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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Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel
by Ruth Bernard Yeazell -
The Lives of the Artists
by Giorgio Vasari -
de Kooning: An American Master
by Annalyn Swan & Mark Stevens -
The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art
by Joseph Leo Koerner -
The Arts and Man
by Raymond S. Stites -
El «Cuaderno italiano», 1770-1786: los orígenes del arte de Goya
by Jesús Urrea Fernández & Manuela B. Mena Marqués
