Recommendations from our site
“I was completely charmed by the scurrilous, sardonic, sarcastic and farcical account of the life of this very eccentric, miserly, unhappily married person who made portrait busts of eminent people such as the bibulous politician Charles James Fox. It’s a splendid book, with none of the pieties of standard art biographies. What makes these so irritating to my mind, and to my eyes, is that they often see more intellectual substance and indeed more cunning in painting than is actually there. Painting is a fundamentally straightforward practice. If you’re making portrait busts like Nollekens did, it’s practically a nine-to-five occupation and not something to be larded in mysticism.” Read more...
The best books on Lucian Freud
William Feaver, Artists & Art Critic
Our most recommended books
-
El «Cuaderno italiano», 1770-1786: los orígenes del arte de Goya
by Jesús Urrea Fernández & Manuela B. Mena Marqués -
The Andy Warhol Diaries
by Pat Hackett -
Emil and the Detectives
by Eileen Hall (translator) & Erich Kästner -
Private View: The Lively World of British Art
by Antony Armstrong-Jones (Lord Snowdon), Bryan Robertson & John Russell -
A Free House!: Or, The Artist as Craftsman
by Walter Richard Sickert -
Memoirs of the Life of John Constable: Composed Chiefly of His Letters
by C.R. Leslie
