Wenceslaus who, you may ask? Yet it is largely thanks to Hollar
that we know anything of what London looked like in the 17th
century, before the Great Fire, for it was he who produced the
etchings of Old Saint Paul's, the palace of Whitehall and the
meadows (!) of Islington, old London Bridge crowded with timbered
houses, the populous Thames flowing beneath, and of course his
famous panorama of the city, seen from an imaginary high point on
the South Bank. Yet the artist who preserved his adopted city in
such enchanting detail left few traces of his own life. We know
that he left his native Prague in the midst of the Thirty Years
War, and sought refuge in an England on the brink of its own civil
war (a war Hollar avoided by removing himself to the Low Countries,
returning only after the execution of King Charles). For the rest,
Gillian Tindall, acclaimed author of The Fields Beneath and City of
Gold: The Biography of Bombay, draws on a range of sources and on
her own imagination to create a montage of Hollar's life and times,
and the illustrious lives (Samuel Pepys, John Tradescant, John
Ogilby) that touched his. It is a carefully researched account, but
Tindall also employs her considerable skills as a novelist to
illuminate those areas of Hollar's life for which there are no
records (a skill she has already used to effect in Celestine, her
prize-winning novel of 19th-century rural life in France). The
factual and fictional sections complement each other, forming an
intricate whole, not unlike Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor in its
baroque atmosphere and macabre (if understandable) accent on death
and disease. A richly rewarding, multi-layered experience in which
literature and history meet head-on. (Kirkus UK)
The seventeenth-century London Wenceslaus Hollar knew is now
largely destroyed or buried. Yet its populous river, its timbered
streets, fashionable ladies, old St Paul's, the devestation of the
Fire, the palace of Whitehall and the meadows of Islington live on
for us in his etchings. Drawing on numerous sources, Gillian
Tindall creates a montage of Hollar's life and times and of the
illustrious lives that touched his. It is a carefully researched
factual account, but she has also employed her novelist's skill to
form an intricate whole - a life's texture which is also an
absorbing and occasionally tragic story.
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