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“... her eyes are dead and she wears the strained smile of a woman who really wants to tell the painter to bugger off. One critic said perceptively that she appeared ‘weary of being looked at’. Another that the portrait might pass muster as the cover of a Catherine Cookson novel: an opinion I find thought-provoking, as Cookson’s simple tales of poor ...”

“... the always dependable Shakespeare and Michelangelo, Whitman, Marlowe and Henry Scott Tuke, the painter of bathing boys. Three or four are mere suspects, followed by question marks: Samuel Butler? Luca Signorelli? Forster had presumably seen those great paeans to the male buttocks, Signorelli’s frescoes in Orvieto cathedral, and come to an irresistible ...”

“... final version of The Dunciad. I have heard Mr Richardson relate that he attended his father the painter on a visit, when one of Cibber’s pamphlets came into the hands of Pope, who said, ‘These things are my diversion.’ They sat by him while he perused it, and saw his features writhen with anguish; and young Mr Richardson said to his father, when they ...”

“... to Europe. He worked for a time in the studio of John La Farge and might have become a talented painter; he went with Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition to the Amazon; he received a degree in medicine from Harvard, where, despite his abhorrence of laboratory work and mostly to please his father, he instructed in anatomy and physiology, until at ...”

“... the house. Anne had trained at the Queen’s Square Female School of Art as a screen and furniture painter. Charlotte had been trained for nothing, so she wrote. She wrote slowly, and, like the heroine of New Grub Street, did her time in the British Museum Reading Room, grinding articles (‘The Governess in Fiction’, ‘Mary Stuart in Fiction’) out of ...”

“... white-clad American would never take such risks with her behaviour, clothing or portrait-painter. The white female garments in another of James’s stories from the mid-1880s are wholly anti-seductive, even austere. ‘The Author of Beltraffio’ is narrated by a young American obsessed with an English writer who is famous for a novel expounding the ...”

“... dalliances, one of them with the artist and writer Valentine Dobrée, a former lover of the painter Mark Gertler and now the wife of Eliot’s friend Bonamy Dobrée. Aldington fantasised about Valentine in a long poem that lacks intensity despite its exclamation marks: ‘Why cannot we be wise like the Epicureans/Who thought not of possession but of ...”

“... punctuated by bouts of ill-health and thoughts of suicide. Having renounced his ambition to be a painter, he had devoted himself, intermittently, to the pursuit of chemistry, comparative anatomy and physiology; enrolled in Harvard Medical School; abandoned medicine to accompany Louis Agassiz on a zoological expedition to Brazil; returned to medical school ...”

“... the high aristocracy from the toppled Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as artists like the Russian painter Marc Chagall.’ In the song ‘Alma’ – written soon after her obituaries appeared in December 1964 – Tom Lehrer imagines all modern women being jealous of her ‘for bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz’. How did she do it? At first, at least, she ...”

“... there’s a famous après-Deco portrait by Tamara de Lempicka from 1933 – and Yvonne George, a Belgian cabaret star who swept the poet Robert Desnos off his feet. Members of the Brigade des moeurs were biddable, and liked to get a slice of the action, whatever it happened to be. They didn’t have much in the way of convictions, in any ...”

“... like a pig’s back). We stare out along the coast to Tory Island, the home of the great naive painter, James Dixon. Below us Donegal is green, still, silent and peaceful. I’m too tired that evening to open either Himself Alone or The Idiot, and in any case I want to a make a start on a new book, a collection of short essays on single poems. I wish I’d ...”

“... great violence to my own disposition which is to shun, rather than court, regard,’ he told the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon in 1815. Barker makes it clear that he went against the wishes of ‘his more practical womenfolk’ in refusing until he was in his late fifties to truck with the periodical press. He boasted to one editor that he had ‘never ...”

“... and hiss, ‘No sleeping!’ One regular, always with a pile of art books at his elbow, was the painter Jacob Kramer, some of whose paintings, with their Vorticist slant, hung in the art gallery next door. Dirty and half-tight there wasn’t much to distinguish him from the other tramps whiling away their time before trailing along Victoria Street to spend ...”

“... that his children’s English nanny, with whom he may have had an affair, was a spy sent by Lloyd George, and paced the family home brandishing a revolver. He committed himself to a hospital in Hamburg, before moving to a private clinic in Jena in 1920 and then to Ludwig Binswanger’s Bellevue sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, where other postwar burnouts included ...”

“... for me into a series of paintings by Gustave Moreau (appropriately, Flaubert’s favourite modern painter). The novel is forceful, highly coloured, sensationalist, and yet somehow inert, despite, or because of, all the learning and research that went into it. Does it feel like a work of art in the wrong genre? Maupassant did call it ‘an opera in prose’.I ...”