Books like Francis Bacon — picked by fans

The best of biography and a passionate and enthralling account by Selina Hastings of the life of her bohemian father Jack, who escaped his ultra-conservative family to pursue a career as a painter.

With his beautiful Italian wife Cristina, the daughter of the legendary Marchesa Casati famed for her outrageously ornate masked balls, he left Europe for the New World.

They firstly settled in Australia then on the Island of Moorea in the South Pacific, eventually reaching California where Hastings met the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo.

After persuading Rivera to take him on as his painting assistant, he and Cristina spent four years in Mexico City before returning to England. He later taught fresco painting at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in the 1950s - just a few years before I became a student at the Southampton Row establishment and in due… show more.

The best tale and totally mesmerizing story of the confidence-man Felix Krull, who developed the art of subterfuge and deception to a phenomenal degree.

Escaping from a childhood of poverty he eventually rose to mingle with the highest echelons of European society. Helped by being young and good-looking Krull was irresistible to women, of which he was not slow to take advantage.

This chameleon-like quality enabled him to adapt to countless situations and to pursue his career as a highly gifted swindler impervious to the conduct and morals of normal humankind.

When, eventually, the Marquis de Venosta makes him a proposal he cannot refuse - his world changes.

A bewitching experience.

The best story, most engrossing of all and set between the wars, is about the unlikely friendship that developed between the fifty-one-year-old spinster, Edith Olivier and the young artist Rex Whistler thirty years her junior.

Edith Olivier (a cousin of the actor Laurence Olivier) became devoted to Rex, as muse and most fervent supporter, thus transforming both of their lives.

Her home, the Daye House on the Wilton Estate, became a sanctuary for Whistler and the gaiety and fun of the period is perfectly evoked by the author, with a cast of friends and acquaintances that bring it to life in the most engaging manner.

Rex Whistler, perhaps best known for his mural for Lord Anglesey at Plas Newydd, had a glittering and successful career, cut short by his sudden death at the age of thirty-nine, killed by a mortar bomb on the 18th July 1944.

Edith was devastated and… show more.

The Irish writer Colm Toíbín is one of our greatest novelists.

The Magician, a fictional biography of the German writer Thomas Mann, is a madcap family epic. So immediate are Toíbín’s portraits of Mann, his wife, and his children that one thinks one knows them. But Toíbín also offers a brilliant portrait of Mann as a writer.

We get inside his mind as he writes about his unfulfilled erotic desires. But perhaps what is most compelling for me is Toíbín’s portrait of Germany in the 1930s. Mann fled Germany for Switzerland in 1933 when Hitler became Chancellor, and eventually moved to the U.S. He was one of the few ex-pat German writers to speak publicly against the Nazis.

What is most impressive is how Toíbín examines, through Mann, what made Germany susceptible to Nazism. I have not read it more subtly and more compellingly explained.  

Letters to Gwen John is the artist’s mixture of memoir and fictional letters to Gwen John the artist.

Once a partner of the much older artist Lucian Freud, Paul’s life resembles Gwen’s love for the older French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Paul’s fictional letters provide moving insights into Paul’s life, Gwen’s life, and the role of art.

Uncannily Paul’s letters resemble Gwen’s to Rodin in their shared simplicity and devotion to art.

I just wish Paul’s book had been published before I wrote my book because Paul has so many insights into art techniques. 2023 is definitely Gwen’s year with the opening of the major exhibition of Gwen’s work at Pallant House Gallery, UK.

Macneal is a go-to for me when it comes to grim reads set in the Victorian era. I found her writing so superb and her grasp of Victorian London and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood so enthralling, it was hard for me to believe The Doll Factory was her debut.

The book is about art and collecting, but the obsession of the book’s villain is what makes this beating heart of a story thrum.

Spending is about a divorced artist and mom. It starts with a middle-aged protagonist reluctantly giving a gallery talk. She complains that male artists often have muses to do their laundry and supply sex, thereby providing practical and “therapeutic” support. A man in the audience stands up and offers to be the artist’s muse. The story is about what happens when this stubbornly independent woman takes him up on it. I totally related to the crusty heroine who has fought for everything she has and distrusts fortune when it offers abundant gifts. 

I love stories about artists, and I loved the creativity of the whole idea behind this adult fantasy set against an Asian-inspired backdrop, where art is magic and can be used to make things happen in the physical world.

But even better is the fact that the main character—a skilled artist roped into working for a corrupt entity—is nonbinary, and this is nothing more than a mundane fact. It’s a clear reminder that gender is just one part of a person’s existence—and probably not the most important one. 

When kids think of artists, male names usually come to mind. That’s why I was delighted to discover Dancing Through Fields of Color, a lyrical story about Helen Frankenthaler, an abstract expressionist of the 1950s who deserves to be better known. Author Elizabeth Brown shows how Frankenthaler’s difficulty fitting in and creating the art she was told to create ultimately led to her discovering her true gifts and a style that would come to be known as “soak-stain painting.” The rich and joyful colors of Aimee Sicuro’s illustrations of Helen dancing through vibrant flowers, will spark young readers’ imaginations, making them thirst for more.

Picture book biographies need to narrow their focus on a subject, and I love the way the author achieves this. She could have written about Van Gogh’s life in general, but she used the refrain “Vincent can’t sleep” to describe his childhood, schooling, boring jobs, and finally becoming an artist. Insomnia led to his most well-known painting, “The Starry Night.”

I also admire how gently she portrayed his mental illness by emphasizing his quest to find the colors of the night. Lean prose contrasts neatly with Van Gogh’s free-wheeling brushstrokes, richly illuminated by Grandpré’s sweeping illustrations.