Goodden's well-measured life of the artist may help bring Kauffman's oeuvre back to light.
Oxford historian and biographer Goodden (The Sweetness of Life, 1999) enlists her considerable knowledge of 18th-century art history in this fine study of the popular, though frequently belittled, Swiss painter Angelica Kauffman.
Goodden attempts to raise Kauffman's technical reputation while acknowledging her faults. Much like her contemporary Vigée Le Brun, Kauffman was denied the rigorous art training afforded to men, such as learning to draw anatomy from life, and relegated to so-called feminine and decorative subjects such as flower-painting and botanical drawing. However, Kauffman was a sensational popular portraitist in her heyday of late 18th-century London—she was triumphantly elected to the Royal Academy in 1768. She learned how to paint from her Austrian father, who would exert a strong influence on her for most of her life. Early on, she rejected her Swiss origins, and she received her formative training in Italy, copying the masters. On her Grand Tour, she picked up important commissions from the aristocracy, and her fame grew, as did her earnings for portraits; the young woman was the breadwinner in the household. Famous portraits of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and David Garrick established her reputation by the time she arrived in London, and she cemented important friendships with Joshua Reynolds and Henry Fuseli. Despite a rash marriage to a man who turned out to be a faux aristocrat and bigamist, Kauffman seems to have lead the quiet, single-minded life of a serious and industrious artist; her Catholicism prompted her to eventually flee her beloved England and settle in Rome with a second husband and friend to her father. A portrait of Goethe followed on their brief acquaintance, though he complained it was “effeminate.” In the end, the author deems Kauffman a populist, adaptable painter whose own success creating pretty pictures damned her.
Goodden's well-measured life of the artist may help bring Kauffman's oeuvre back to light.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-8441-3758-9
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Pimlico/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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