(Famed Scottish writer and traveler, Robert Louis Stevenso...)
Famed Scottish writer and traveler, Robert Louis Stevenson not only journeyed across the American Great Plains, he married an American and saw a good deal of of the broad continent. In this volume, Stevenson turns his wonderful prose and biting wit on such topics as Americans, race relations, the illness that had plagued him his entire life, self-examination, the perils of life as an artist, dreams and more. He sees an America that Americans don't see and relates it in the most charming and entertaining of ways. It's not all about America. He also writes of his love of the artist communities of Southern France and the Fife area of his native Scotland.
Sidney Colvin was an English curator and literary and art critic, part of the illustrious Anglo-Indian Colvin family. He is primarily remembered for his friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson.
Background
Sidney Colvin was born on June 18, 1845 in London, England, United Kingdom. His parents were wealthy people of the mercantile class; Colvin’s mother, Mary Steuart Bayley, was from an affluent family and his father, Bazett David Colvin, owned business interests in India as well as significant land holdings in Suffolk. Colvin was raised on the family estate in Suffolk, where he enjoyed aiuntensive education at home.
Education
Sidney graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge with Bachelor's degree 1867.
Sidney seems to have been most involved in London’s art world: he contributed reviews and essays to art journals and was active in several artistically-oriented clubs. By earning a reputation in London as a “gentleman of taste,” Colvin rose as a professor at Cambridge much more quickly than he might have if he had focused on his teaching duties; in 1873, just six years after he was graduated, Colvin was made Slade Professor of Fine Arts.
The Slade professorship offered Colvin an impressive pulpit from which to urge his views on art, but the professorship also caused a rift between Colvin and his early mentor, Ruskin. Ruskin then held a similar post at Oxford University, which he treated with great seriousness - and apparently, Ruskin felt that Colvin’s easy ascension showed perilous irresponsibility on the part of the University and Colvin. Ruskin was, by this time, beginning to suffer the bouts of mental illness that would later incapacitate him completely, so this break occurred at a particularly painful time. Once Colvin won the post without Ruskin’s help, Ruskin attempted to guide Colvin in aesthetics, but with little success. Colvin managed to hold the Slade professorship until 1885; his friendship with Ruskin, however, was ruined.
As an authority on fine arts, Colvin won several prestigious positions in the art world: he catalogued and curated collections in his field of specialization, Italian Renaissance; he served as director of the Fitzwilliam Museum until 1883; and he served as the British Museum’s keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings from 1884 to 1912. During this period he published a few works on art history-Children in Italian and English Design (1872), A Selection from Occasional Writings on Fine Art (1873) and Albrecht Durer, His Teachers, His Rivals, and His Scholars (1877) - but he also began to write literary biographies.
His first effort in the literary biography line was Lan- dor, a study of the Victorian essayist Walter Savage Landor. Landor was best known for his bizarre sequence of Imaginaty Conversations (1824-29), in which he would imagine (without any research to guide him) what kinds of conversations various famous persons might have had. Though Colvin praised the imaginary conversation series, and though he called Landor “a great artist in English letters,” Colvin’s biography seems more critical than laudatory. Moreover, the choice of such an imaginative writer seems strange, given Colvin’s own insistence on factual discussion. Perhaps Colvin felt that he understood Landor as his opposite.
Colvin turned next to his premier subject, John Keats. But his 1887 pamphlet only served as an introduction to his greater study of the poet. Colvin built on his “sketch” after he left the British Museum; when he did so, he created the most complete and authoritative biography of Keats that had yet been written: John Keats; His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics, and After-Fame.
The biography offers the facts of Keats’s life and poetry, appreciatively but critically.
Following the publication of this impressive study, Colvin published one more literary memoir, Memories and Notes of Persons and Places 1852-1912 (1921). In it, Colvin reminisces about the artists and authors he has known. Reviewers commented favorably on Colvin’s languid style and his diffident, factual notes on the impressive personages who decorated his life.
Colvin’s early and late careers were pulled together, then, by his conservative tastes, his discerning eye, and his diffident position as an invisible chronicler of his day. He died in 1927, just three years after his wife. His marriage, like his best-loved career, came to him late in life, but both were thereby treated with greater seriousness.