Available Formats
Words & Pictures: Writers, Artists and a Peculiarly British Tradition
By (Author) Jenny Uglow
Faber & Faber
Faber & Faber
5th August 2019
4th July 2019
Main
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Biography and non-fiction prose
Individual artists, art monographs
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
820.9
Paperback
176
Width 135mm, Height 180mm, Spine 12mm
188g
As children, learning to read, we look first at the illustrations - but how do these tell their stories differently to the words Words & Pictures explores this question through three encounters between writers and artists. It looks at how artists have responded to two great, contrasting works, Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress; at Hogarth and Fielding, great innovators, sharing common aims; and at Wordsworth and Bewick, a poet and engraver, both working separately, but both imbued with the spirit of their age. A brief coda turns to a fourth relationship: writers and artists who collaborate from the start, like Dickens and Phiz, and Lewis Carroll and Tenniel.
Sometimes amusing, sometimes moving, this is a book to pore over and enjoy. The visions it considers link daily life to the universal, the passionate and the sublime.
Jenny Uglow 's books include prize-winning biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth and Sarah Losh. The Lunar Men, published in 2002, was described by Richard Holmes as 'an extraordinarily gripping account', while Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, won the National Arts Writers Award and A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Her most recent book is In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815. She lives in Canterbury.