Erewhons of the Eye: Samuel Butler As Painter, Photographer and Art Critic

by Elinor S. Shaffer

extremely rare,very good condition

356 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Mir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Samuel Butler is now famous primarily for his satirical novels, but he was also a painter, photographer, travel-writer, and art critic. His own writing indicates that Butler viewed painting as his primary career, although he was never successful at it and few of his paintings survive. Because so little attention has been paid to the diversity of his interests scholarship on Butler is not full or integrated; Shaffer is trying to remedy that by looking at Butler's ideas about the visual arts. Butler believed that the visual and verbal could interact and transform one another.

Also, Butler traveled to areas of Italy which were then very isolated and recorded in notes, sketches and photographs many scenes, primitivist artworks, church interiors, etc which were destroyed before too much later, so I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested rural culture in pre-Unification Italy.