John, The painter

JOHN THE PAINTER
the first modern terrorist
by Jessica Warner
Historian Simon Schama was more enthusiastic about his carefully researched work, describing it as a 'rich, ambitious history, executed in literary fire works : a small glory and a joy to read'.
This book's anti hero trained as a house painter but could not find work, so he tramped the country looking for work , his jobs became house breaking and pick pocketing. After a two years of spell in America, he became an impassioned supporter of the American Revolution.
His first act of terror , on returning to England in 1776 , was to try to burn down Portsmouth Dockyard . Unlucky for him , only the rope house was destroyed. Next, he set some fires in Bristol. The country was terrified and the news papers carried full of scare stories. Was he acting alone or part of a gang? Who were his American Masters? At the height of the scare , King George III was being briefed daily, and offered a huge reward for the miscreant;s capture.
The Bow street runners were sent in pursuit. Would the terrorist be caught or would the Royal dockyards be destroyed and the British war effort in America come to a grinding halt?

Aubrey Beardsley

AUBREY BEARDSLEY
by Patrick Bade
Probably no artist made such an impact in such a short time. Aubrey Beardsley was only aged 25 when he died. Yet his works were already famous all over. He was hailed asa agenius. He was rebelling against materialism and morals thro his works. This artist ranked along side people such as Oscar Wilde, with him the artist shared a love and hate relationship. He was initially influenced by Pre Raphaelites and later developed his own technique, which owed much to the Japanese style - eschewing paint for pen and ink

Aubrey Beardsley

AUBREY BEARDSLEY
by Patrick Bade
Probably no artist made such an impact in such a short time. Aubrey Beardsley was only aged 25 when he died. Yet his works were already famous all over. He was hailed asa agenius. He was rebelling against materialism and morals thro his works. This artist ranked along side people such as Oscar Wilde, with him the artist shared a love and hate relationship. He was initially influenced by Pre Raphaelites and later developed his own technique, which owed much to the Japanese style - eschewing paint for pen and ink

Allure

ALLURE
By Diana Vreeland
‘Allure is some thing that exists’, Diana Vreeland said, ‘It is some thing around you, like a perfume or a scent, it is like memory, it pervades.’ Diana Vreeland was not only a fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar and editor inn chief of Vogue or almost a decade and was also the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of arts costume institute.
She inspired the world of fashion for over 50 years until her death in 1989. This book is Vreeland’s personal selections of 164 images by some of the last century’s greatest photographers – among them are: Horst, De Meyer, Avedon, Beaton, Penn, and Steichen. Capturing the people and events that gave shape to the culture of an era, they feature personalities including: Garbo, Nureyev, Callas, and Queen Mary, the duchess of Windsor, Audrey Hepburn, and Josephine Baker. Vreeland goes far beyond them into the imaginative, gossipy world she knew so well.

Essential Man Ray

ESSENTIAL MAN RAY
By Ingrid Schaffner
One of the essential series published b Harry N Abrams of New York , here we learn about the life and career of the Philadelphia born Dadaist-Surrealist photographer and painter Man Ray , whi began life as Emmanuel Rudinitsky in 1890 and died in Paris in 1976.
He delighted in shocking his viewers with works designed to”amuse, annoy, bewilder, and mystify”, we learn that the essence of the man and his work lies in surrealism , his art showing us the uncanny and disturbing in the every day life.
Although he liked to be known as a painter , his most striking images were made with the camera , and well women specifically was probably the biggest influence in his art.

Discourses on Art

DISCOURSES ON ART
Sir Joshua Reynolds
.by Robert Wark
Sir Joshua Reynolds’ discourses on art ‘forms one of the most eloquent literary documents in the history of the European art. Composed as lectures to the students at the Royal Academy in the late eighteenth century, they both summarise the art theory of the previous 300 years and point towards the attitudes prevalent in the nineteenth century. His general topic is the education of the artist and he is concerned with the essentials of the problem he tackles: the purpose of art, the nature of the creative process and the artist’s relation to tradition. Long recognized as the fundamental text for the study of the eighteenth century English painting, this edition is generally considered to be the definitive.

Seven pillars of wisdom

THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM
By T E Lawrence
As Angus Calder states in his introduction to this edition, seven pillars of wisdom is one of the major statements about the fighting experience of the First World War. Lawrence’s younger brothers, Frank and Will, had been killed on the western front in 1915 the book was written in between 1919 and 1926 and it tells of the vastly different campaign against Turks in the Middle East, one of which encompasses gross acts of cruelty and revenge and ends in a welter of stink and corpses in the disgusting hospital in Damascus