You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. Chapter 5 explores the movement towards more abstract modern art, looking at Work by Wyndham Lewis, Winifred Nicholson and then Ben Nicholson’s slow move from realist to more abstract art. Winifred Knights The Deluge is mentioned here, but just this single work by this artist. The Romantic is certainly one of those. I absolutely adored this story and it goes up there as one of my books of the year. The second of William Boyd's 'whole life' works I have read, following on from Any Human Heart, which is one of the best books I've read in recent years.

The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between - Waterstones

If there is a flaw it lies in the author being primarily a biographer of art (Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, John Minton, Duncan Grant, Gwen Raverat and the Pipers have all been covered by her in the past) so the image of the era is 'coloured' by an anecdotal approach which does not always enlighten. Figures such as Ravilious, Knights, Dunbar, Nash and Spencer re-interpreted Britain and its landscape for a new world, and this thoughtful and generously illustrated book charts their progress as well as the environment and society they sought to represent'

Algernon Newton took technical inspiration from Canaletto, with works illustrated from 1929 and 1932 that “override time and movement, evoking something similar to T S Eliot’s ‘still point of the turning world’, a place‘where past and future are gathered’.” A panoramic story, at its heart the hopeless, impetuous romantic that is Cashel Greville Ross. William Boyd is a superb story teller. The conceit of the tale is that he is merely reworking the surviving notes, letters and mementoes of Ross into a fictionalised biography. Footnotes enhance the joke. I especially enjoyed finding out where in the British Museum could be found the Lion of Glymphonos, a particularly impressive piece of looted Greek statuary. Cashel is a wonderful creation, Don Quixote to Ignatz’ Sancho Panza and Raphaella’s Dulcinea. But one thing that does stand out is that he never gives up. He doesn’t dwell on his misfortune but simple strides boldly on to the next adventure. He is a glass half full guy, a romantic. Is he ‘the worlds biggest preposterous romantic fool, or a man who knows what true love is.’ The Real and the Romantic' is a valuable if somewhat impressionistic review of British art between the two world wars with a decent selection of illustrations and an easy style that makes it a pleasure to read. A gloriously old-fashioned and sumptuous read. William Boyd is as good as ever as he ages. He's now in his Seventies and his writing is as fine as ever. This is a "whole life" novel telling the fictional story of Cashel Greville Ross, whose long life spans the 19th Century.

The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars

You constantly want to see how Cashel will manage to get himself out of various scrapes and I kept willing him on. He’s a likeable, decent and well-meaning character who helps others, with as the title suggests a strong romantic side. I was rooting for him all the way hoping his life would turn out well. Frances Spalding's beautifully illustrated history reveals the hidden undercurrents that electrified the work of 1920s and 1930s artists … The author combines the august and measured commentary of the distinguished art historian with a gumshoe’s curiosity … This is a weighty and beautifully illustrated addition to the scholarship of its period' Set against this refulgent blue surface are low-lying buildings of white coraline stone, interspersed with the vivid green of palm trees, tamarind and fig. Closer to shore, a mephitic stink becomes more evident – rotting fish and putrid mud, charcoal smoke and human filth, overlaid by the cloying perfume of cloves. The smell of Zanzibar. One hundred thousand people live on this small island, crammed into the noisome, narrow alleyways of the old town, and their effluvia is everywhere. Described by one reviewer as ‘Around the World in 80 Years’, Cashel’s adventures take him across the globe to places as varied as Oxford, Venice, Zanzibar and Madras. It’s during his time in Italy that the most significant event in his life occurs: the moment he meets the Countess Raphaella Rezzo. From the start he is completely bewitched by her. ‘And he knew – as an animal knows that he has found his mate. He need look no further, ever.’ However, as we know from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’. She is also consistently fair-minded. She manages to avoid the current tendency to over-privilege the minor artist to suit the obsessive need for diversity whilst still opening the doors of perception to some neglected artists and, of course, in a balanced way, to the female contribution.In The Romantic we follow the life of Cashel Greville Ross who, you might be forgiven for thinking, was a real person, such is the mastery of Boyd's work. Ross begins life ignominiously enough but he makes the most of the opportunities that come his way. Although I can't help thinking that things happen to Mr Ross rather than him making them occur. In fact when he does have an idea of how to proceed in life it invariably means disaster to some extent. The 21st century has seen a surge of interest in English art of the interwar years. Women artists, such as Winifred Knights, Frances Hodgkins and Evelyn Dunbar, have come to the fore, while familiar names – Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Stanley Spencer – have reached new audiences. High-profile exhibitions have attracted recordbreaking visitor numbers and challenged received opinion. In The Real and the Romantic, Frances Spalding, one of Britain’s leading art historians and critics, takes a fresh and timely look at this rich period in English art. First are the war memorials and paintings of the Great War created by official war artists, with most of these paintings now being displayed in the Imperial War Museum in south London. These memorialise, not glamourise, the horror of industrial war, with bleak landscapes with small human figures of John Nash and Paul Nash. For me, this section summarised the British artistic response to the war shown in the 2018 Tate Britain exhibition, Aftermath, which better illustrated the broadly realistic response of British artists. The most emotive work for me is John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (1919), which monumentalises the soldiers (the canvas is about seven foot by twenty foot), and shows the “pity of war”, even if not the horror of some of the other paintings. Veteran biographer Frances Spalding, known for her insightful books on the early British Modernists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry, turns her penetrating gaze on the interwar years'

