Explores the development of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the mid 19th century; and works which figure amongst the most lasting and generally propular in British art. Renowned writer and art critic Edward Lucie-Smith contributes a study of the individual artists, their interconnection and previously unpublished material of their intricate links with the social establishment of the time. James Cahill has a special interest in the movement, having studied Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Holman Hunt. He reviews the major exhibition of 150 works at Tate Britain launched in September 2012. 'I think what I want to do is to follow a trail that leads, through many twists and turns, from the religious revival of the early 19th century to Blue Period Picasso, then to Surrealism. It may take in the Children of the Raj and the discovery of Japan along the way. It leads from rather rigid moralism, to conscious immoralism, and then at last to Freud/Dali.' Edward Lucie-Smith 05/2012

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." Edgar Degas Covering every era and over 650 artists, this comprehensive, illustrated guide offers an accessible yet expansive view of art history, featuring everything from iconic works and lesser-known gems to techniques and themes. Offering a comprehensive overview of Western artists, themes, paintings, techniques, and stories, Art: A Visual History is packed full of large, full-colour images of iconic works and lesser-known gems. Exploring every era, from 30,000BCE to the present, it includes features on the major schools and movements, as well as close-up critical appraisals of 22 masterpieces - from Botticelli's Primavera to J. M. W. Turner's The Fighting Temeraire. With detailed referencing, crisp reproductions and a fresh design, this beautiful book is a must-have for anyone with an interest in art history - from first-time gallery goers to knowledgeable art enthusiasts. What makes great art? Discover the answer now, with Art: A Visual History.

This comprehensive study of Rome’s contribution to the early history of photography traces the medium’s rise from a fledgling science to a dynamic form of artistic expression that forever changed the way we perceive the Eternal City. The authors examine the diverse transnational group of photographers who thrived in the cosmopolitan art center of Rome—and the pivotal role they played in the refinement and technical development of the nascent medium in the nineteenth century. The book ranges from the earliest pioneers—the French daguerreotypist Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey and the Welsh calotypist Calvert Richard Jones—to the work of the Roman School of Photography and its successors, among them James Anderson and Robert Macpherson of Britain; Frédéric Flachéron, Firmin Eugène Le Dien, and Gustave Le Gray of France; and Giacomo Caneva, Adriano de Bonis, and Pietro Dovizielli of Italy. Lavishly illustrated with 112 plates, many never before published, by nearly fifty practitioners, this volume expands our understanding of the place of Rome in early photography. An exhibition of the same title, to open at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in December 2022, accompanies this study.

This is an essential volume for anyone wanting to learn more about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their ethos, and offers the opportunity to study their greatest works in one beautiful collection. This impressive new book opens by looking at key Pre-Raphaelite artists in turn, documenting the artists' lives and the development of their talents. Includes a stunning gallery of more than 290 Pre-Raphaelite works.

Decorative handcrafts are commonly associated with traditional femininity and unthreatening docility. However, the artists connected with interwar Vienna’s “female Secession� created craft-based artworks that may be understood as sites of feminist resistance. In this book, historian Megan Brandow-Faller tells the story of how these artists disrupted long-established boundaries by working to dislodge fixed oppositions between “art� and “craft,� “decorative� and “profound,� and “masculine� and “feminine� in art. Tracing the history of the women’s art movement in Secessionist Vienna—from its origins in 1897, at the Women’s Academy, to the Association of Austrian Women Artists and its radical offshoot, the Wiener Frauenkunst—Brandow-Faller tells the compelling story of a movement that reclaimed the stereotypes attached to the idea of Frauenkunst, or women’s art. She shows how generational struggles and diverging artistic philosophies of art, craft, and design drove the conservative and radical wings of Austria’s women’s art movement apart and explores the ways female artists and craftswomen reinterpreted and extended the Klimt Group’s ideas in the interwar years. Brandow-Faller draws a direct connection to the themes that impelled the better-known explosion of feminist art in 1970s America. In this provocative story of a Viennese modernism that never disavowed its ornamental, decorative roots, she gives careful attention to key primary sources, including photographs and reviews of early twentieth-century exhibitions and archival records of school curricula and personnel. Engagingly written and featuring more than eighty representative illustrations, The Female Secession recaptures the radical potential of what Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka referred to as “works from women’s hands.� It will appeal to art historians working in the decorative arts and modernism as well as historians of Secession-era Vienna and gender history.

