David Boyd Haycock – författare

Stukeley's antiquarian researches, particularly into the great stone circles of Stonehenge and Avebury, were the first to reveal their great antiquity. Friend of Newton, his life embodies the classic Enlightenment confrontation between science and religion.Dr William Stukeley (1687-1765) was the most renowned English antiquary of the eighteenth century. This study discusses his life and achievements, placing him firmly within his intellectual milieu, which he shared with his illustrious friend Isaac Newton and with other natural philosophers, theologians and historians. Stukeley's greatest memorial was his work on the stone circles of Stonehenge and Avebury: at a time when most historians believed theywere Roman or medieval monuments, he proved that they were of much greater antiquity, and his influence on subsequent interpretations of these monuments and their builders was enormous. For Stukeley, these stone circles - the work of "Celtic Druids", were a link in the chain that connected the pristine religion of Adam and Noah with the modern Anglican Church. Historians today belittle such speculations, but Stukeley shared his vision of lost religious and scientific knowledge with many of the great minds of his day; this account shows how throughout his distinguished career his antiquarian researches fortified his response to Enlightenment irreligion and the threat he believed itposed to science and society.DAVID BOYD HAYCOCK is a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.

Over the course of a long and very successful career spanning the first half of the 20th century, Lucy Kemp-Welch established herself as one of the leading equestrian painters at work in the UK and one of the country’s best-known women artists. David Boyd Haycock’s new, extensively illustrated biography of Kemp-Welch brings this remarkable artist and her work back into sharp focus.  Born in 1869, Kemp-Welch first came to the art establishment’s attention in 1897 when her immense painting, Colt Hunting in the New Forest, caused a sensation at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition; the work was bought for the Nation by the Chantry Bequest in the year of exhibition. In 1915, she illustrated Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, and was commissioned to paint images for the Government during the First World War. Later, the mural Women’s Work in the Great War, was placed in the Royal Exchange in London, where it remains to this day.Respected art writer and curator Boyd-Haycock shines new light on Kemp-Welch’s life, writing from a 21st-century perspective and reflecting on her as a female painter in a male-dominated environment. Alongside Kemp-Welch’s paintings, the book will feature exclusive period photographs of the artist herself, shown at work and in her studio.

Examines a wide range of aspects of health and medicine in maritime and imperial settings during the eighteenth and nineteenth century.Maritime medicine, together with its links to the development of empire, is a burgeoning area of historical interest and enquiry. This book, based on extensive original research, explores the history of health and medicine in maritime and imperial contexts in a key period, reflecting the growing professionalization of medicine at sea from the establishment of the Sick and Hurt Board to the end of the Victorian era. The chapters, written by leading expertsin the field, are grouped around two central themes: Royal Naval medical policy, administration and practice; and health and mortality relating to the migration of peoples across the globe, including slavery, emigration and indentured migration. The book will be of interest to a wide range of historians, particularly those working in the fields of maritime history, the history of medicine, and the history of colonialism and imperialism.David Boyd Haycock was Curator of Seventeenth-Century Imperial and Maritime History at the National Maritime Museum, 2007-09, and has held research fellowships at the University of Oxford, the University of California, Los Angeles and theLondon School of Economics. He is author of William Stukeley: Science, Religion and Archaeology in Eighteenth Century England, which is published by Boydell and Brewer. Sally Archer is at the National Maritime Museum.CONTRIBUTORS: Erica M. Charters, John Cardwell, Mick Crumplin, Pat Crimmin, Mark Harrison, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Ralph Shlomowitz, Simon J. Hogerzeil, David Richardson, Robin Haines, Laurence Brown, Radica Mahase.

Paul Nash (1889-1946) was one of the most important British artists of the twentieth century and an official war artist in both the First and the Second World Wars. This new edition of Nash’s unfinished autobiography, Outline, is published to coincide with the Tate's major Paul Nash retrospective and incorporates an abridged edition of the previously unpublished ‘Memoir of Paul Nash’ by his wife Margaret.Nash started writing Outline in the late 1930s, but it was left incomplete on his sudden death in 1946. Nash had struggled to complete the book, finding that he could not get beyond the beginning of the Great War.  Outline is, nevertheless, one of the great English literary works of the period, for Nash was a gifted writer. His autobiography offers considerable insights into to the young life of the artist himself, and the development of his personal and very distinctive vision. When eventually published in 1949 his incomplete memoir was supplemented by letters that Nash wrote to his wife from the Western Front in 1917. This new edition includes these letters for the vivid insight they give into Nash’s experience of the war. The third element of the new edition is Margaret Nash’s revealing (and previously unpublished) 1951 memoir of her husband. What emerges through these different narrative voices and perspectives, enhanced with photographs of Paul and Margaret Nash and reproductions of key works from throughout Nash's career, is a fascinating portrait of a major figure in Modern British art.

