Recent stories of note:
“A Novelist Draws”
Rupert Christiansen, Literary Review
On the island of Guernsey is a home whose owner, it is evident, was fond of excess and whimsy: walls adorned floor to ceiling with china, ceilings fitted with tapestries, ornament and pattern everywhere possible. This is the Hauteville House, the home of Victor Hugo during his exile on the Channel Islands, which is open to the public, as is the author’s equally eccentric home in Paris. Now, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, visitors can get still another view into Hugo’s aesthetic sensibilities: the writer produced an estimated four thousand drawings during his lifetime, and some are now on view in an exhibition reviewed by Rupert Christiansen for the Literary Review. Eerie, beguiling, and fantastical, they recall children’s-book illustrations. These drawings’ roster of admirers has included Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso, so if you find yourself drawn in by them, you wouldn’t be the first.
“William Blake still weaves his mystic spell”
Philip Marsden, The Spectator
Of course, among all writers whose artworks merit museum exhibitions, Victor Hugo is not the first that comes to mind. That honor goes to William Blake, whose illuminated poems are assigned in undergraduate courses and enchant readers now as much as ever. In The Spectator, Philip Marsden reviews a new book on the poet that tracks Blake’s timeless appeal, enchanting artists and writers from the Pre-Raphaelites to Robert Mapplethorpe. “The only time that missed out” on Blake, Marsden writes, “was his own.” Keep an eye out for Nicholas Shrimpton’s review of the volume, Philip Hoare’s William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, in a forthcoming issue of The New Criterion.
“The life story of Francesca Alexander—the American artist in tune with Italy—is told in new book”
Charlotte Gere, The Art Newspaper
Many of us take on a modified version of our name to get by in another language (in Spanish class, I was “Susana”), but it’s far less common to be recorded in the history books by that name. This was the case, however, for Francesca Alexander, who was born Esther Frances in Boston but moved to Italy as a teenager and found success as an artist under her Italianized name. Alexander is best remembered for her illustrated volumes of Tuscan folk ballads, which were championed by John Ruskin, but a new biography of the artist likewise documents her work as a painter, her life in Italy during the Risorgimiento, and her training by her father, also a painter. Charlotte Gere writes for The Art Newspaper that the book points to Alexander’s achievements without “unsustainable claims for her talent”—a virtue not always found in writings on lesser-known artists.