What is modernism in Southeast Asia? What is modern art, as embodied in the paintings of Southeast Asia? These questions and more are answered in Reframing Modernism: Painting from Southeast Asia, Europe and Beyond, published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name. Featuring 217 works by 51 Southeast Asian and European artists, from the Centre Pompidou and National Gallery Singapore as well as other Southeast Asian collections in the region and beyond, this catalogue tells the compelling story of modernism as it developed across continents, and reveals artists' powerful, and sometimes surprising, responses to modernity.

Noted for its vivid colours, elaborate use of symbols, and dedication to close observation of the natural world, the work of Pre-Raphaelite artists combines a deep engagement with the past and a modern realism that exemplifies the concerns of the age of steam travel. In Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, author Tim Barringer draws on an imaginative selection of paintings, drawings, and photographs to suggest that the dynamic energy of Pre-Raphaelitism arose out of the paradoxes at its heart. Past and present, historicism and modernity, symbolism and realism, as well as the tensions between city and country, men and women, worker and capitalist, colonizer and colonized all make appearances within Pre-Raphaelite art. By focusing on these issues, Barringer draws together the strands of revisionist thought on the Pre-Raphaelites and provides a range of stimulating new interpretations of their work. Beautifully illustrated, the second edition of this authoritative survey traces the history of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and includes new sections on photography as well as a revised introduction and bibliography.

This book examines the involvement of African American artists in the New Deal art programs of the 1930s. Emphasizing broader issues informed by the uniqueness of Black experience rather than individual artists’ works, Mary Ann Calo makes the case that the revolutionary vision of these federal art projects is best understood in the context of access to opportunity, mediated by the reality of racial segregation. Focusing primarily on the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Calo documents African American artists’ participation in community art centers in Harlem, in St. Louis, and throughout the South. She examines the internal workings of the Harlem Artists’ Guild, the Guild’s activities during the 1930s, and its alliances with other groups, such as the Artists’ Union and the National Negro Congress. Calo also explores African American artists’ representation in the exhibitions sponsored by WPA administrators and the critical reception of their work. In doing so, she elucidates the evolving meanings of the terms race, culture, and community in the interwar era. The book concludes with an essay by Jacqueline Francis on Black artists in the early 1940s, after the end of the FAP program. Presenting essential new archival information and important insights into the experiences of Black New Deal artists, this study expands the factual record and positions the cumulative evidence within the landscape of critical race studies. It will be welcomed by art historians and American studies scholars specializing in early twentieth-century race relations.

Smell loomed large in cultural discourse in the late nineteenth century, thanks to the midcentury fear of miasma, the drive for sanitation reform, and the rise in artificial perfumery. Meanwhile, the science of olfaction remained largely mysterious, prompting an impulse to “see smell� and inspiring some artists to picture scent in order to better know and control it. This book recovers the substantive role of the olfactory in Pre-Raphaelite art and Aestheticism. Christina Bradstreet examines the iconography and symbolism of scent in nineteenth-century art and visual culture. Fragrant imagery in the work of John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, George Frederic Watts, Edward Burne-Jones, and others set the trend for the preoccupation with scent that informed swaths of British, European, and American art and design. Bradstreet’s rich analyses of paintings, perfume posters, and other works of visual culture demonstrate how artworks mirrored the “period nose� and intersected with the most clamorous debates of the day, including evolution, civilization, race, urban morality, mental health, faith, and the “woman question.� Beautifully illustrated and grounded in current practices in sensory history, Scented Visions presents both fresh readings of major works of art and a deeper understanding of the cultural history of nineteenth-century scent.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood heralded an exciting new direction in British art, and the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and their contemporaries remain some of the most popular, evocative and recognisable Victorian art. Liverpool patrons and artists encouraged the group when London critics were hostile, and the city became home to its own Pre-Raphaelite school. Artists such as William Windus, John Lee, James Campbell and William Davis adopted Pre-Raphaelite principles whilst developing their own unique style and identity. The Walker Art Gallery, Lady Lever Art Gallery and Sudley House hold some of the finest works by both London-based and Liverpool Pre-Raphaelite artists, 71 of which are featured in this book.

