A fascinating, consistently entertaining exploration into the exploding business of 19th-century art.
A noted historian weaves a brilliantly colorful tapestry.
From 1800, when George III still ruled, until the end of Victoria’s reign in 1901, Britain experienced dramatic social, political, economic, and cultural changes, resulting from the advent and expansion of the Industrial Revolution. Art historian and biographer Hamilton (University Curator and Honorary Reader in the History of Art/Univ. of Birmingham; London Lights: The Minds that Moved the City that Shook the World, 2007, etc.) offers an enthralling, densely detailed examination of the impact of these changes on the art world, populating his narrative with more than 150 painters, sculptors, dealers, collectors, engravers, publishers, writers, architects, and providers of artists’ materials, such as chemists (who created colors), suppliers of marble, and manufacturers of pen nibs. It’s likely that many of his huge cast of characters will not be familiar to readers, but Hamilton’s deft portraits bring them to life: Benjamin Robert Haydon, “vain, debt-ridden, self-destructive,” who insisted on painting historical narratives at a time when that genre was on the wane; the “charming, generous, loving” John Varley, a venerated teacher and popular watercolorist, whose financial woes landed him in debtors prison; the indomitable Maria Graham, a multilingual explorer of “untrodden paths,” whose marriage to artist Augustus Wall Callcott allowed her to reinvent herself “as an influential opinion-former and a distinguished, gregarious, and independent woman of letters.” Hamilton gives prominence to his former biographical subjects J.M.W. Turner, a savvy and successful marketer of his works; and Michael Faraday, who improved image reproduction of steel-plate engraving and lithography and contributed to the creation of a new paint color, Prussian blue. The book is organized according to participants’ roles, which include not only creators of art, but also the patrons who supported them, the dealers who exhibited and sold their works, and the engravers who reproduced their work for mass consumption.
A fascinating, consistently entertaining exploration into the exploding business of 19th-century art.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-870-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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