Considered by John Singer Sargent to be the best British draughtsman since the Renaissance, Augustus John was the first of the British ‘Post-Impressionists’. Such was his importance that Virginia Woolf declared in 1921 that by 1908 ‘The age of Augustus John was dawning,’ and Wyndham Lewis would dub the ten years leading up to 1914 ‘the Augustan decade'. Handsome, unconventional and full of brilliant promise and Bohemian spirit, John was the man almost every young British art student wanted to emulate. This book reveals why, telling his extraordinary story from his birth in south Wales in 1878 through to the end of his youth in the closing stages of the First World War.Interweaving his biography are the personalities who surrounded John, and the book looks at their influence on him, and his upon them. They include his fellow students at the Slade School of Art – his sister Gwen John and future wife Ida Nettleship, and his friends William Orpen, Ambrose McEvoy, Spencer Gore and Percy Wyndham Lewis – all of whom would become prominent artists in their own right.This book is a long overdue, new interpretation of this singular figure, who was both at the heart of the British artistic milieu, and yet set apart from its movements and manifestos.

Augustus John & the First Crisis of Brilliance tells the story of a remarkable generation and its artistic achievements. Accompanying Piano Nobile’s exhibition of the same title, the publication explores the artistic networks around Augustus John before the First World War. John was closely acquainted with many of his highly talented contemporaries and this publication considers his relationship to Jacob Epstein, James Dickson Innes, Gwen John, Henry Lamb, Derwent Lees, Wyndham Lewis and William Orpen. The publication includes an introductory essay by Dr David Boyd Haycock discussing Augustus John and the notion of genius. A selection of over forty paintings, drawings and sculptures illuminates some of the key themes at play in John’s milieu, and each work is accompanied by thoroughly researched catalogue entries by Dr Haycock. Themes and subjects include friendship and family portraits, the muses Dorelia McNeill and Euphemia Lamb, and the landscapes of Wales, Provence and Ireland.

Despite achieving extraordinary fame in his lifetime, when he was widely considered to be one the greatest living British artists and his drawings were thought by John Singer Sargent to be amongst the finest seen since the Renaissance, Augustus John has grown increasingly obscure. Augustus John: Drawn from Life seeks to restore this remarkable artist to his rightful place in the canon of British Art. In the first three decades of the 20th century Augustus John (1878–1961) was widely considered one of the greatest living British artists, famous almost as much for his extraordinary Bohemian lifestyle as for his outstanding portraits, etchings and drawings. John was born in Wales in 1878 and educated at the Slade School of Art in London in the 1890s, where the onus of teaching was on the daily life class and a close study of the Old Masters. He soon emerged as a wonderfully gifted draughtsman – indeed, the American painter John Singer Sargent would declare that John’s youthful drawings were amongst the finest seen since the Renaissance. Dividing his life between England, Wales and France, and reaching his prime in the years immediately before the outbreak of the Great War, by 1910 John would be likened to a British Gauguin, a Welsh Post-Impressionist using bold colors and a willfully naïve and primitive style to explore the complex combination of romanticism, escapism and alienation engendered by 20th-century life. The great American collector John Quinn considered John and his sister Gwen key European artists, and his work would be included in the influential Armory Show in New York in 1913. After the War he would become Britain’s leading society portraitist, earning a fortune in commissions – though it was his more personal paintings of friends, lovers, family and fellow artists and writers such as W.B. Yeats, T.E. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Ottoline Morrell and his muse/mistress Dorelia McNeill that best revealed his great talents. Published to coincide with exhibitions at Poole Museum in Dorset in the summer of 2018 and at Salisbury Museum in Wiltshire in the summer of 2019, Augustus John: Drawn from Life reexamines the life and work of this significant but increasingly overlooked British artist. Focusing on around sixty works drawn from private and public collections, including the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of Wales, the book will offer new insights into John’s life and development as an artist from the late 1890s to the outbreak of the Second World War.