Rex Whistler: ‘a desolate sense of loneliness amidst so much fun’

Rex Whistler: Inspirations (two-volume boxed set): Love and War; Family, Friendships, Landscapes Hugh and Mirabel Cecil

Pimpernel Press, pp.192, £30, ISBN: 9781910258422

An Anthology of Mine Rex Whistler, with additional material by Laurence Whistlerand Hugh and Mirabel Cecil

Pimpernel Press, pp.88, £40, ISBN: 9781910258156

When Hugh and Mirabel Cecil’s book In Search of Rex Whistler was published in 2012, the late Brian Sewell reviewed it with typical insight and lack of generosity. Despite recognising the artist as an extraordinary talent and perhaps the inventor of neo-romanticism, he regretted that Whistler would never be taken sufficiently seriously and pronounced it the last book on him.

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'Rex Whistler: Inspirations (two-volume boxed set): Love and War; Family, Friendships, Landscapes', £25.50 and 'An Anthology of Mine', £34 are available from the Spectator Bookshop, Tel: 08430 600033

TaggedBook review — 20th-century British art, Dorneywood, Edith Oliver, Illustration, Plas Newydd, Poetry, the first world war, the Slade, the Tate

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Rex Whistler: ‘a desolate sense of loneliness amidst so much fun’

The supremely gifted, but tragically short-lived, artist looks set for a much-deserved revival with the publication of two handsome new anthologies of his work

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