History of British Design 1820-1970

MacCarthy, Fiona

Unwin Hyman

Stanley Spencer: An English Vision

Stanley Spencer`s extreme combination of the homely and the weird has baffled viewers of his paintings. In this book, MacCarthy investigates Spencer`s life, sets his work in its cultural context, and emphasizes the links between his life and his paintings. This volume provides a comprehensive account of a profoundly original artist and his work.

Biographies & Memoirs

Yale University Press

A beautifully illustrated portrayal of the life of the artist and writer who revolutionized Victorian society and whose legacy is still widely embraced today William Morris (1834–1896) was an artist, craftsman, designer, poet, polymath, and visionary thinker. Well known for advocating that objects of beauty be accessible to all, Morris had a tremendous impact on the British Socialist movement, the Arts and Crafts movement, the Garden City movement, as well as on successive generations of artists and thinkers in Britain and beyond. In this fascinating book, Fiona MacCarthy examines Morris’s vision of a society in which art could flourish, and how this idea resonated over the ensuing century. Anarchy and Beauty takes the reader through Morris’s fascinating career, from the establishment of his decorative arts shop (later Morris &amp; Co.), to his radical sexual politics and libertarianism, and the publication in 1890 of his novel News from Nowhere, which envisions a utopian socialist society. MacCarthy then looks at the numerous artists and movements that bear the influence of Morris’s ideas: Arts and Crafts and the Garden City, which took hold in both Europe and the United States; artists’ communities that sprung up during the interwar years; and the 1951 Festival of Britain, whose mission was to bring the highest standards of design within the reach of everyone.

Anarchy & Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy, 1860–1960

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Lord Byron in all his controversial splendor--the long-awaited, authoritative biography With this brilliant book, Fiona MacCarthy has produced the most important work on Byron in nearly half a century. Granted unprecedented access to many documents and artifacts unexamined by previous scholars, the acclaimed biographer brings a fresh, engaging sensibility to a full appreciation of the poet's life and art. Byron: Life and Legend explores heretofore unrevealed aspects of Byron's complex creative existence, reassessing his poetry, reinterpreting his incomparable letters, and reconsidering the voluminous record left by the poet's contemporaries: his friends and family, his critics and supporters. MacCarthy's scope is comprehensive, giving due weight to each aspect of her subject's genius and covering the full range of his life, retracing his journeys through Italy, Turkey, and Greece and culminating in his heroic voyage to Missolonghi, where he died at the tragically early age of thirty-six. After his death, a pervasive Byronism swept Europe; presented here is the fascinating evolution of his posthumous reputation and its influence on literature, architecture, painting, music, manners, sex and psyche. Full of energy and detail, subtlety and glamour, this vital new study reestablishes Byron as a charismatic figure in the forefront of European art.

Byron: Life and Legend

History

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Arts & Literature

William Morris was an extraordinary figure, so manifold in his ambitions and talents, so outsize in his personality, that no single biographer has yet come to grips with his entire life, works, and character. As a wonderfully talented designer and artistic entrepreneur, Morris created a style that still lives; as a contradictory political figure - at once a radical and a traditionalist - he was a founding father of British Socialism in the era of Marx and Engels; as a poet and storyteller, he attained a huge contemporary reputation, producing several best-sellers; and as the husband of the Pre-Raphaelite icon Jane Morris (whose love affair with Dante Gabriel Rossetti caused a stir and led to many famous paintings), he was the subject of personal torments as profound as his creative ones. In this biography, Fiona MacCarthy brings all the strands together, from the dreamy boy in a London suburb spinning medieval fantasies to the great bearded patriarch dividing his time between the design and production of beautiful fabrics, the translation of Icelandic epics, and the promotion of Socialism on street corners. Her understanding of his work as an artist-craftsman is profound, yet she is equally illuminating about the strange mixture of nostalgia and yearning for change that shaped his politics. At the same time, she is prepared to deal frankly and in detail with his often painful personal life.

William Morris: A Life for Our Time

KNOPF

Traces the life and career of the British sculptor, engraver, and typographer, and makes use of his own diaries to depict his complex personality

Eric Gill: A Lover's Quest for Art and God

Literature & Fiction

E.P.Dutton

Eric Gill was perhaps the greatest English artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a typographer and lettercutter of genius and a master in the art of sculpture and wood-engraving.'A wonderfully detailed account of his personality - so vivid, you feel you know just what it would have been like to visit him at one of his patriarchal communes . . . A Dominican, dining with the Gills, once thought he saw a nimbus shining around Eric's head. Despite the sexual improprieties it unearths, MacCarthy's authoritative biography allows you to understand how someone might have thought that.' John Carey, Sunday Times

Eric Gill

Faber and Faber

Winner of the Wolfson History Prize, the essential biography of the father of the Arts and Crafts movement. The author, Fiona MacCarthy, is the curator of the National Portrait Gallery's 2014-15 exhibition   Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy  .     'One of the finest biographies ever published in this country' A. S. Byatt Since his death in 1896, William Morris has come to be regarded as one of the giants of the Victorian era. But his genius was so many-sided and so profound that its full extent has rarely been grasped. Many people may find it hard to believe that the greatest English designer of his time, possibly of all time, could also be internationally renowned as a founder of the socialist movement, and could have been ranked as a poet together with Tennyson and Browning. With penetrating insight, Fiona MacCarthy has managed to encompass all the different facets of Morris's complex character, shedding light on his immense creative powers as artist and designer of furniture, fabrics, wallpaper, stained glass, tapestry and books, and as a poet, novelist and translator; his psychology and his emotional life; his frenetic activities as polemicist and reformer; and his remarkable circle of friends, literary, artistic and political, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. Fiona MacCarthy's skilful drawing together of these disparate elements makes for a comprehensive and compelling biography.

William Morris : A Life for Our Time

Faber Paperbacks

This biography reinterprets the great man's life and poetry. MacCarthy casts a fresh eye on Byron's childhood in Scotland, his embattled relations with his mother and his series of relationships with adolescent boys.

Faber Faber Ltd

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MacCarthy, Fiona. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by MacCarthy, Fiona

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MacCarthy, Fiona. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

History of British Design 1820-1970

Stanley Spencer: An English Vision

Anarchy & Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy, 1860–1960

Byron: Life and Legend

Byron: Life and Legend

William Morris: A Life for Our Time

Eric Gill: A Lover's Quest for Art and God

Eric Gill

William Morris : A Life for Our Time

Byron: Life and Legend