In his best-selling travel memoir, The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain punningly refers to the black man who introduces him to Venetian Renaissance painting as a “contraband guide,� a term coined to describe fugitive slaves who assisted Union armies during the Civil War. By means of this and similar case studies, Paul H. D. Kaplan documents the ways in which American cultural encounters with Europe and its venerable artistic traditions influenced nineteenth-century concepts of race in the United States. Americans of the Civil War era were struck by the presence of people of color in European art and society, and American artists and authors, both black and white, adapted and transformed European visual material to respond to the particular struggles over the identity of African Americans. Taking up the work of both well- and lesser-known artists and writers—such as the travel writings of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, the paintings of German American Emanuel Leutze, the epistolary exchange between John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, newspaper essays written by Frederick Douglass and William J. Wilson, and the sculpture of freed slave Eugène Warburg—Kaplan lays bare how racial attitudes expressed in mid-nineteenth-century American art were deeply inflected by European traditions. By highlighting the contributions people of black African descent made to the fine arts in the United States during this period, along with the ways in which they were represented, Contraband Guides provides a fresh perspective on the theme of race in Civil War–era American art. It will appeal to art historians, to specialists in African American studies and American studies, and to general readers interested in American art and African American history.

Marius de Zayas brings together a series of texts and essays published by the Mexican writer, critic, cartoonist, gallerist and curator, Marius de Zayas (1880-1961) in three very distinct magazines: America, Camera Work and 291; and in two small books, one published by Alfred Stieglitz's gallery and the other by The Modern Gallery. A century after its publication, these writings on art gathered for the first time in a single volume and are accompanied by an introductory study and a series of annotations written by Antonio Saborit, who has devoted himself to researching the life and work of Marius de Zayas, an essential figure in the history of modern Western art.

Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893) is known predominantly for his close association with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and for his masterpiece, The Last of England (1852-55), with its poignant imagery of a young emigrant couple aboard ship taking their last sight of home. Admired by the young Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Brown was introduced by Rossetti to the artists of the PRB, an association that confirmed Brown's interests in outdoor light effects and led to the glowing palette of his great paintings of the 1850s. His interests embraced decorative design, and in the 1860s he was a founding member of the now famous decorating firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. This fully illustrated catalogue provides the first complete coverage of all of Madox Brown's work (including a section on frame designs contributed by Lynn Roberts). Drawing on the artist's diary and largely unpublished correspondence with associates and patrons, Mary Bennett provides a fascinating insight into his ideas and practice. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Sculptors Against the State considers the relation of anarchist ideology to avant-garde sculpture through an examination of three iconic artists whose work transformed European modernism: Umberto Boccioni, Jacob Epstein, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Addressing such complex subjects as sexual liberation, homosexuality, the history of emotions, the ethics of violence, and tactics of nonviolent resistance, Mark Antliff demonstrates how sculptural processes were shaped by forms of anarchism calculated to foster a radical community. The anarchist view that the State is a state of mind and a set of social relationships is a central theme Antliff uses to explore not only the art of Boccioni, Epstein, and Gaudier-Brzeska but the associated aesthetics of radical luminaries such as Oscar Wilde, F. T. Marinetti, and Ezra Pound. Taking Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Epstein’s Tomb of Oscar Wilde, and Gaudier-Brzeska’s Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound as a starting point, Antliff argues that these sculptors saw the arts as a radical catalyst for an entirely new constellation of interpersonal relations and psychological dispositions—ones antithetical to those propagated by the State. Powerfully argued and informed by extensive archival research, Sculptors Against the State provides a new understanding of these artists, even as it sheds light on why contemporary anarchist theory is necessary for understanding the profound cultural impact modernism had during the twentieth century. Antliff’s work will be of interest to students and scholars of modernist art and literature, and particularly those who study the intersections between artistic practice and politics.

