Toss Woollaston: A Life in Letters (With signed card from author) Jill Trevelyan

Toss Woollaston A Life in Letters Edited by Jill Trevelyan.

Signed card from author enclosed. 

Publisher: Te Papa Press, Wellington, New Zealand , 2004, First Edition.

Hardback with jacket in very good plus condition, no inscriptions. Slight edge wear with crease on back cover, minor marks. 520 pages, illustrated.

Toss Woollaston was for many years the pre-eminent twentieth-century New Zealand modernist, whose great landscape paintings changed the way New Zealanders saw their country and themselves. He was also a passionate diarist and correspondent who wrote engagingly about everything: life, love, God, the landscape, poetry, and his friends. But above all, he wrote about art - his own and that of others. His letters are an archive of national importance, spanning his entire lifetime. Many hundreds of them are included in this volume. Woollaston's letters provide a vivid, intimate perspective on his life. Here, in place of the 'famous artist', is an appealing individual, constantly beset by financial insecurity and other obstacles to painting, but possessed of unshakeable self-belief and determination. Candid, opinionated, irreverent, and sometimes caustic, Toss is good company - always engaging, and with a keen eye for social mores, whether at a country fair in Greymouth or an art opening in New York. This collection illuminates Woollaston's painting and his relationships with family, friends, and the art community of his time. It includes letters to contemporaries Ursula Bethell, Charles Brasch, Tony Fomison, and Colin McCahon, among others. Beautifully illustrated with reproductions of paintings, sketches, archival photographs, and samples of the letters themselves, this book features a substantial introduction and bridging text from editor and curator Jill Trevelyan. Altogether, it is a compelling biographical portrait and an important record of a key period in NZ's cultural and social history.

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