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The Subject of a Portrait

The Subject of a Portrait

by JohnHarvey (Author), JohnEverettMillais (Illustrator), SimonLavery (Editor), TredynasDays (Editor)

  • Used

    Paperback 2014

    $9.51
Synopsis

In 1853 the most brilliant young painter of Victorian England, John Everett Millais, travelled to Scotland with the country's leading art critic, John Ruskin, and his young wife Euphemia ('Effie'). While in Scotland, the artist was to paint the critic's portrait. But the marriage was built on intimate secrets, and the events that followed became both the most famous love story, and the most famous scandal, to involve a young woman, an author and an artist, in nineteenth century England. Still however we do not know exactly 'what happened in the Highlands' - or in London, afterwards. The Subject of a Portrait recreates those dilemmas. It catches the excitement of watching an artist, torn by conflicts, produce a great painting. A young wife must change the foundations of her life - and of herself. And a great critic gains revolutionary insights at the cost of his personal disaster. The figure 'John' is a new character in fiction. The mysteries surrounding the Ruskin marriage are of intense contemporary interest. They are the subject of two feature films for release this year and next. A film may show the images - but the intimate guesswork of a novel can get to the roots of the knots in life, even of the twists in a strange, great figure like Ruskin. The fiction of John Harvey has been consistently found 'immensely readable', 'impressive, compelling...tense, exciting and significant', 'remarkable and terrifying...charged, street-credible' (Isabel Raphael, Allan Massie, the TLS). Britain's most distinguished literary critic, Professor Sir Christopher Ricks, found The Subject of a Portrait 'excellent; I was taken by every page; more, every sentence. It is beautifully and startlingly written, the sudden shifts and turns, impulse and counter-impulse within and from these remarkable people. A very fine love story.'

$9.51

Quantity

1 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 289
 Publisher: Polar Books UK
Published: 02 Jul 2014
ISBN 10: 0953630943
ISBN 13: 9780953630943
Children’s book age: 12+ Years

Media Reviews
A discerning and sumptuous study: Captivating story of a love triangle peopled with sympathetic characters...John Harvey uses this metaphor to great effect in his new novel, The Subject of a Portrait. Although Harvey tells the story from the perspectives of all three involved - as based on Millais' work from the period, and what details of the affair have made the historical record - it's the figure of Ruskin around whom the book is focused. After Millais chooses the background against which he intends to paint his subject, he begins with the details of the setting, leaving the man a mere outline , a blank shape to be filled in at a later date. The novel works in a similar fashion: Ruskin's silhouette is slowly filled in with every turn of the page. The portrait Harvey paints of the great critic is gloriously riddled with the contradictions that make him so intriguing a subject. On the one hand, there's his strange upbringing, patted and petted and coddled and cooed over by his doting mother, kept as a child long out of infancy, the consequences of which are his lifelong attraction to childish innocence and his tendency to retreat into baby talk. But on the other there's the respected public figure who wields his patronage with a fist of iron, believing Millais' art is his alone to command . It's a rare feat to be able to turn such familiar fodder into so captivating a story peopled with such sympathetic characters. Harvey's novel might not break new ground, but it's a discerning and rather sumptuous study of one of history's most infamous love triangles. Lucy Scholes, The Independent, 'The Monday Book' The Subject of a Portrait is a subtle, engaging and intelligent exploration of some of the iconic figures of the Victorian literary and artistic period. We are familiar with the notion that the Victorians were a strange mixture of sexual repression and prurience; this novel brings to life these contradictions with style and great narrative skill. The characters of Millais and Effie are far from romantic stereotypes; their passion is depicted as convincingly as Heathcliff and Cathy's. But it's the strangely sympathetic portrayal of the monstrous innocent Ruskin, with his angels and demons in constant conflict, that dominates the narrative and lingers in the memory. (Simon Lavery in Tredynas Days) A thrilling discovery and a guaranteed page-turner. Powered by lyrical prose of the highest order, this is a moving and at times shocking account of the relationship between the renowned art critic, John Ruskin, his wife, Euphemia (Effie), and her lover, the brilliant pre-Raphaelite painter, John Everett Millais. John Harvey's evocation of Victorian England and its climate of sexual repression will be hard to match. So too will the subtlety and eye for intimate detail with which he brings alive an achingly beautiful love story. Definitely one of my books of the year that should be on everyone's reading list. Farzana Shaikh (Amazon Customer Review)
Author Bio
John Harvey's first novel, The Plate Shop, described shop floor life in a heavy engineering works: it won the David Higham Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize. His second, Coup d'Etat, depicted life under the Greek military dictatorship of the Colonels: it was selected by Chris Patten in the Sunday Telegraph as 'the novel which shows the best grasp of political life'. The Legend of Captain Space considered how strange and frightening the experience of motherhood may be: A. S. Byatt said in The Independent that it created 'perfected instances of some terrible mystery of human existence'. Of his non-fiction books, Men in Black, his acclaimed history of the colour black in men's dress, has been translated into seven languages, and his latest book, The Story of Black, is described in the Diplomat magazine as 'a wonderfully written and illustrated book'. He is the author also of two cultural essays, Clothes and Stairs. John Harvey is a Doctor of Letters of Cambridge University and Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.