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On May 8th, 1889, Vincent Van Gogh was admitted to a mental asylum near St.-Remy-de-Provence where he remained as a voluntary patient until May the following year. Throughout the year, Van Gogh enjoyed a continuous dialogue with his brother about his art, his mental condition, his hopes and ambitions, and from time to time his despair and sense of failure. The asylum year saw Vincent at his most raw and needy, but also at his most creative - turning out the equivalent of a masterpiece a day. This book offers an account, month by month, of that crucial penultimate chapter in Van Gogh s life. It is separated from the other chapters in the artist s life because although treated in all the numerous biographies it is none the less a self-contained episode, a play within a play, with a shape and dynamic of its own. Van Gogh s asylum year is unlike any other year in the long history of art."
Edwin Mullins has had a long and distinguished career as both an arts journalist and a presenter of TV arts programmes. In Search of Art is a collection of vividly told recollections of both his extraordinary adventures, visiting famous artists, and the discoveries he made when on assignments for indulgent newspaper editors in the days of generous budgets. Blessed with a prodigious memory, and fully armed with the notebooks and diaries he has always kept, he has included in this collection of true stories, some accounts which resemble very closely some of the situations in which William Boot found himself in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop.
A window into the lives and work of some of the biggest arts names of the 20th century, including Henry Moore, Salvador Dali, Alexander Calfer, L.S Lowry, Picasso, John Piper, Francis Bacon and Jean Cocteau.
Fifteenth-century painter Jan Van Eyck becomes a pawn in the hands of nefarious plotters in the court of Philip, Duke of Burgundy, but nonetheless manages to create a great masterwork, the Ghent altarpiece
In this book Edwin Mullins examines this very British affection in detail: he looks at the great tradition of English landscape painting and demonstrates how the inspiration of nature is reflected in the way the English use the land, in the creation of the small garden, and, on a larger scale, in the landscaped slopes of parkland surrounding the English country house.
Wallis was a semi-literate Cornish fisherman, a little mentally unbalanced and largely deaf, who took up painting at the age of seventy, never having received any tuition. He painted largely out of loneliness, selling his pictures for a few pence to anyone who wanted them. He died in a workhouse above Penzance at the age of eighty-seven. Wallis used to paint old scraps of cardboard, most of them oddly shaped and supplied by the local grocer. He insisted on using ship s paint, a medium which he understood, and he employed very few colours. His subject was usually the sea and boats - scenes he had known during his early days as an Atlantic seaman and offshore fisherman. Painting was for him a dip into the memories of the past. Despite his lack of training, during his lifetime Wallis had a few distinguished patrons, for the most part artists, scholars and museum officials, among whom were Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and H. S. Ede (then at the Tate Gallery)."
Provence owes its name to Julius Caesar who described the region as “the Province of Rome.” Edwin Mullins seeks out hidden traces of that ancient world along with the many spectacular monuments that today adorn the cities of Nîmes, Arles, Vienne, and Orange. He tells the story of how the Romans came to invade Provence, how they stayed to colonize it, and how they transformed Provençal cities into imitations of Rome. His narrative also tells how the Emperor Constantine brought about the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity from his favorite city of Arles—and how the Romans were eventually driven out by the Visigoths. Roman Provence is also a guide to the principal sites in the region as well as those rarely visited, with separate chapters on various Roman achievements: triumphal arches, aqueducts, farming, city life, bridges and road-building, temples and shrines, theaters and amphitheaters.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century anarchy in Italy led to the capital of the Christian world being moved from Rome for the first and only time in history. It was a critical moment, and it resulted in seven successive popes remaining in exile for the next seventy years. The city chosen to replace Rome was Avignon. And depending on where you stood at the time they were seventy years of heaven, or of hellopinions invariably ran to extremes, as did the behaviour of the popes themselves. It was during this period of exile that the city witnessed some of the most turbulent events in the history of Christendom, among them the suppression of the Knights Templar and the last of the heretical Cathars, the first onslaught of the Black Death, the final collapse of the crusading dream, and the first decades of the Hundred Years War between England and France, in which successive Avignon popes attempted to mediate.
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?THERE ARE FOUR ROADS LEADING TO SANTIAGO, WHICH COMBINE TO FORM A SINGLE ROAD? -- So begins The Pilgrim?s Guide, the world?s first guidebook. Written early in the twelfth century by Benedictine monks, it served travelers taking part in the great pilgrimage of the Middle Ages, to the tomb of the apostle St. James, the cousin of Christ, at Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. The four roads are all in France: from Paris in the north; from V�zelay in Burgundy; from Le Puy-en-Velay in the Massif Central; and from Arles in Provence?all threading their way across the country before joining as a single road in northern Spain. A step-by-step account of these four journeys through medieval F...