"An invaluable resource a delightful and compendious opus." - The Pre-Raphaelite Society Review The Death of Chatterton hangs from the wall of the Tate Britain, a resplendent depiction of tragedy. This is the canvas that earned Henry Wallis his lasting legacy. It embodies the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, from its morbid subject (Thomas Chatterton, a precocious 18th-century poet who poisoned himself to escape poverty, aged only seventeen), to its vibrant colourwork and detailed naturalism, characteristic of the first phase of Pre-Raphaelitism. Despite this, no significant study has been dedicated to Wallis - until now. Henry Wallis: From Pre-Raphaelite to Collector/Connoisseur - delivers the first comprehensive appraisal of this often-overlooked Pre-Raphaelite. Composed of three parts - a biography, a catalogue raisonne and a series of important appendices - this book demonstrates the full range of Wallis's contributions to the world of Victorian art. The biography acknowledges Wallis's expertise as a colourist and draughtsman, while paying respect to his lesser-known accomplishments as both collector and connoisseur. The Illustrated Catalogue gathers every identifiable work in the painter's name - of which there are many, including The Stonebreaker: Wallis's other great masterpiece. Finally, the appendices present a selection of correspondence between Wallis and various members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle - William Holman Hunt, Frederic George Stephens, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Bell Scott, Arthur Hughes, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. A pioneering exploration of the artist and the man, Henry Wallis will be at home on the bookshelf of any Pre-Raphaelite enthusiast.

Alexander Gardner is best known for his innovative photographic history of the Civil War. What is less known is the extent to which he was involved in the international workers’ rights movement. Tying Gardner’s photographic storytelling to his transatlantic reform activities, this book expands our understanding of Gardner’s career and the work of his studio in Washington, DC, by situating his photographic production within the era’s discourse on social and political reform. Drawing on previously unknown primary sources and original close readings, Makeda Best reveals how Gardner’s activism in Scotland and photography in the United States shared an ideological foundation. She reads his Photographic Sketch Book of the War as a politically motivated project, rooted in Gardner’s Chartist and Owenite beliefs, and illuminates how its treatment of slavery is primarily concerned with the harm that the institution posed to the United States’ reputation as a model democracy. Best shows how, in his portraiture, Gardner celebrated Northern labor communities and elevated white immigrant workers, despite the industrialization that degraded them. She concludes with a discussion of Gardner’s promotion of an American national infrastructure in which photographers and photography played an integral role. Original and compelling, this reconsideration of Gardner’s work expands the contribution of Civil War photography beyond the immediate narrative of the war to comprehend its relation to the vigorous international debates about democracy, industrialization, and the rights of citizens. Scholars working at the intersection of photography, cultural history, and social reform in the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic will find Best’s work invaluable to their own research.

Major edition revealing key ideas and events in the lives and work of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and Victorian literary circles: 5,800 letters (including 2,000 previously unpublished letters) to 330 recipients. 1855-1862: This nine-volume editionl represents the definitive collection of extant Rossetti correspondence, an outstanding primary witness to the range of ideas and opinions that shaped Rossetti's art and poetry. The largest collection of Rossetti's letters ever to be published, it features all known surviving letters, a total of almost 5,800 to over 330 recipients, and includes 2,000 previously unpublished letters by Rossetti and selected letters to him.In addition to this, about 100 drawings taken from within letter texts are also reproduced. In its entirety the collection will give an invaluable and unparalleled insight into Rossetti's character and art, and will form a rich resource for students and scholars studying all aspects of his life and work. The correspondence has been transcribed from collections in sixty-four manuscript repositories, containing Rossetti's letters to his companions inthe Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt and Stephens; friends such as Boyce and Bell Scott; his early patrons, Ellen Heaton and James Leathart; and his publisher friend, Alexander Macmillan. An additional twenty-two printed sources have also been accessed. Index; extensive annotations. WILLIAM E. FREDEMAN (1928-1999) was professor of English at the University of British Columbia from 1956-1991. His many books, articles and reviews on the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers include his important Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study. He died in 1999 with this edition almost completed; LEONARD ROBERTS is an art historian and author of Arthur Hughes: His Life and Works.

