ART
A beautifully illustrated survey of the relationship between the development of books, the artist and Western pictorial art from the 15th to the 20th centuries
Jamie Camplin was editorial director at Thames & Hudson from 1979 to 2005, and managing director from 2005 to 2013. He is the author of The Rise of the Plutocrats: Wealth and Power in Edwardian England and 1914: The King Must Die. According to Michael Holroyd, in The Times, he writes with ‘skill and a wry romantic wit. I can see he is playing brilliantly.’ Maria Ranauro is a senior picture researcher at Thames & Hudson, and in January 2016 won the Longman-History Today Historical Picture Researcher of the Year award.
165 illustrations 24.0 x 16.5cm 256pp ISBN 978 0 500 252253 September £24.95
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‘BOOK LOVE’ AND THE HOME
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Books Do Furnish a Painting Jamie Camplin and Maria Ranauro ‘There is no writer … who is so much of a painter as Dickens’ Vincent van Gogh ‘I don’t invent it – really do not – but see it, and write it down’ Charles Dickens
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federico zndomeneghi’s Young Girl Reading (1880s) was another indication of the view that sensitivity and intelligence went with reading. The Venetian-born Zandomeneghi, unlike his fellow Italian artists, embraced the Impressionists, becoming friends with Degas and Renoir after going to Paris in 1874. guguin ws noT Being misleding when he once confessed that he had practised his art at the expense of his family. Nevertheless, about the time of this portrait of his favourite son, Clovis (c. 1886), he observed that Clovis was ‘a hero’, who ‘asks for nothing, not even to play, and goes to bed quietly’.
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picTure Tells many stories. For the American missionary the
Reverend Hollis Read, railing against Satan in 1872, the novels favoured by young women were ‘garbage’, full of ‘a moral poison’ and inciting ‘carnal passion’. For the artist – Winslow Homer, the bachelor of the three Homer brothers, here with The New Novel (1877) – there is the sense that this is the red- or blonde-haired girl he coveted in the 1870s. No one has convincingly identified her, but when she disappears from his work, he becomes reclusive and solitary, warding off biographers and becoming misanthropic. But the girl sees it differently; like so many others, she has the joy of a good book out of doors.
PERENNIAL PLEASURES IN MULTIPLE LOCATIONS
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What should you do at Christmas? In Edvard Munch’s Christmas in the Brothel, the artist depicts himself sleeping off the effects of drink while the Madame reads a book. Is it a girl or a boy who is denied control of the books in Renoir’s Portraits d’enfants? What was Gauguin hinting at when he painted Milton’s Paradise Lost into a portrait of a friend? And why were the Cumberland girls reading The Fashionable Lover in George Romney’s portrait of them? Thousands of fine paintings include books in their subject matter. Beginning with the question, ‘What is a book?’, this companionable survey explores the symbiotic relationship between the development of books and the emergence of our modern sense of the importance of the individual artist; it parades and interprets the work of many of the greatest artists of the last five hundred years; and it explains how and why books became the single most ubiquitous feature of our cultural lives and, in large measure, of our everyday existence. These paintings connect us with centuries of gender differences, religious systems, symbols, education, patterns of transport, social status, romance, the imagination of children, literary life, sex, friendship, civilized bathing, scientific discovery, aids to rest, aids to reflection, danger … Books tell us about ourselves – and they certainly do furnish a painting.