A lavishly illustrated art compendium and biography of Arthur Barbosa, the artist who, over more than 60 years, provided dust jackets for some of the 20th century's most famous authors of fiction, including Georgette Heyer, Doris Leslie, C. S. Forester, Patrick O'Brian, Joanna Trollope, Graham Greene, Sax Rohmer, Jules Verne, Anthony Powell, Lytton Strachey and, of course, George MacDonald Fraser. Born in Liverpool, he moved to London at the end of the 1920s where he became a noted and respected illustrator and commercial artist. A lifelong friend of Rex Harrison, he also numbered among his friends and acquaintances Cecil Beaton, Frederick Ashton, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Living in London during the Jazz Age and WWII, he grew old in a small Kentish village. He married three times and moved with the movers and shakers in '30s London. An accomplished interior designer, he was also an expert in the esoterica of military uniforms which shows in his splendid colourful artworks, posters for example Scott & Bailey 1922 Diamond Jubilee, murals and adverts as well as prized book jackets for romances and children's books, diversions of young and old on cycling, duelling, Brighton Regent's Resort and page after page of glamorously decorated military men and more recently on bottles of port and sherry from Tescos! Heavyweight tome, 23 x 30cm packed with colour illus. and hundreds of line artworks and engravings on glossy paper. Collector's item. 350 pages.
Published price: £80
Bibliophile price: £46
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