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Duveen: The Story of the Most Spectacular Art Dealer of All Time

S.N. Behrman, "Duveen: The Story of the Most Spectacular Art Dealer of All Time"

ISBN: 1907970576 | 2014 | EPUB | 188 pages | 3 MB

"When you pay high for the priceless, you"re getting it cheap." Joseph Duveen

Joseph Duveen was the world"s most famous art dealer. His clients were amongst the most prominent and infamous Americans of the 20th century and included Mellon, Frick, Hearst and Morgan. If you weren"t a client, chances are you were a nobody. Famous for his charm, shrewd salesmanship, relentless pursuit of the perfect objet d"art and his ability to command eye-watering prices – Duveen was as unique as one of his priceless Old Masters.

In this exceptional biography S. N. Behrman tells the story of Duveen"s rise to prestige, from delftware peddler to selling the greatest European paintings to the greatest American millionaires. Duveen was a skilled salesman, enticing his well-heeled and business-savvy clients with visions of cultivation through acquisition of high-culture. He even laid the foundations for the great American museums of art, including the National Gallery and the Frick Collection, by persuading his clients to bequeath their purchases to the nation.

Everyone wanted a Duveen, because a Duveen was so much more than a painting or a vase; it was a chance at immortality.

"Astonishing . . . It"s a masterful, deeply enjoyable work." – David Remnick, New Yorker

"A witty and hypnotically readable biography." – Clifton Fadiman

"Incredibly entertaining." – Edmund Wilson

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Apuleius: A Latin Sophist

S. J. Harrison, "Apuleius: A Latin Sophist"

English | ISBN: 0199271380, 0198140533 | 2004 | 292 pages | PDF | 25 MB

This book is a response to the literary pleasures and scholarly problems of reading the texts of Apuleius, most famous for his novel Metamorphoses or Golden Ass. Living in second-century North Africa, Apuleius was more than an author of fiction; he was a consummate orator and professional intellectual, Platonist philosopher, extraordinary stylist, relentless self-promoter, and versatile author of a remarkably diverse body of work, much of which is lost to us. This book is written for those able to read Apuleius in Latin, and Apuleian works are accordingly quoted without translation (although where they exist suitable translations have been indicated). In this book Dr Harrison has provided a literary handbook to all the works of Apuleius as well as the Metamorphoses, and has set his works against their intellectual background: not only Apuleius" career as a performing intellectual, a sophist, in second-century Roman North Africa, but also the larger contemporary framework of the Greek Second Sophistic. While focusing primarily on the texts as literature and literary-historical, the book also deals with Apuleius" works of didactic philosophy and his consequent connection with Middle Platonism.

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