William Holman Hunt was one of the three major artistic talents of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Hunt's work was always characterized by great seriousness of purpose, and his paintings include many of the most beautiful and powerful images of that midcentury explosion of creativity. This catalogue raisonee gives him the attention he deserves. The book includes an introduction that assesses Hunt's life and artistic practice and discusses his aims, philosophy, and religious beliefs, which shed light on his works. While many of his paintings, with their extraordinary effects of light and color, are immediately accessible, his mature works incorporate symbolism that cannot be fully understood without a detailed knowledge of his intentions, and the catalogue entries thoroughly explore this. The volume presents Hunt's oils and works on paper in two separate sections, and appendixes provide additional information on his illustrated letters, etchings, published illustrations, sculpture, and furniture. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Evelyn Waugh's first book: a portrait of one of the greatest artists of the nienteenth century, from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth 'Biography, as books about the dead are capriciously catalogued, is still very much in the mode' This is a sparkling account of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's tragic and mysterious life, telling the story behind some of the greatest poetry and painting of the nineteenth century. Shot through with charm and dry wit, and illuminated by his sense of kinship with the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Rossetti is at once a brilliant reevaluation of Rosetti's work and legacy, as well as a blast of defiance against the art establishment of Waugh's day. 'The youthful high spirits of the writing make this a true cultural delight' New Statesman 'To be celebrated with fireworks, bunting and marching bands' Country Life

In Consuming Painting, Allison Deutsch challenges the pervasive view that Impressionism was above all about visual experience. Focusing on the language of food and consumption as they were used by such prominent critics as Baudelaire and Zola, she writes new histories for familiar works by Manet, Monet, Caillebotte, and Pissarro and creates fresh possibilities for experiencing and interpreting them. Examining the culinary metaphors that the most influential critics used to express their attraction or disgust toward painting, Deutsch rethinks French modern-life painting in relation to the visceral reactions that these works evoked in their earliest publics. Writers posed viewing as analogous to ingestion and used comparisons to food to describe the appearance of paint and the painter’s process. The food metaphors they chose were aligned with specific female types, such as red meat for sexualized female flesh, confections for fashionably made-up women, and hearty vegetables for agricultural laborers. These culinary figures of speech, Deutsch argues, provide important insights into both the fabrication of the feminine and the construction of masculinity in nineteenth-century France. Consuming Painting exposes the social politics at stake in the deeply gendered metaphors of sense and sensation. Original and convincing, Consuming Painting upends traditional narratives of the sensory reception of modern painting. This trailblazing book is essential reading for specialists in nineteenth-century art and criticism, gender studies, and modernism.

