One Hundred Portraits: Artists, Architects, Writers, Composers, and Friends [Hardcover]

Barry Moser (Author), Ann Patchett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 29, 2010

Portraits have long been a staple of Moser's oeuvre, beginning with his first book, The Red Rag, published by Castalia Press in 1970, which included a frontispiece portrait of the American painter (and author of The Red Rag), James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Nearly thirty years later he published his edition of the King James Bible, in which over half of the images were portraits. In this gathering are many of Moser's old portraits and more than fifty new ones created especially for this collection, including Charles Dickens, Daniel Webster, Stephen Crane, Dante Alighieri, Frederic Chopin, Nelson Algren, Jean Cocteau, Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Rembrandt van Rijn, Ben Shahn, Jim Harrison, Flannery O'Conner, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Eric Carle, Kaye Gibbons, Virginia Hamilton, Nancy Willard, Patricia MacLachlan, Jack Coughlin, Jane Yolen, Joyce Carol Oates, and many others. Ann Patchett, the recipient of the 2002 Pen Faulkner Award and Great Britain's prestigious Orange Award, contributes a splendid essay about Moser's portraits and the subject of portraiture in general. Moser has also penned a note about portraits that appears as an afterword.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"The portrait is, in my way of thinking, akin to a crystal goblet. I merely shape it and offer it to you. You fill it with what you know of that person, or of that person's work." Renowned for having illustrated over 200 books for children and adults, Moser, a member of the National Academy of Design, created a number of new engravings for this collection of portraits. Represented are poets (Keats, Wordsworth, Plath), authors (Mann, Twain, Carroll, Chekhov), composers (Handel, Wagner, Sibelius), activists (Douglass, Truth, King), and artists (Carle, Homer, van Rijn), as well as Moser's immediate family. In the brief afterword, he discusses the sources for his portraits, including subjects of whom no accurate depictions exist, like Chaucer. In those cases Moser utilized death masks , ancient photographs, and even busts. Printed on heavy matte paper, with spare titles including name, dates of birth and death, and occupation, One Hundred Portraits is a pleasure to study. The heavily detailed engravings result in portraits of very expressive faces, and giving readers, according to Ann Patchett, "the chance to visit the people we were sure of and learn something more."
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From Booklist

Moser is a rare being, a book illustrator working in a traditional medium with a distinctive and vital vision. The recipient of many awards, Moser has illustrated such foundational works as the King James Bible, Alice in Wonderland, and Moby-Dick. His newest book is wholly his own, a portrait gallery of 100 writers, artists, and leaders. Some were commissioned; many were made specifically for this volume. In her elegant foreword, writer Ann Patchett considers how strangely mutable faces are in life. Then Moser’s small, firmly detailed, strongly textured, and subtly expressive black-and-white portraits demonstrate all that art can grasp and encompass. We read, not merely look at, these dramatic portraits of people who gazed into the morass and out at the horizon and were indelibly changed and provoked by what they saw. Here, in shadow and radiance, more intimately and more humanly than we’ve ever seen them before are, to name a few, Shakespeare, Keats, Sojourner Truth, Thomas Eakins, Faulkner, Richard Wright, Sylvia Plath, and Thomas Eakins. Each astute, intricate, psychologically charged portrait extends what we thought we knew of each remarkable subject. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: David R Godine (October 29, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1567923666
• ISBN-13: 978-1567923667
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 7.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #635,751 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Barry Moser is the prizewinning illustrator and designer of nearly three hundred books for children and adults. He is widely celebrated for his dramatic wood engravings for the only twentieth-century edition of the entire King James Bible illustrated by a single artist. He is the Printer to the College at Smith College where he is Professor in Residence in the department of art. His work can be found in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; the Metropolitan Museum; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among scores of other libraries and collections. He lives in western Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A solid addition to any community library art collection, February 13, 2011

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: One Hundred Portraits: Artists, Architects, Writers, Composers, and Friends (Hardcover)

ONE HUNDRED PORTRAITS documents engravings by Barry Moser, one of the most prolific book engraving artists of the last decades. His watercolors, woodcuts and engravings have illustrated more than two hundred books, and offers a selection of engravings - many created just for this book. Moser chose artists and friends who were important to him: this is the first book to gather all of his portraits of notable figures in the arts and is key to any serious arts or literary collection.