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Item Details
| Title:
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A GENIUS FOR FAILURE
THE LIFE OF BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON |
| By: |
Paul O'Keeffe |
| Format: |
Electronic book text |
| List price:
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£25.00 |
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We believe that this item is permanently unavailable, and so we cannot source
it.
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| ISBN 10: |
1446426580 |
| ISBN 13: |
9781446426586 |
| Publisher: |
VINTAGE PUBLISHING |
| Pub. date: |
11 January, 2011 |
| Pages: |
576 |
| Synopsis: |
* Haydon's first attempt at suicide ended when the low calibre bullet fired from his pistol fractured his skull but failed to penetrate his brain. * His second attempt also failed: a deep slash across his throat left a large pool of blood at the entrance to his studio, but he was still able to reach his easel on the opposite side of the room. *Only his third attempt, another cut to the throat which sprayed blood across his unfinished canvas, was successful. He died face-down before the bespattered 'Alfred and the First British Jury', his final bid 'to improve the taste of the English people' through the High Art of historical painting.* Such intensity, struggle and near-comic inability to succeed encapsulate Haydon's career. Thirty years before his death his huge, iconic paintings had made him the toast of early 19th-century London, drawing paying crowds to the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly for months and leading to nationwide tours. * However, his attempt to repeat such success three months before his death was to destroy him: barely a soul turned up, leaving the desperate painter alone, humiliated, and facing financial ruin. * In A Genius for Failure Paul O'Keeffe makes clear that the real tragedy of Haydon lay in the extent to which his failures were unwittingly engineered by his own actions - his refusal to resort to the painting of fashionable portraits, for example, and his self-destructively acrimonious relationship with the RA.* The company he kept - Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington, among many others - and the momentous events he lived through - The Battle of Waterloo, the Coronation of George IV, and the passing of the first Parliamentary Reform Bill - make A Genius for Failure not only the definitive biography of this fascinating and tragic painter, but a stirring portrayal of an age. |
| Illustrations: |
8pp colour insert and 20pp integrated b/w |
| Publication: |
UK |
| Imprint: |
Vintage Digital |
| Returns: |
Non-returnable |
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