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So wrote Virginia Woolf affectionately of Gwen Raverat, the granddaughter of Charles Darwin.    In this first full biography, Frances Spalding looks beyond the artist Gwen Raverat's childhood memoir; Period Piece, and creates a fascinating and moving portrait of Charles Darwin's granddaughter. She explores her Darwin inheritance; her conflicts when she moves beyond her home environment to enter the Slade School of Art; her encounter with post-Impressionism; and her friendships with Stanley Spencer, Rupert Brooke and members of the Bloomsbury set.  At each stage, Gwen's artistic creativity is interwoven with her relationships and circumstances.  She helps revive the medium of wood-engraving and with her husband, Jacques Raverat, celebrates the South of France in the art they produce while living in Venice.   Drawing on a huge cache of unpublished papers, Spalding brings us a life lived with bravery, humour; realism and integrity, surrounded by a remarkable cast of relatives, friends and associates.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49638734954769,"sku":"GOR010886591","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50469587517713,"sku":"GOR004573865","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50907158184209,"sku":"GOR002203737","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1844134245.jpg?v=1751378680"},{"product_id":"whistler-book-frances-spalding-9780714819723","title":"Whistler","description":"\u003cb\u003e#1 \u003ci\u003eNEW YORK TIMES \u003c\/i\u003eBESTSELLER - A high-stakes thrill ride through the darkest corners of the Sunshine State, from the author hailed as the best thriller writer alive by Ken Follett\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eRiveting . . . an elaborate conspiracy.\u003ci\u003e--The New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe expect our judges to be honest and wise. 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Together they created a revolution in British style that resonates with contemporary painters, writers, actors, designers, fashion editors and publishers. The Group began the twentieth century with a desire to challenge what they felt were the religious, artistic, social and sexual taboos of Victorian England. Together they created a revolution in British style that resonates with contemporary painters, writers, actors, designers, fashion editors and publishers.  This book explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, as well as their legacy to the twenty-first century. Author Frances Spalding demonstrates how this network of artists, lovers and patrons recorded one another obsessively in both words and images. She presents over twenty fascinating biographies, all of which are illustrated with paintings and intimate photographs created by members of the Group. 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It begins in late-Victorian Cambridge, which Gwen herself amusingly described in her childhood memoir \"Period Piece\". But Frances Spalding looks behind and beyond the pages of this much-loved book. She explores Gwen's Darwin inheritance, her conflicts when she moves beyond her home environment to enter the Slade School of Art, her encounter with Post-Impressionism, and her friendships with Stanley Spencer, Rupert Brooke, and members of the Bloomsbury set. Central to her life is her husband, the Frenchman Jacques Raverat, who emerges as a vivid, courageous personality. At each stage, Gwen's artistic creativity is interwoven with her relationships and circumstances. She helps revive the medium of wood-engraving and, with Jacques, celebrates the South of France in the art they produce while living in Venice. In the late 1920s her abiding love of Cambridge draws her back to a corner of England with which she is inextricably associated. 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Spalding is a lucid and revealing guide who wears her scholarship lightly' Sunday Times    'Spalding’s prose is as clear as a Ravilious greenhouse, her thoughts as orderly as a Ben Nicholson white relief' The Times   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.      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.      The devastation of the First World War left the art world decentred and directionless. This book is about its recovery. Spalding explores how exciting new ideas co-existed with a desire for continuity and a renewed interest in the past. We see the challenge to English artists represented by Cézanne and Picasso, and the role played by museums and galleries in this period. Women artists, writers and curators contributed to the emergence of a new avant-garde. The English landscape was revisited in modern terms. The 1930s marked a high point in the history of modernism in Britain, but the mood darkened with the prospect of a return to war. The former advance towards abstraction and internationalism was replaced by a renewed concern with history, place, memory and a sense of belonging. Native traditions were revived in modern terms but in ways that also let in the past. Surrealism further disturbed the ascetic purity of high modernism and fed into the British love of the strange.      Throughout these years, the pursuit of ‘the real’ was set against, and sometimes merged with, an inclination towards the ‘romantic’, as English artists sought to respond to their subjects and their times.