Nature's Engraver

Nature's Engraver

Author: Jenny Uglow

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-05-15

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0226823911

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In this superb biography, Uglow tells the story of the farmers son who influenced book illustration for a century to come. It is a story of violent change, radical politics, lost ways of life, and the beauty of the wild--a journey to the beginning of a lasting obsession with the natural world.


Bewick's British Birds

Bewick's British Birds

Author: Thomas Bewick

Publisher: Arcturus Publishing

Published: 2022-10-01

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 1398825182

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With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy...' Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte's heroine was not alone in her enjoyment of Thomas Bewick's British Birds - since its first publication in 1797 it has become one of the best-loved classics of natural history. Bewick's masterful woodcuts are more than scientific records; each beady eye and jaunty pose betrays the artist's love of birds. This edition includes over 180 bird species, from garden favourites such as robins, blackbirds and finches, to predators such as the osprey and the majestic golden eagle. Each entry is illustrated with an engraving, and throughout the book are narrative vignettes typical of Bewick's playful, engaging style.


Thomas Bewick

Thomas Bewick

Author: Nigel Tattersfield

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780714126913

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Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) was the foremost wood engraver of his generation, and the quality of his work has remained unsurpassed. His extraordinary woodcuts of animals and birds made him famous, and he dramatically influenced the development of the illustrated book in both England and America. Yet Bewick was no isolated creative genius toiling in an artists atelier, but a trade engraver in the heart of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, working at the very moment when the Industrial Revolution was beginning to change the world. This book celebrates the skill of the artist by presenting 60 engravings, some never published before, and by offering a historical perspective.


Aesop's Human Zoo

Aesop's Human Zoo

Author: Phaedrus

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-10-27

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 022680612X

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Most of us grew up with Aesop's Fables—tales of talking animals, with morals attached. In fact, the familiar versions of the stories attributed to this enigmatic and astute storyteller are based on adaptations of Aesop by the liberated Roman slave Phaedrus. In turn, Phaedrus's renderings have been rewritten so extensively over the centuries that they do not do justice to the originals. In Aesop's Human Zoo, legendary Cambridge classicist John Henderson puts together a surprising set of up-front translations—fifty sharp, raw, and sometimes bawdy, fables by Phaedrus into the tersest colloquial English verse. Providing unusual insights into the heart of Roman culture, these clever poems open up odd avenues of ancient lore and life as they explore social types and physical aspects of the body, regularly mocking the limitations of human nature and offering vulgar or promiscuous interpretations of the stuff of social life. Featuring folksy proverbs and satirical anecdotes, filled with saucy naughtiness and awful puns, Aesop's Human Zoo will amuse you with its eccentricities and hit home with its shrewdly candid and red raw messages. The entertainment offered in this volume of impeccably accurate translations is truly a novelty—a good-hearted and knowing laugh courtesy of classical poetry. Beginning to advanced classicists and Latin scholars will appreciate the original Latin text provided in this bilingual edition. The splash of classic Thomas Bewick wood engravings to accompany the fables renders the collection complete.


Mr. Lear

Mr. Lear

Author: Jenny Uglow

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2018-04-17

Total Pages: 610

ISBN-13: 1466828234

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A sparkling biography of the poet and artist Edward Lear by the award-winning biographer Jenny Uglow Edward Lear, the renowned English artist, musician, author, and poet, lived a vivid, fascinating life, but confessed, “I hardly enjoy any one thing on earth while it is present.” He was a man in a hurry, “running about on railroads” from London to country estates and boarding steamships to Italy, Corfu, India, and Palestine. He is still loved for his “nonsenses,” from startling, joyous limericks to great love poems like “The Owl and the Pussy Cat” and “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” and he is famous, too, for his brilliant natural history paintings, landscapes, and travel writing. But although Lear belongs solidly to the age of Darwin and Dickens—he gave Queen Victoria drawing lessons, and his many friends included Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite painters—his genius for the absurd and his dazzling wordplay make him a very modern spirit. He speaks to us today. Lear was a man of great simplicity and charm—children adored him—yet his humor masked epilepsy, depression, and loneliness. Jenny Uglow’s beautifully illustrated biography, full of the color of the age, brings us his swooping moods, passionate friendships, and restless travels. Above all, Mr. Lear shows how this uniquely gifted man lived all his life on the boundaries of rules and structures, disciplines and desires—an exile of the heart.


The Pinecone

The Pinecone

Author: Jenny Uglow

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2012-09-04

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0571290450

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In the village of Wreay, near Carlisle, stands the strangest and most magical church in Victorian England. This vivid, original book tells the story of its builder, Sarah Losh, strong-willed and passionate and unusual in every way. Born into an old Cumbrian family, heiress to an industrial fortune, Sarah combined a zest for progress with a love of the past. In the church, her masterpiece, she let her imagination flower - there are carvings of ammonites, scarabs and poppies; an arrow pierces the wall as if shot from a bow; a tortoise-gargoyle launches itself into the air. And everywhere there are pinecones, her signature in stone. The church is a dramatic rendering of the power of myth and the great natural cycles of life and death and rebirth. Sarah's story is also that of her radical family - friends of Wordsworth and Coleridge; of the love between sisters and the life of a village; of the struggle of the weavers, the coming of the railways, the findings of geology and the fate of a young northern soldier in the Afghan war. Above all, though, it is about the joy of making and the skill of local, unsung craftsmen.