The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars – A Times Best Art Book of 2022

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We made our way up to the piano nobile where LB greeted us. He is quite short and, not to put too fine a point on it, very plump. His face is plump, his hands are plump, his fingers are plump. Hair receding, also. He introduced us to his mistress, Contessa Guiccioli, very young, 18–20, I’d say, who matches her paramour in plumpness but, however, is very beautiful with it, speaking hardly a word of English but, looking at her very ample figure, let’s say its noticeable prominences, it is not her anglophony that explains her attraction to LB, I would venture. Eileen M Hunt: Feminism vs Big Brother - Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder; Julia by Sandra Newman 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 life of Cashel Greville Ross encompasses taking part in the battle of Waterloo, hanging out with Shelley and Byron in Italy, prison in London, running a brewery in New England, exploring Africa and being a consul in Trieste. His life begins in 1799 and stretches to the advent of the modern age in the late Nineteenth century.

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

It is exactly as shown, yet I think Ravilious must primarily have chosen subjects that worked for him as suggestive spatial compositions with a particular play of light. The objects and buildings in them were 'as found', and in this way certainly added a mood, just as they had done for other painters for centuries. A perfectionist, if he started a subject that didn't satisfy him, he usually tore up the paper – four times out of five, according to his wife, the artist Tirzah Garwood. As is inevitable in an overview of a period such as this, I kept feeling that the analysis of artist’s work was too fleeting, and it was also sometimes difficult to follow an artist’s inclusion in a particular chapter rather than another. This made it an engaging read, and renewed my intention of reading monographs on more of the artists discussed, so I am glad to have read this book. However, although more limited in scope, I found both Sybil Cyril: Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews, Artists Together, 1920–1943 by Jenny Uglow and Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris more satisfying reads. 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.I suspect that if you ask a type of reader to align William Boyd with another writer of his generation the name Sebastian Faulks will come up. Faulks is quoted on the book cover endorsing The Romantic. I think there’s quite a similarity in the two writers’ output. Boyd, like Faulks, is strongest in his depiction of the horrors and depravity of war, and the more bloody the hand to hand combat, the more striking the description. An early Boyd novel is An ice Cream War set in World War One, in Africa. Boyd doesn’t glamorise bloodshed, and in the Romantic the fate of Cashel’s comrade Croker will stay with me. Hand to hand fighting, as depicted in the Battle of Waterloo, was not fun. Here his instinct for the innate symbolic quality of objects and their strangeness has full play, as well as his fondness for snow and night skies. Ravilious became fascinated by submarines and spent time on board one of them to prepare lithographs for a projected book. Although relatively small numbers of these seem to have been printed, they are striking images, conveying the domesticity of life as well as the discomfort and danger.

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He is romantic… Adventures call him… He finds himself in Italy where he inevitably meets the greatest romantics of the time – Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron… Do not expect deep introspection. The purpose is not to wonder what drives Cashel or what he is thinking. Instead, the goal is to surrender to a hugely satisfying good yarn that follows one colorful character through his multiple iterations – son and brother, lover, soldier, farmer, debtor, best-selling writer, husband and father, world traveler (and Ivan Turgenev look-alike). The real-life people he encounters along this journey only heightens the fun. Finally the influence of Cézanne is considered on a number of British artists, with Roger Fry having appreciated in 1906 an artist “whose work fully satisfied his demand for an architectonic sense of underlying design.” 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.I felt that I knew what Boyd was going to describe, and how the life of the protagonist would turn out. I was also conscious that in a (literary) world that has changed enormously in the last twenty years, the characterisations were a bit dated and focused on too limiting a view of history. An early example when a young man is seduced by a randy housekeeper was flat. There’s schoolboy masturbation; there’s extraordinary fortune smiling on our main man in whatever predicament presents itself. Boys own stuff. I suspect am also probably comparing it unfairly to the end of Logan Mountstuart in Any Human Heart (which I found really moving and actually left me a bit teary). Chapter 7 discusses sculpture and carving, the influences of “primitive”sculpture and “truth to materials”, which started with Gaudier-Brzeska and Brancusi before the First World War, carried on by Epstein, and Hepworth and most importantly Henry Moore after the war. I love those books with a big sweeping story you can just sink into and lose yourself. A bit like the literary version of a big comfy blanket in Autumn. 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.