Romantic: the real life of Cashel Greville Ross : a novel The Romantic: the real life of Cashel Greville Ross : a novel

Of Scottish descent, Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana on 7th March, 1952 and spent much of his early life there and in Nigeria where his mother was a teacher and his father, a doctor. Boyd was in Nigeria during the Biafran War, the brutal secessionist conflict which ran from 1967 to 1970 and it had a profound effect on him.Alan Bennett recalls in the film how he discovered Ravilious through a reproduction Train Landscape in a school classroom in the mid-1940s. The watercolour painting formed part of a series of 'Chalk Figures' completed after his last one-man show in the spring of 1939, and although never formally exhibited, the Leicester Galleries in London arranged for the sale of three of them into public collections. It’s often been said that within our lifetimes, we live many lives. Certainly that’s the case with William Boyd’s latest protagonist, Cashel Greville Ross. Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ This is a slight frustration because, when she does look more deeply into the relationship between art and culture (as in the effect of war and immediate post-war depression and, more cursorily, the turn to politics in the late 1930s), she is very good indeed.

The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between - Waterstones The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between - Waterstones

The writing is a joy and Boyd has that skill of conjuring the sights and sounds of place and time that effortlessly transports the reader. Though this is quite a lengthy book I just didn’t want it to end. A fresh look at a period of English art that has surged in interest and popularity in recent years, authored by one of Britain's leading art historians and critics. Disappointing. A flat and unconvincing story. The protagonist makes a long series of poor judgements and is somewhat impassively buffeted from one catastrophy to another, largely avoidable had be been less naive. He is supported by an inexplicably loyal character with quite ludicrous (overly convenient) talents, designed simply to rescue Cashel at every turn. The love interest who purportedly sustains the hero through his tribulations is utterly unconvincing, cold and manipulative - only he won't let himself see it.All in all this is a thoroughly enjoyable, immensely readable book. It's not overlong as some fictional autobiographies can be and you get some very famous names thrown in for good measure as Cashel Greville Ross continues his adventures from Waterloo to the discovery of the source of the Nile. Bookended by the intensity of commemoration that followed World War I and by a darkening of mood brought about by the foreshadowing of World War II, the decades between the wars saw the growing influence of modernism across British art and design. But as modernism reached a peak in the mid-1930s, artists were simultaneously reviving native traditions in modern terms and working with a renewed concern for place, memory, history, and particularity. There was a push-me-pull-you tension about the British art scene between the two world wars, posits art historian Frances Spalding, in her fine new book The Real and the Romantic. Cashel Greville Ross, the hero of William Boyd’s new novel The Romantic, is a man who does plenty of wandering and whose path through life changes direction many times. Born in Ireland in 1799, he lives through some of the major events of the 19th century and becomes a soldier, a writer, a farmer and an explorer – though not all at the same time. He is present on the battlefield of Waterloo, befriends Byron and Shelley in Pisa and travels through Africa in search of the source of the Nile. Most of all, this romantic will fall head over heels for a glamorous Contessa named Raphaella, who will never stray far from his mind. Although to this reader, Raphaella came across as vainglorious, manipulative and materialistic as well as (of course) beautiful, this is, after all the romantic era, and Cashel is the ultimate romantic.