Matthew Sturgis (born 1960) [1] is a British historian and biographer.
Matthew Sturgis (born 1960) [1] is a British historian and biographer.
Sturgis earned a degree in history at the University of Oxford. [2]
Sturgis has written art criticism for Harpers & Queens , travel journalism for The Sunday Telegraph , book reviews for The Independent , and cartoons for the Oldie and the Daily Mail . [2]
The Independent called his 1998 Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography "impressively researched". [3]
Reviewing Walter Sickert: A Life, Sickert scholar Richard Shone concluded, "At last Sickert has the biography he deserves". [4] Another reviewer found Sturgis "marvelous in capturing the sparkling eccentricities of his subject along with the changing fads and fashions to which Sickert was throughout his long life so sensitive". [5]
Reviewing Oscar: A Life in The Guardian , Anthony Quinn wrote "he is a tremendous orchestrator of material, fastidious, unhurried, indefatigable." [6] The Evening Standard , called it "sympathetic and insightful", and "much better" than the last major biography of Wilde, by Richard Ellman thirty years earlier. [7]
He is married to the art dealer and gallerist Rebecca Hossack, and they live in a Georgian house in Fitzrovia, London. [8]
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.
Walter Richard Sickert was a German-born British painter and printmaker who was a member of the Camden Town Group of Post-Impressionist artists in early 20th-century London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the mid and late 20th century.
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and depicted the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant despite his early death from tuberculosis. He is one of the important Modern Style figures.
Jane Francesca Agnes, Lady Wilde was an Irish poet under the pen name Speranza and supporter of the nationalist movement. Lady Wilde had a special interest in Irish folktales, which she helped to gather and was the mother of Oscar Wilde and Willie Wilde.
The Yellow Book was a British quarterly literary periodical that was published in London from 1894 to 1897. It was published at The Bodley Head Publishing House by Elkin Mathews and John Lane, and later by John Lane alone, and edited by the American Henry Harland. The periodical was priced at 5 shillings and lent its name to the "Yellow Nineties", referring to the decade of its operation.
Salome is a one-act tragedy by Oscar Wilde. The original 1891 version of the play was in French; an English translation was published three years later. The play depicts the attempted seduction of Jokanaan by Salome, step-daughter of Herod Antipas; her dance of the seven veils; the execution of Jokanaan at Salome's instigation; and her death on Herod's orders.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a poem by Oscar Wilde, written in exile in Berneval-le-Grand, after his release from Reading Gaol on 19 May 1897. Wilde had been incarcerated in Reading after being convicted of gross indecency with other men in 1895 and sentenced to two years' hard labour in prison.
Jacques-Émile Blanche was a French artist, largely self-taught, who became a successful portrait painter, working in London and Paris.
The Westminster School of Art was an art school in Westminster, London.
Ella D'Arcy was a short fiction writer in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The Savoy was a magazine of literature, art, and criticism published in eight numbers from January to December 1896 in London. It featured work by authors such as W. B. Yeats, Max Beerbohm, Joseph Conrad, Aubrey Beardsley and William Thomas Horton. Only eight issues of the magazine were published: two quarterly and six monthly (July-December). The publisher was Leonard Smithers, a controversial friend of Oscar Wilde who was also known as a pornographer. Among other publications by Smithers were rare erotic works and unique items such as books bound in human skin.
Douglas Ainslie, was a Scottish poet, translator, critic and diplomat. He was born in Paris, France, and educated at Eton College and at Balliol and Exeter Colleges, Oxford. A contributor to the Yellow Book, he met and befriended Oscar Wilde at age twenty-one while an undergraduate at Oxford. He was also associated with other such notable figures as Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Pater and Marcel Proust. The first translator of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce into English, he also lectured on Hegel. He was identified as the "Dear Ainslie" recipient of twelve letters written by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1895 - 1896, which were auctioned by Christie's in 2004.
Leonard Charles Smithers was a London bookseller and publisher associated with the Decadent movement.
Oscar Wilde's life and death have generated numerous biographies.
Mabel Beardsley was an English Victorian actress and elder sister of the famous illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, who according to her brother's biographer, "achieved mild notoriety for her exotic and flamboyant appearance".
Richard Shone is a British art historian and art critic specializing in British modern art, and from 2003–15 was the editor of The Burlington Magazine.
The Climax is an 1893 illustration by Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898), a leading artist of the Decadent (1880-1900) and Aesthetic movements. It depicts a scene from Oscar Wilde's 1891 play Salome, in which the femme fatale Salome has just kissed the severed head of John the Baptist, which she grasps in her hands. Elements of eroticism, symbolism, and Orientalism are present in the piece. This illustration is one of sixteen Wilde commissioned Beardsley to create for the publication of the play. The series is considered to be Beardsley's most celebrated work, created at the age of 21.
The Peacock Skirt is an 1893 illustration by Aubrey Beardsley. His original pen and ink drawing was reproduced as a woodblock print in the first English edition of Oscar Wilde's one-act play Salome in 1894. The original drawing was bequeathed by Grenville Lindall Winthrop to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in 1943.
Cicely Hey (1896–1980) was a British artist known as a painter, sculptor and model-maker. Although born in England she spent much of her career in Wales.
Herbert Vivian was an English journalist, author and newspaper owner, who befriended Lord Randolph Churchill, Charles Russell, Leopold Maxse and others in the 1880s. He campaigned for Irish Home Rule and was private secretary to Wilfrid Blunt, poet and writer, who stood in the 1888 Deptford by-election. Vivian's writings caused a rift between Oscar Wilde and James NcNeil Whistler. In the 1890s, Vivian was a leader of the Neo-Jacobite Revival, a monarchist movement keen to restore a Stuart to the British throne and replace the parliamentary system. Before the First World War he was friends with Winston Churchill and was the first journalist to interview him. Vivian lost as Liberal candidate for Deptford in 1906. As an extreme monarchist throughout his life, he became in the 1920s a supporter of fascism. His several books included the novel The Green Bay Tree with William Henry Wilkins. He was a noted Serbophile; his writings on the Balkans remain influential.
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