Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives Of The Pre Raphaelites
10 best books like Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives Of The Pre Raphaelites (Franny Moyle): Effie: The Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, John Ruskin and John Everett Millais, A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin, The Courtesan’s Revenge, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, George Eliot: The Last Victorian, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, In Ruins: A Journey Through History, Art, and Literature, Pre-Raphaelites in Love
| Author | Suzanne Fagence Cooper |
| ISBN | 0312581734 |
The Scottish beauty Effie Gray is the heroine of a great Victorian love story. Married at 19 to John Ruskin, she found herself trapped in an unconsummated union. She would fall in love with her husband’s protégé, John Everett Millais, and inspire some of his most memorable art, but controversy and...
| Author | Judith Flanders |
| ISBN | 0393052109 |
THE MACDONALD SISTERS--Alice, Georgiana, Agnes, and Louisa--started life in the teeming ranks of the lower-middle classes, denied the advantages of education and the expectation of social advancement. Yet as wives and mothers they would connect a famous painter, a president of the Royal Academy,...
| Author | Frances Wilson |
| ISBN | 0571205240 |
I had relatively high hopes for this book, in part because it came recommended by a friend but also in part because I was genuinely interested to learn about this fascinating subject. I have read various tomes centred on sexuality, yet had no knowledge of courtesans.
The book got off to a relatively...
| Author | Émile Mâle |
| ISBN | 0064300323 |
Emile Male's book aids understanding of medieval art and medieval symbolism, and of the vision of the world which presided over the building of the French cathedrals. It looks at French religious art in the Middle Ages, its forms, and especially the Eastern sources of sculptural iconography used in...
| Author | Daisy Hay |
| ISBN | 0374123756 |
Young Romantics tells the story of the interlinked lives of the young English Romantic poets from an entirely fresh perspective—celebrating their extreme youth and outsize yearning for friendship as well as their individuality and political radicalism.
The book focuses on the...
| Author | Alexandra Harris |
| ISBN | 0500251711 |
In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea shops.Alexandra Harris tells a different story: eclectically, passionately,
wittily,...
| Author | Kathryn Hughes |
| ISBN | 0815411219 |
Mary Ann Evans, aka George Eliot (1819-1880) achieved lasting renown with the novels Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Adam Bede. Her masterworks were written after years of living an unconventional life, including a scandalous voyage to Europe with the married writer and editor George Henry Lewes....
| Author | Elizabeth Prettejohn |
| ISBN | 0691070571 |
Though always controversial in art circles, the Pre-Raphaelites have also always been extremely popular with museum goers. This accessible new study provides the most comprehensive view of the movement to date. It shows us why, a century and a half later, Pre-Raphaelite art retains its power to fascinate,...
| Author | Christopher Woodward |
| ISBN | 1400030862 |
In this enchanting meditation on ruins, Christopher Woodward takes us on a thousand-year journey from the plains of Troy to the monuments of ancient Rome, from the crumbling palaces of Sicily, Cuba, and Zanzibar to the rubble of the London Blitz. With an exquisite sense of romantic melancholy, we encounter...
| Author | Gay Daly |
| ISBN | 0899194508 |
Strange, awkward title, although it is pretty literal. This is pretty repetitive. After about the 3rd Pre-Raphaelite, I got the picture that they all had strange relationships with women. I think this was most interesting as a portrait of Victorian married life among the bohemian set. Man, those guys...
| Author | Helen Langdon |
| ISBN | 0374118949 |
Of all the books I've read on Caravaggio, Caravaggio: A Life is the most sympathetic to him as a faithful and inspired artist. It is so easy to dismiss him as so many art historians have as a criminal, a degenerate, a drunk and violent man. If that is all he was that does not explain his abilities as an artist...
| Author | Fiona MacCarthy |
| ISBN | 0571228615 |
From the prize winning author of William Morris comes a new biography of Edward Burne-Jones, the greatest British artist of the second half of the nineteenth century.
The angels on our Christmas cards, the stained glass in our churches, the great paintings in our galleries - Edward Burne-Jones's...
| Author | Jan Marsh |
| ISBN | 0704301695 |
Who were those women who sat for the Pre-Raphaelite painters? Muses to an exclusively male genius, of tragic stature and uncertain health - were they indeed as passive as their portrait painters and their critics contrived to suggest? Jan Marsh reveals the actual lives behind the myth of the Pre-Raphaelite...
Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel
| Author | Lucinda Hawksley |
| ISBN | 0233001174 |
My ex boyfriend - my greatest love - used to think I was a pre-Raphaellite and he used to leave pictures of Lizzie on my bed when he found them in old books or art magazines; because he knew I loved her.
Once, we went to the most enchanted forest and camped there. One day when we were walking, we found...
| Author | Roberto Calasso |
| ISBN | 0374534071 |
A spectacular act of close reading and looking by a great writer
In La Folie Baudelaire, Roberto Calasso—one of the most original and acclaimed writers on literature, art, culture, and mythology—turns his attention to the poets and writers of Paris in the nineteenth century who created...
| Author | Julia Frey |
| ISBN | 1857993632 |
According to the kitchen scales, the paperback edition of this book comes in at 940 grams, despite which it is a light, engaging and mildly troubling account of the brief life of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (mostly H.T-L below (view spoiler)[ in the book either Henry, once or twice Henri, Toulouse or Lautrec,...
| Author | Franco Mormando |
| ISBN | 0226538524 |
Sculptor, architect, painter, playwright, and scenographer, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was the last of the great universal artistic geniuses of early modern Italy, placed by both contemporaries and posterity in the same exalted company as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. And his...
Tamara De Lempicka: A Life of Deco and Decadence
| Author | Laura Claridge |
| ISBN | 0517705575 |
An icon of the Jazz Age, Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka lived a life well worth recording. Until now, however, no one has written the story of this woman of extraordinary talent and notoriety. She was a great beauty, an aristocratic refugee of the Russian Revolution, and a frankly erotic painter...
Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50
| Author | Agnès Poirier |
| ISBN | 1627790241 |
An incandescent group portrait of the midcentury artists and thinkers whose lives, loves, collaborations, and passions were forged against the wartime destruction and postwar rebirth of Paris
In this fascinating tour of a celebrated city during one of its most trying, significant, and...
| Author | Jenny Uglow |
| ISBN | 0374232873 |
In the village of Wreay, near Carlisle, stands the strangest and most magical Victorian church in England. This vivid, original book tells the story of its builder, Sarah Losh, strong-willed, passionate, and unusual in every way.
Sarah Losh is a lost Romantic genius—an antiquarian, an...
| Author | Alex Owen |
| ISBN | 0226642054 |
A highly original study that examines the central role played by women as mediums, healers, and believers during the golden age of spiritualism in the late Victorian era, The Darkened Room is more than a meditation on women mediums—it's an exploration of the era's gender relations.
The...
The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays
| Author | Marguerite Yourcenar |
| ISBN | 0374519196 |
I really did think Borges unique in a genius that allowed him, in his nonfictions, to select a tidbit from a superannuated encyclopedia, extract an incident from the most obscure chronicle—or, conversely, from the collective media memory of widely disseminated, easily recognizable historical...