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49740099158289,"sku":"NGR9780500518649","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49947511488785,"sku":"GOR012256946","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50008265916689,"sku":"CIN0500518645VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51002908737809,"sku":"NIN9780500518649","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51189908799761,"sku":"GOR014195634","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52153354387729,"sku":"GOR014497034","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0500518645.jpg?v=1750879533"},{"product_id":"john-piper-myfanwy-piper-book-frances-spalding-9780199567621","title":"John Piper, Myfanwy Piper","description":"This book is about a shared journey made by John and Myfanwy Piper who early on settled down in a small hamlet on the edge of the Chilterns, whence they proceeded to produce work which placed them centre stage in the cultural landscape of the twentieth century. Here, too, they fed and entertained many visitors, among them Kenneth Clark, John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Benjamin Britten, and the Queen Mother. Their creative partnership encompasses not only a long marriage and numerous private and professional vicissitudes, but also a genuine legacy of lasting achievements in the visual arts, literature and music.  Frances Spalding also sheds new light on the story of British art in the 1930s. In the middle of this decade John Piper and Myfanwy Evans (they did not marry until 1937) were at the forefront of avant-garde activities in England, Myfanwy editing the most advanced art magazine of the day and John working alongside Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and others. But as the decade progressed and the political situation in Europe worsened, they changed their allegiances, John Piper investigating in his art a sense of place, belonging, history, memory, and the nature of national identity, all issues that are very much to the fore in today's world.  Myfanwy Piper is best known as 'Golden Myfanwy', Betjeman's muse and for her work as librettist with Benjamin Britten. John Piper was an extraordinarily prolific artist in many media, his fertile career stretching over six decades and involving him in many changes of style. Having been an abstract painter in the 1930s, he became best known for his landscapes and architectural scenes in a romantic style. This core interest, in the English and Welsh landscape and the built environment, developed in him a sensibility that took in almost everything, from gin palaces to painted quoins, from ruined cottages to country houses, from Victorian shop fronts to what is nowadays called industrial archeology. 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During the 1940s and early 1950s he become a central figure within Soho, an intimate friend of, among many others, Michael Ayrton, Robert Colquhoun, Lucian Freud and the poet W.S. Graham.  He enjoyed early success as a painter and was associated in the 1940s with the English Neo-Romantics.  By the early 1950s he had become the most admired and influential illustrator of his day.   Frances Spalding's sensitive account of Minton's life and work makes use of letters, articles and revue sketches by Minton himself, as well as many interviews with the artist's friends and acquaintances.  She brings out the many conflicts within him, and shows how these were reflected in his art through its combination of romantic imagery and taut severities of style. His deep melancholy was for the most part kept hidden behind a euphoric generosity and a wild restlessness. But gradually, like his alcoholism, it became all-pervasive, and tragic and embittered he took his own life, aged thirty-nine.  This new edition incorporates a new preface by the author and a new appendix featuring lists of public collections, exhibitions, illustrated books and book jackets, and a select bibliography. It will be widely welcomed by art historians, curators, dealers and all those interested in this fascinating period in British art and culture.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50419354927377,"sku":"GOR010254725","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50710844113169,"sku":"GOR012201692","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0853319189.jpg?v=1751297786"},{"product_id":"dance-till-the-stars-come-down-book-frances-spalding-9780340485552","title":"Dance Till the Stars Come Down","description":"John Minton was an artist, a Bohemian and, in his own lifetime, a myth: \"the embodiment and symbol\", according to one of his contemporaries, \"of a particular decade of London life and London painting\". 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Since the revival of interest in British neo-romanticism Minton's reputation has been very much in the ascendant and he is steadily emerging as one of the most fascinating artists of his generation.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50478015086865,"sku":"GOR005422039","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50615137337617,"sku":"GOR010353708","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51907452109073,"sku":"GOR002106482","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0340485558.jpg?v=1751102076"},{"product_id":"ravilious-at-the-fry-book-frances-spalding-9780957317215","title":"Ravilious at the Fry","description":"A pictorial and commentary guide to the work of Eric Ravilious within the collection of the Fry Art Gallery.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50479354282257,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50479354675473,"sku":"GOR007205431","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0957317212.jpg?v=1751171578"},{"product_id":"prunella-clough-book-frances-spalding-9781848220119","title":"Prunella Clough","description":"Prunella Clough (1919-1999) was one of the best and most original artists to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century. This book celebrates her outstanding contribution to British art providing, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of Clough's entire career.   