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

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A wonderful romp through the 19th century, mixing fact and fiction seamlessly. Our hero manages to, amongst other things, get involved in the Battle of Waterloo, mix with Byron and Shelley in Italy, help find the source of the River Nile, become the author of best selling books and have an 60 year love affair.

Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars - A Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars - A

Set against this refulgent blue surface are low-lying buildings of white coraline stone, interspersed with the vivid green of palm trees, tamarind and fig. Closer to shore, a mephitic stink becomes more evident – rotting fish and putrid mud, charcoal smoke and human filth, overlaid by the cloying perfume of cloves. The smell of Zanzibar. One hundred thousand people live on this small island, crammed into the noisome, narrow alleyways of the old town, and their effluvia is everywhere. Of Scottish descent, Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana on 7th March, 1952 and spent much of his early life there and in Nigeria where his mother was a teacher and his father, a doctor. Boyd was in Nigeria during the Biafran War, the brutal secessionist conflict which ran from 1967 to 1970 and it had a profound effect on him. She also gives context and historical depth to the various movements and this creates a rich narrative where you can see the art as a response to wider issues in the world.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. There was a push-me-pull-you tension about the British art scene between the two world wars, posits art historian Frances Spalding, in her fine new book The Real and the Romantic. It’s a great achievement by Boyd to produce this book and it’s thoroughly enjoyable with flashes of humour, warmth and fascinating insights into some interesting real- life characters like Byron and Richard Burton from the Nineteenth century. The great majority are held by the Imperial War Museum, although some were distributed to art galleries in different parts of Britain and in the former Empire. 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.

The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between - Waterstones The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between - Waterstones

Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’ As i finished the book, I found myself thinking at first that the end - Ross's death - felt a tad underwhelming. On reflection, though, I think the manner and location of his demise were really appropriate, reflecting the nature of his life, somewhat rootless and geographically random. It was right that he went that way. The Romantic is one of the books on the longlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023 but it had been on my RADAR long before that. The Romantic has been compared by other readers to one of William Boyd’s earlier books, Any Human Heart, which is also a ‘whole life’ story, albeit set in a different period. I haven’t read that book although it is on my virtual TBR pile. Cashel’s relationships with women tend to be interrupted by either his roving nature or his impetuosity. But there is one woman in particular with whom he becomes so besotted that their eventual parting becomes something that forever haunts him. This is a key theme that becomes a focus of his thoughts and actions as he reaches an age where he increasingly starts to reflect on his life. Can he eventually find happiness, or at least closure? This becomes something that I found had an emotional impact on me as I neared the end of this tale. I’d enjoyed it to this point but now I was somewhat obsessed about knowing how this would all conclude.It is exactly as shown, yet I think Ravilious must primarily have chosen subjects that worked for him as suggestive spatial compositions with a particular play of light. The objects and buildings in them were 'as found', and in this way certainly added a mood, just as they had done for other painters for centuries. A perfectionist, if he started a subject that didn't satisfy him, he usually tore up the paper – four times out of five, according to his wife, the artist Tirzah Garwood. I’m sitting with Eliza Caird (fka Doolittle, now just Eliza) in the restaurant of the Covent Garden Hotel, as she explains her transition from fresh-faced pop singer to the artist behind one of the rawest, smoothest albums of 2018. “I’m still super proud of the old stuff – I think I tapped into a side of me that I didn’t even know was there, and I’m really glad for it. But I always felt that there was something else I had to be doing. It was like being in a band, and then waking up and actually becoming a solo artist. Even though I kind of was a solo artist. That’s the best way I can put it. Do you want some nuts?” This was a wonderfully crafted cradle to grave story of Cashel Greville Ross. Written as a fictional biography Boyd weaves in true historical events and people giving us a insightful sweep into 19th century life spanning many countries and continents. I enjoyed reading about Ross as a character and all of his adventures and relationships. A great immersive story. Algernon Newton took technical inspiration from Canaletto, with works illustrated from 1929 and 1932 that “override time and movement, evoking something similar to T S Eliot’s ‘still point of the turning world’, a place‘where past and future are gathered’.” Figures such as Ravilious, Knights, Dunbar, Nash and Spencer re-interpreted Britain and its landscape for a new world, and this thoughtful and generously illustrated book charts their progress as well as the environment and society they sought to represent'

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

This is a slight frustration because, when she does look more deeply into the relationship between art and culture (as in the effect of war and immediate post-war depression and, more cursorily, the turn to politics in the late 1930s), she is very good indeed.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. 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. 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. 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 Real and the Romantic | Frances Spalding | London Review

I love those books with a big sweeping story you can just sink into and lose yourself. A bit like the literary version of a big comfy blanket in Autumn. But one thing that does stand out is that he never gives up. He doesn’t dwell on his misfortune but simple strides boldly on to the next adventure. He is a glass half full guy, a romantic. Is he ‘the worlds biggest preposterous romantic fool, or a man who knows what true love is.’ Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’Spalding brings new insights to familiar names … a layering and interweaving of ideas bring increasing depth and nuance to our understanding … alongside the revision and expansion of art historical narratives of the period, precisely what you expect from a writer of Spalding’s calibre, come nuggets of fascinating detail' 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. Drawn to War reveals that the work he left when he died was stored by his great friend Edward Bawden underneath a bed at his home in Great Bardfield until restored to his three children in 1972, the year of the first retrospective since his memorial exhibition. Boyd is a supremely accomplished writer and once again he’s delivered a novel that’s grabbed me and taken me on a rollercoaster ride in the company of a man I grew to like and eventually to care for. I truly enjoyed my journey with Cashel Greville Ross with its many adventures, twists and turns, over the course of the best part of a century.