"Wait there a minute, please, sheepy-sheepy, and a great man will paint you."

Today we're happy to be releasing a new e-book, Corot, by Elbert Hubbard. Part of our new line of classic books on art, this brief biography of the French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was originally published in 1902. I first came across the book only four weeks ago in Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis. Both as a reader and as a publisher I'm always on the lookout for interesting books on art, and the worn old copy of the nicely printed original Corot pamphlet cost just a few dollars. It was a happy find.

Reading it later, I found Hubbard's writing engaging and entertaining, but it wasn't until I came across this excerpt—from the very lively letter of Corot's that's included in the book—that I knew we'd publish an e-book edition:

A good picture is full of motion. Clouds that stand still are not clouds—motion, activity, life, yes, life is what we want—life!

Bam! A peasant comes out of the cottage and is coming to the meadow.

Ding, ding, ding! There comes a flock of sheep led by a bell wether. Wait there a minute, please, sheepy-sheepy, and a great man will paint you.

All right then, don’t wait. I didn’t want to paint you anyway.

I can't blame most people for glazing over at the phrase "nineteenth century French art", but they're people that haven't read texts like these. "Wait there a minute, please, sheepy-sheepy, and a great man will paint you." Individual, honest, playful and passionate. A little silly too maybe, but it's writing like this that makes far-away-seeming art and artists come alive. 

My dream is to host a live, dramatic reading of Corot's letter on stage somwhere, but for now I'll have to be satisfied with this new e-book edition. And to celebrate the finding of the book at Magers & Quinn, and to encourage it be found again and again, we're making it free to download for a limited time. Enjoy!

An ewe and a lamb, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, ca. 1825. © musée du Louvre département des Arts graphiques.

This season's big artist biography

In case you've somehow missed it, this season's "big artist biography"* is now out, Modigliani: A Life, by Meryle Secrest. Generally, and perhaps unsurprisingly given Secrest's rich body of work (including her 1979 book on collector and connoisseur Bernard Berenson, which is terrific) this new work is being generally well received, and for Modigliani or artist biography fans, seems well worth a read.

There are plenty of reviews to read as well, but Christopher Benfey in Slate captures the main critical points of many of them: "On the whole, Secrest seems more comfortable with details of Modigliani's life than with his art … But Secrest's primary aim is not a fresh take on Modigliani's art. Instead, she wishes to destroy, once and for all, what she calls the "legend" of his life." And ultimately, "it's not from the realm of legend that she wants to rescue Modigliani. She just wants a different legend, one that reflects better on the man she rightly admires."

Lance Esplund in the Wall Street Journal, is perhaps most critical of the biography, and more particularly of Modigliani's worthiness as a subject, concluding: "Unfortunately, Modigliani was at the center of one of the most inventive and turbulent periods in European art and history. Much more interesting things were happening in the lives and work of other artists, and in the city of Paris and the world at large, than in the life and art of Modigliani."

And for a different take, check out Brian Boucher's interview with Secrest in Art in America.

* Seemingly every spring and fall, Knopf publishes a single, big, artist biography that, like many of its books, gets the full-court press of book reviews and reading attention (Evans' Grant Wood last season, Wullschläger's Chagall not too long before that). We don't begrudge Knopf or the biographers for it, and many of the books have been extremely terrific (Richardson's Picasso, Spurling's Matisse) but still, it's a strange pattern.