Situating the development of Clough's art within the trajectory of her life, Frances Spalding explores the key themes and inspirations that informed the artist's work. The author's unique access to hitherto unpublished letters, a journal which Clough kept in the late 1940s and notebooks from the artist's visits around England, combined with her extensive knowledge of twentieth-century British art, ensures a ground-breaking and unique account of Clough's life and work.   Themes such as the importance of place in Clough's oeuvre, her interests in Surrealism, Neo-Romanticism and Abstract Expressionism run alongside broader debates such as the artist's position within the English art scene and her critical reception. Her relationship with her aunt, designer and architect Eileen Gray, is given due attention, as are other key alliances in her life. With its breadth of material, Prunella Clough: Regions Unmapped will appeal to a wide spectrum of readers from those with a general interest in the artist and the period to curators, collectors, dealers and academics.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50613860696337,"sku":"GOR004067413","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51433806758161,"sku":"GOR012280328","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53522498027793,"sku":"NLS9781848220119","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1848220111.jpg?v=1751379583"},{"product_id":"whistler-book-frances-spalding-9780714832357","title":"Whistler","description":"James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was one of the most original artists of the late 19th-century. 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Ruskin, the champion of Pre-Raphaelitism, accused him of \"flinging a pot of paint in the public's face\" - a comment that promptly inspired the famous lawsuit which left Whistler victorious but bankrupt. Whistler was one of the most independent artists in the second half of the nineteenth century, comparable in stature with Degas. His \"Nocturnes\" create an indefinable mood of wistful poetry, while his portraits remain some of the most haunting images in nineteenth-century art.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50778208108817,"sku":"GOR006758291","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0714832359.jpg?v=1750945071"},{"product_id":"vanessa-bell-book-frances-spalding-9780899192055","title":"Vanessa Bell","description":"Vanessa Bell was a central figure within the Bloomsbury Group\u003cbr\u003eand lent to it a stability and coherence it might otherwise have\u003cbr\u003elacked. A talented artist, she held sway with her acuity, integrity\u003cbr\u003eand a sense of humour. Yet she remained inscrutable, glimpses\u003cbr\u003eof her life only appearing through her sister, Virginia Woolf. In this authorised biography, Frances Spalding draws upon a\u003cbr\u003emass of unpublished documents to reveal Vanessa Bell's considerable\u003cbr\u003eachievements, in both her art and her increasingly unorthodox\u003cbr\u003elife. A sympathetic account is given of her marriage to\u003cbr\u003eClive Bell, her affair with Roger Fry and the complex nature of\u003cbr\u003eher lasting relationship with Duncan Grant. It is a fitting tribute\u003cbr\u003eto a woman of great paradox, wit and honesty.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50921660743953,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50921661006097,"sku":"CIN089919205XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/089919205X.jpg?v=1751298458"},{"product_id":"illustrated-letters-of-virginia-woolf-book-frances-spalding-9781849949637","title":"The Illustrated Letters of Virginia Woolf","description":"The moving story of the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf, revealed through her own letters to those closest to her.The letters - at times witty and irreverent, at times melancholy and introspective - are possibly even more revealing for their insights into the complex personality of the novelist herself. A true letter, she insisted, should be like a film of wax pressed close to the graving of the mind. The book contains biographical notes on the main recipients of the letters, together with background information on Virginia Woolf's life and work. Frances Spalding's previous books include British Art Since 1900 and biographies of the painters Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell.This book is beautifully illustrated with contemporary photographs and paintings, many by members of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51627307532561,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51627307860241,"sku":"NGR9781849949637","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52153644482833,"sku":"GOR014496703","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52517293064465,"sku":"NIN9781849949637","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52592169189649,"sku":"NLS9781849949637","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":52902075367697,"sku":"CIN1849949638LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1849949638.jpg?v=1780567975"},{"product_id":"stevie-smith-book-frances-spalding-9781803998633","title":"Stevie Smith","description":"A biography of the poet Stevie Smith","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51632795287825,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51632795615505,"sku":"NGR9781803998633","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53143813062929,"sku":"GOR014772746","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1803998636.jpg?v=1751154295"},{"product_id":"spalding-f-virginia-woolf-book-frances-spalding-9783944874463","title":"Spalding, F: Virginia Woolf.","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53608096563473,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53608096596241,"sku":"GOR014978835","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9783944874463.jpg?v=1780077242"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-au\/collections\/author-books-by-frances-spalding.oembed?page=3","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}