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
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The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso
by Dante Alighieri -
Private View: The Lively World of British Art
by Antony Armstrong-Jones (Lord Snowdon), Bryan Robertson & John Russell -
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy
by Mark Doty -
Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words
by Boel Westin -
Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation
by E.H. Gombrich -
A Free House!: Or, The Artist as Craftsman
by Walter Richard Sickert
