Kirjahaku

The first major life of the outstanding British painter – and Jack the Ripper suspect – Walter Sickert (1860-1942), by the highly acclaimed biographer of Aubrey Beardsley. Walter Richard Sickert is perhaps the outstanding figure of British art during the last hundred years. Many contemporary painters, from Hodgkin and Bacon to Auerbach and Kossof, acknowledge a debt to his influence. His career spanned six decades of unceasing experiment and achievement. As a young artist, he was welcomed and encouraged by Degas. He was the disciple of Whistler and mentor of Beardsley. He founded the London Impressionists and the Camden Town Group. He was taken up by both the Woolfs and the Sitwells. He gave painting lessons to Winston Churchill. His energy was prodigious and his personality fascinating: he was also an illustrator, cartoonist, writer, polemicist, teacher and wit. He relished controversy: his early paintings of London music halls and his late works, based on 18th-century etchings and contemporary news photographs, provoked outraged criticism from conventional commentators. Sturgis also devotes an appendix to charting in detail Sickert's posthumous life as a player in the 'Jack the Ripper' circus, assessing (and demolishing) the arguments of Patricia Cornwell and others in the light of his own discoveries.

The first major biography of Oscar Wilde in thirty years is the most complete telling of his life and times to date.

The 1890s have become legendary: the period of Wilde, Beardsley and the Yellow Book; a decadent twilight at the close of the Victorian century, when young poets weary of life sat about drinking absinthe and talking of strange sins. The provenance of this beguiling picture is peculiar, for the myth of the Decadent Nineties was created during the period itself. It was an age of artistic self-consciousness, during which writers and painters believed that they had to create not only their works but also their personalities. In Passionate Attitudes, Matthew Sturgis examines the varying extents to which ambitious poets, penurious painters, canny publishers and a controversialist press all conspired to promote the notion of decadence. He explores in detail the cataclysmic effect upon English decadence of the spectacular trial and subsequent conviction of Wilde in 1895, a fall which was to cast a blight over the whole generation. As well as the luminaries Wilde, Beardsley and Beerbohm, Sturgis portrays Arthur Symons, the poet of the music halls, who divided his energies between promoting Verlaine and chasing after chorus girls; Ernest Dowson, the demoralised romantic of the Rhymers Club; Count Erik Stenbock, who kept a snake up his sleeve and went mad; and John Gray, who may have been the model for Wilde's Dorian. John Lane published most of their books; Owen Seaman and Ada Leverson parodied their manners. Elegantly written, Passionate Attitudes provides a hugely informative and richly entertaining account of the zeitgeist behind the glorious decade of excess.

When Aubrey Beardsley died in 1898, he was aged only 25. In his short but crowded career he had become one of the defining figures of the fin-de-siècle, a precocious draughtsman who redefined the limits of black-and-white art. His erotic, decadent illustrations for Oscar Wilde's Salome set the tone for his style: by turns shocking, facetious and cruel. Beloved by Burne-Jones, cursed by William Morris, he was the intimate of Wilde, the rival of Whistler, the friend of Beerbohm, Sickert, Ada Leverson and William Rothenstein. His deliberate manipulation of press and public, his awareness of both art and the market-place, made him one of the first truly modern artists.

Abigail McLellan (1969-2009) was known for her pared-down images that were set against richly-worked backgrounds of saturated colour. This limited edition of 100 incorporates a new, original colour etching produced exclusively for this publication from an image created by the artist and authenticated by the artist's widower, Alastair Wallace. The print is packaged with the book in a slipcase.Born in Middlesbrough, McLellan's family moved to Scotland when she was thirteen and her education was concluded at the Glasgow School of Art. McLellan's vision, for all its individuality, drew strongly upon the traditions of Scottish - and, particularly, Glaswegian - art. Her striking simplifications of form and her bold sense of design owed much to Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his circle. More contemporary influences included Joan Eardley and Craigie Aitchison. Yet McLellan's vision was very much her own and in her quest to create a comparable intensity of colour she evolved a highly personal technique, building up layer upon layer of translucent, quick-drying acrylic paint in short, stippled strokes.