Bruce Redford – författare

For over two centuries Boswell's massive biography of Samuel Johnson has been both reverenced and reviled. Yet neither its admirers nor its critics have fully understood how the book was designed to work upon them. Boswell himself is partly to blame: throughout the Life he directs attention away from artistry to industry, from creative choices to dedicated researches. Yet his working manuscript, one of the twentieth century's greatest literary discoveries, tells a much different tale. Designing the Life of Johnson, the first study of its kind, reconstructs Boswell's models and methods by charting this textual labyrinth. It begins by analysing the stages that led to the first edition, goes on to reveal the impact of portrait and theatre-piece upon the structure of the Life, and ends by uncovering the transformation of Johnson from savage into sage. The result is a more subtle, more vital assessment of Boswell the designer - and an enhanced awareness of biography's power to make life into art.

For over two centuries Boswell's massive biography of Samuel Johnson has been both reverenced and reviled. Yet neither its admirers nor its critics have fully understood how the book was designed to work upon them. Boswell himself is partly to blame: throughout the Life he directs attention away from artistry to industry, from creative choices to dedicated researches. Yet his working manuscript, one of the twentieth century's greatest literary discoveries, tells a much different tale. Designing the Life of Johnson, the first study of its kind, reconstructs Boswell's models and methods by charting this textual labyrinth. It begins by analysing the stages that led to the first edition, goes on to reveal the impact of portrait and theatre-piece upon the structure of the Life, and ends by uncovering the transformation of Johnson from savage into sage. The result is a more subtle, more vital assessment of Boswell the designer - and an enhanced awareness of biography's power to make life into art.

A revealing, interdisciplinary exploration of the brilliant visual quotations in the work of the celebrated grand-manner portraitistThe work of portraitist John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) has come to epitomize the glamour and anxiety of his age. In this innovative study, Bruce Redford reveals the web of visual quotations and references that informed Sargent’s most ambitious paintings. Throughout his career, Sargent was recognized and rewarded as a “Young Master” whose bravura portraits inspired comparison with the likes of Velázquez, Van Dyck, and Reynolds. At the same time, his paintings responded to the stylistic experiments and cultural preoccupations of a world on the cusp of modernity. Sargent achieved this complex synthesis through a pictorial language composed of witty acts of allusion.  John Singer Sargent and the Art of Allusion offers the first sustained inquiry into the painter’s practice of quotation—one that created a complex visual code. Through comparative analysis among thematic groupings of portraits and analogous literary texts, Redford shows how Sargent devised and transmitted that code. The result is an enhanced awareness of Sargent’s daring gamesmanship, his place in the history of portraiture, and the dynamics of allusion in both art and literature.