BIOGRAPHY · GENERAL
Callow, Philip.
Also known as: Philip Callow, Philip CALLOW
Vincent van Gogh was a complete and utter failure in everything that seemed important to his contemporaries.
— from Vincent van Gogh, 2001
Most acclaimed
Louis
2001
"There are many Stevensons behind the initials RLS, but the one that has endeared him to so many readers for so long is surely the fighter, battling to stay alive. Jorge Luis Borges described Stevenson's brief life as courageous and heroic. In Philip Callow's new biography, one can see why.". "Doctors, called repeatedly to what should have been his deathbed, would find a scarecrow, twitching and alive. A sickly child, Louis became in turn a bohemian dandy, a literary gypsy traipsing through the mountains of France with a donkey, and at twenty-eight the lover of an American woman ten years his senior, the fabulous Fanny.". "He escaped his Scottish town, his family, his friends who had mapped out a literary career for him in London, and instead went chaotically across the Atlantic and overland to California in poverty and despair to reach his beloved, wherupon he escaped into marriage and committed himself to being a nomad. He sailed the Pacific and dreamed of being an explorer; his restlessness was Victorian. All the while he was composing some of the most treasured tales in the English language."--BOOK JACKET.
Chekhov
1993
Portrait of Chekhov the man, devoted to his family and his actress wife, his medical career, his literary accomplishments, and his fatal illness.
Vincent van Gogh
2001
"A volume which explores Van Gogh's oeuvre through two fundamental aspects of his artistic identity: his love for the countryside and his attachment to the city. Admired for his light-filled landscapes as much as for his impassioned portraits, Vincent van Gogh was an impetuous painter with a cavalier disregard for convention when it suited him. At the same time he was a sophisticated thinker, fluent in several languages, and trained as an art dealer. Though often plagued by several doubts about his work, he was immensely ambitious and ultimately had a clear sense of his oeuvre as a whole and the place it was to take in the history of art. Such apparently contradictory positions define much of Van Gogh's life and artistic output. They are also at the basis of this volume, which explores Van Gogh's oeuvre through two fundamental aspects of his artistic identity: his love for the countryside as a stable, never-changing environment and his attachment to the city as the center of fast-moving, modern life. The catalog features works by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Jean-Francois Millet, Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro, Charles Francois Daubigny, Anton Mauve; prints after Daubigny, Daumier, Millet, that Van Gogh himself collected and copied as well as etchings and aquatints by Pissarro and Cezanne; and five letters written by Van Gogh to friends, colleagues, and art critics. It accompanies an exhibition at Complesso Monumentale del Vittoriano that begins on February 20, 2011." --Publisher's website.