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Rex Whistler was one of the most intriguing artists of the interwar years. His career lasted only from 1925 until his tragically early death in the Second World War, when he was thirty-nine. But in those two decades he established himself as an artist in many different fields, and especially as the outstanding mural painter of the period. His first big mural, painted while he was still a student at the Slade School of Art, was for the Tate Gallery restaurant. He went on to paint many others, including those at Port Lympne in Kent, Dorneywood in Buckinghamshire and - his masterpiece - Plas Newydd on the Isle of Anglesey. He was also an acclaimed portrait painter, of people and of their houses...
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"A vivid and moving account of the remarkable relationship between the writer Edith Olivier and the young artist Rex Whistler The winter of 1924: Edith Olivier, alone for the first time at the age of fifty-one, thought her life had come to an end. For Rex Whistler, a nineteen-year-old art student, life was just beginning. Together, they embarked on an intimate and unlikely friendship that would transform their lives. Gradually Edith's world opened up and she became a writer. Her home, the Daye House, in a wooded corner of the Wilton estate, became a sanctuary for Whistler and the other brilliant and beautiful younger men of her circle: among them Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Tennant, William Walton, John Betjeman, the Sitwells and Cecil Beaton - for whom she was 'all the muses'. Set against a backdrop of the madcap parties of the 1920s, the sophistication of the 1930s and the drama and austerity of the Second World War and with an extraordinary cast of friends and acquaintances, Anna Thomasson brings to life, for the first time, the fascinating, and curious, friendship of a bluestocking and a bright young thing"--Publisher's description.
Desert Islands opens with a captivating essay on the romance of islands and castaways in literature and life, and the associations that have arisen in the imagination of readers in every generation. The essay leads on to over 200 pages of what de la Mare himself calls 'a rambling commentary', in the form of an anthology or commonplace book on every conceivable aspect of this teeming subject. There are notes, reflections and quotations from a lifetime's reading on wrecks, maroons, pirates, utopias, goats, hallucinations, exotic foods, misers, punishments, solitude , Darwin, parrots, idols, saints, hermits, maps, spices, drugs . . . and of course Daniel Defoe. Desert Islands is the perfect bedside or holiday book. It also playfully boasts a subtitle of rococo inventiveness and one of the longest you will ever read! 'A vast treasure chest, a bewildering collection . . . to dazzle and fascinate everyone who lifts the lid.' Geoffrey Grigson
Hugh and Mirabel Cecil have written many books and bibliographies including In Search of Rex Whistler His Life and His Work, published in 2012. Mirabel Cecil has also written for The Times, started a design page for Country Life and was one of the first contributors to The World of Interiors. Historian Hugh Cecil is an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Leeds and trustee and co-founder of the Second World War Experience Centre in Leeds. His numerous publications include The Flower of Battle: How Britain Wrote the Great War, At the Eleventh Hour, and Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced.The renowned artist Rex Whistler (1905-44) painted what would be his final large-scale mural at Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire.Between 1938 and 1939 he worked in the imposing drawing room of the house for the owners Mr and Mrs Gilbert Russell. Hecreated a memorably romantic 'Gothick' mural, covering every part of the walls with subtle decorations; the climax is the trompe l'oeil 'smoking urn'.