The Face of Britain: The Nation through Its Portraits
Simon Schama
- First edition
- First printing
- Signed by the author
All signed editions from Topping and Company Booksellers will be wrapped with great care in protective packaging and shipped securely via courier to ensure safe delivery.
Hardcover New and Signed First Edition. Dust jacket is in fine condition.
Churchill and his painter locked in a struggle of stares and glares; Gainsborough watching his daughters run after a butterfly; a black Othello in the nineteenth century; the poet-artist Rossetti trying to capture on canvas what he couldn’t possess in life; a surgeon-artist making studies of wounded faces brought in from the Battle of the Somme; a naked John Lennon five hours before his death.
In the age of the hasty glance and the selfie, Simon Schama has written a tour de force about the long exchange of looks from which British portraits have been made over the centuries: images of the modest and the mighty; of friends and lovers; heroes and working people. Each of them – the image-maker, the subject, and the rest of us who get to look at them – are brought unforgettably to life. Together they build into a collective picture of Britain, our past and our present, a look into the mirror of our identity at a moment when we are wondering just who we are.