Founded by a band of young iconoclasts, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood stunned Victorian England with its revaluation of culture and lifestyle. With Pre-Raphaelitism ascendant in the 1850s and canonical by the 1880s, the movement's refractory reception history is an object lesson in how avant-gardes burst upon the scene, dispense with their antagonistic posture, and become a mainstay of tradition. Wendy Graham traces the critical discourses that greeted the Pre-Raphaelites' debut, shaped their contemporary reception, and continued to inform responses to them well after their heyday. She explains the mechanics of fame and the politics of scandal contributing to the rise of aestheticism, providing a new interpretation of the place of aesthetic counterculture in Victorian England. Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity sheds new light on Victorian discourses on sexuality and masculinity through a thick description of literary bravado, the emotions of male bonding within cliques, and homoerotic frissons among the creators and reviewers of Pre-Raphaelitism. She threads together the qualities that made William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Gabriel Rossetti exemplary figures of aesthetic celebrity in the 1850s; Algernon Swinburne and Simeon Solomon in the 1860s; and Edward Burne-Jones and Walter Pater in the 1870s. The book documents the symbiotic relationship between periodical writers and the artists and poets they helped make famous, demonstrating that the origin myth of Bohemian artistic transcendence was connected with the rise of a professional class of journalists. Graham shows that the Pre-Raphaelites innovated many of the phenomena now associated with Oscar Wilde, arguing that they were foundational for him in forging an artistic and personal identity with a full-blown publicity apparatus. Wilde had models. This book is about them.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet, painter, aesthete, founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was one of the most influential British artists to have lived. His extraordinary and obsessive vision was fuelled by the tortured love he felt for three muses: the tragic Lizzy Siddal, into whose coffin Rossetti cast the only manuscript of his poems (only to have her exhumed and the volume retrieved years later); the earthy former sex worker Fanny Cornforth; and Jane Burden, the statuesque wife of his friend William Morris. During the whole of his life Rossetti returned to the three faces, sometimes combining them, in his bid to encapsulate the nature of woman. The portraits he made range from rapid, vivid sketches to careful drawings and fully worked out allegorical paintings. Few artists have so relentlessly followed a particular vision; it is not surprising that Rossetti's haunting and sensual paintings were admired by the Symbolists and Picasso alike. With two essays by the leading scholar of Rossetti, Christopher Newall, and Holburne curator Sylvie Broussine, richly illustrated with 75 images including ravishing details in full page and spreads, this is a magnificent but approachable introduction to the riches and strangeness of Rossetti's art.

This book addresses the unique and profound indeterminacy of “Creole,� a label applied to white, black, and mixed-race persons born in French colonies during the nineteenth century. "Creole� implies that the geography of one’s birth determines identity in ways that supersede race, language, nation, and social status. Paradoxically, the very capaciousness of the term engendered a perpetual search for visual signs of racial difference as well as a pretense to blindness about the intermingling of races in Creole society. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby reconstructs the search for visual signs of racial difference among people whose genealogies were often repressed. She explores French representations of Creole subjects and representations by Creole artists in France, the Caribbean, and the Americas. To do justice to the complexity of Creole identity, Grigsby interrogates the myriad ways in which people defined themselves in relation to others. With close attention to the differences between Afro-Creole and Euro-Creole cultures and persons, Grigsby examines figures such as Théodore Chassériau, Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, Alexandre Dumas père, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, the models Joseph and Laure, Josephine Bonaparte, Jeanne Duval, and Adah Isaacs Menken. Based on extensive archival research, Creole is an original and important examination of colonial identity. This essential study will be welcomed by specialists in nineteenth-century art history, French cultural history, the history of race, and transatlantic history more generally.

'You haunt me everywhere.' So wrote Edward Burne-Jones to Frances Graham, his muse for the last 25 triumphant years of his life: 'I haven't a corner of my life or my thoughts where you are not'. He drew her obsessively, included her in some of his most famous paintings, and showered her with gifts. Even when she betrayed him to marry, he would return to her. To him 'all the romance and beauty of my life means you.' This is the first biography of his muse. In a discreet, subtle, human way, her life is a study in power - artistic, social, political, familial, local - and all the more fascinating for being played out from a perennial position of weakness. What makes a muse? The word conjures up for the artist a human cocoon of sexual allure and worship: part inspiration, part lover and protector. Yet however beguiling, demanding and volatile a muse could be, it remained a life surrendered to the art of another. In Victorian England, this was especially so with the hierarchies between the sexes so firmly entrenched. The life of a muse to a Pre-Raphaelite artist was no different: Ruskin and Effie Gray, Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal, both powerfully destructive relationships that ended respectively in divorce and death. The one who survived was Frances Graham. She had a restless, irrepressible intelligence, able to mix at her small dinners politicians and aristocrats with writers, artists and the up and coming, be they Oscar Wilde or Albert Einstein. In time, she became the confidante of three government ministers, including Asquith, the Liberal leader. 'The Portrait of a Muse' is the tale of a remarkable woman living in an age on the cusp of modernity.