There’s schoolboy masturbation; there’s extraordinary fortune smiling on our main man in whatever predicament presents itself. Boys own stuff.

romantic : the real life of Cashel Greville Ross : a novel The romantic : the real life of Cashel Greville Ross : a novel

The life of Cashel Greville Ross encompasses taking part in the battle of Waterloo, hanging out with Shelley and Byron in Italy, prison in London, running a brewery in New England, exploring Africa and being a consul in Trieste. His life begins in 1799 and stretches to the advent of the modern age in the late Nineteenth century. Ross, the illegitimate son of the big house, a drummer boy at Waterloo, an officer in the Indian Army refusing to carry out an atrocity, by his late twenties he has partied with Byron and the Shelleys in Italy, had a frenzied affair with an Italian noblewoman, published his first novel, been defrauded, imprisoned for debt and emigrated to the United States to build an ideal community. With his loyal servant Ignatz, he starts the first Lager brewery in America, marries, fathers two daughters, attempts to find the source of the Nile, begins a feud with Burton and Speke, becomes a Consul in Trieste, meets again the love of his youth, Countess Raphaella, but perhaps, all too late. The fictional biography is my favourite genre. I suppose that's why I somewhat surprisingly enjoyed reading Daniel Defoe. And it's good to see the genre is now getting some popular traction; The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is a whole life novel. But the first modern example I read was Boyd's Any Human Heart, a book which must be in my lifetime top ten. If I hadn't been so excited about Boyd writing another, set this time in the 19th century, I wouldn't be so disappointed now. She covers movements, revivals, trends and individual artists from Stanley Spencer to Paul Nash, from the shunning of Picasso by the English art scene to Ben Nicholson's move to abstraction. She provides as much as she can on women artists, who were often overlooked; Sybil Andrews, Dora Carrington, Gwen John and Winifred Nicholson feature here.A scholarly yet always readable and fascinating account of the major trends in art between the two world wars. Spalding takes us from Lutyens and war memorials to abstraction and the eve of the Second World War. The writing is a joy and Boyd has that skill of conjuring the sights and sounds of place and time that effortlessly transports the reader. Though this is quite a lengthy book I just didn’t want it to end. In the years leading up to his death, Ravilious told his friends how dissatisfied he was becoming with his work. It was a form of mid-life crisis, no doubt, that he could have resolved had he lived longer, yet the curtailment of his life places him precisely within an epoch. If we take the title of Frances Spalding's book, he contrives to be both Real and Romantic simultaneously, yet the romanticism is all the stronger for its understatement and its anchorage to realism.

The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars

The Romantic is certainly one of those. I absolutely adored this story and it goes up there as one of my books of the year.Frances Spalding describes, with the maximum of insight and minimum of fuss, the myriad ways English painters and sculptors responded to the challenge of making art in the aftermath of the First World War. She employs both major and minor names – from Paul Nash to Winifred Knights – to reveal the interwar years as a time of unexpected invention and stylistic fecundity' A gloriously old-fashioned and sumptuous read. William Boyd is as good as ever as he ages. He's now in his Seventies and his writing is as fine as ever. This is a "whole life" novel telling the fictional story of Cashel Greville Ross, whose long life spans the 19th Century. The twenty-first century has seen a surge of interest in English art from the interwar years, and the value of work by artists such as Stanley Spencer and Eric Ravilious has soared in value. New critical attention focuses on other artists, often women, who were previously overlooked, such as Winifred Knights and Evelyn Dunbar, while encouraging a more nuanced understanding of the cultural landscape of the 1920s and ’30s. With these new perspectives in mind, The Real and the Romantic takes a fresh look at this richly diverse period in English art.



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