Bøker av David Boyd Haycock

Considered by John Singer Sargent to be the best British draughtsman since the Renaissance, Augustus John was the first of the British 'Post-Impressionists'. Such was his importance that Virginia Woolf declared in 1921 that by 1908 'The age of Augustus John was dawning, ' and Wyndham Lewis would dub the ten years leading up to 1914 'the Augustan decade. Handsome, unconventional and full of brilliant promise and Bohemian spirit, John was the man almost every young British art student wanted to emulate. This book reveals why, telling his extraordinary story from his birth in south Wales in 1878 through to the end of his youth in the closing stages of the First World War.Interweaving his biography are the personalities who surrounded John, and the book looks at their influence on him, and his upon them. They include his fellow students at the Slade School of Art - his sister Gwen John and future wife Ida Nettleship, and his friends William Orpen, Ambrose McEvoy, Spencer Gore and Percy Wyndham Lewis - all of whom would become prominent artists in their own right.This book is a long overdue, new interpretation of this singular figure, who was both at the heart of the British artistic milieu, and yet set apart from its movements and manifestos.

Over the course of a long and very successful career spanning the first half of the 20th century, Lucy Kemp-Welch established herself as one of the leading equestrian painters at work in the UK and one of the country's best-known women artists. David Boyd Haycock's new, extensively illustrated biography of Kemp-Welch brings this remarkable artist and her work back into sharp focus.   Born in 1869, Kemp-Welch first came to the art establishment's attention in 1897 when her immense painting, Colt Hunting in the New Forest , caused a sensation at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition; the work was bought for the Nation by the Chantry Bequest in the year of exhibition. In 1915, she illustrated Anna Sewell's Black Beauty , and was commissioned to paint images for the Government during the First World War. Later, the mural Women's Work in the Great War , was placed in the Royal Exchange in London, where it remains to this day. Respected art writer and curator Boyd-Haycock shines new light on Kemp-Welch's life, writing from a 21st-century perspective and reflecting on her as a female painter in a male-dominated environment. Alongside Kemp-Welch's paintings, the book will feature exclusive period photographs of the artist herself, shown at work and in her studio.

Stukeley's antiquarian researches, particularly into the great stone circles of Stonehenge and Avebury, were the first to reveal their great antiquity. Friend of Newton, his life embodies the classic Enlightenment confrontation between science and religion.

George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, John Dos Passos, Felicia Browne, John Cornford, Stephen Spender... These were just some of the talented, committed and adventure-hungry men and women who travelled to Spain to join the struggle against General Franco's fascist rebellion. Through their personal letters, diaries and memoirs, David Boyd Haycock brings the experiences of these remarkable individuals -- as well as many less celebrated but equally compelling figures -- stunningly to life. He describes the mingled excitement and trepidation with which they set out for Spain, and their sheer relief that here at last was a chance to do something against the calamitous threat posed by Fascism. He evokes the glamour and the terror of wartime Barcelona, as Stalin's security forces lethally stifled dissent and imposed Party orthodoxy. And he charts the painful disillusionment of a generation of men and women as they witnessed the triumph of realpolitik over morality, and came to understand their impotence in the face of greater forces. Hemingway described the Spanish Civil War as 'the dress rehearsal for the inevitable European war'. I am Spain is at once a compelling, scrupulously researched account of this pivotal 20th-century conflict, and a moving, psychologically exact portrait of an extraordinary, passionate and gifted group of men and women whose minds and lives were changed by the experience of war.