Autobiographical Recollections
With a Prefatory Essay on Leslie as an Artist, and Selections from his Correspondence

This two-volume work of autobiography and letters by the Royal Academician Charles Leslie (1794–1859) was published in 1860.

Charles Robert Leslie (Author), Tom Taylor (Edited by)

9781108074483, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 May 2014

348 pages, 1 b/w illus.
21.6 x 14 x 2 cm, 0.44 kg

The Royal Academician Charles Leslie (1794–1859) also wrote biographies of fellow painters. His life of John Constable and a two-volume work on Sir Joshua Reynolds are also reissued in this series. On his death, the Reynolds work was completed by the journalist and dramatist Tom Taylor (1817–80), who also edited Leslie's two-volume autobiography, published in 1860. Though born in London, Leslie was an American, a child prodigy in drawing, who returned to Britain in 1811 to study painting with Benjamin West and Washington Allston. He had enormous admiration for the paintings of his contemporaries and of the previous generation, and his reminiscences are intended to preserve 'some recollections of those chiefly whom I could praise'. Volume 1 of this lively and self-deprecating work, full of good-humoured anecdotes, is prefaced by an introductory essay by Taylor on Leslie and his art.

Preface
1. Voyage to America
2. Desire to be a painter
3. President West
4. Wilkie
5. Lord Holland
6. Appointment in America
7. Visit to Cashiobury
8. Lord Egremont
9. The Wellington statue
10. Turner
11. John Howard Payne
12. Prince Saunders.

Subject Areas: The arts: general issues [AB]