Nonfiction November Week 3: Pairings

This week's hostess for Nonfiction November is Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running,and Working From Home.  The prompt:

This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or maybe it’s just two books you feel have a link, whatever they might be. You can be as creative as you like! 

I'm pairing books about art: a nonfiction book, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. by John Walker (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., n.d.) and a fiction work, Water Studies, by Virginia Mann (Bretton Bay Books, 2017).  

First, a disclaimer:  Virginia Mann was my first cousin.  She and I had several years ago renewed contact via Facebook.  She died a few years ago, much to my sadness and regret.  She had a great career as an art historian and museum curator.  She had one last bucket list item just a few years before she passed: she wanted to write a novel.  And so she did.

The plot of Water Studies revolves around two mysterious artist's sketchbooks of a few hundred years' vintage, discovered in two very different places by two different women.  The investigation into the sketchbooks' origin and provenance reveals also the story of a family torn apart and then reunited.  Sprinkled among plot points are references from our own family's life.  One is a reference to one female family member's boyfriend half a century past, a young naval aviator in training at the Pensacola Naval Air Station.  This is a wonderful reference to my father, a fine tribute and heart-warming to me, as he died when I had just turned seven years old.  Another reference to one of the protagonists offering to teach the other hula, which she learned in Hawaii, is a nod to Virginia's mother, my aunt Sally, who learned the hula when Uncle Dick was stationed in Hawaii during World War II, and who taught hula when they returned to the mainland.

The author's knowledge of art shows through the story.  If you are familiar enough with the lore surrounding one particular artist, you may guess the identity of the creator of the mysterious sketchbooks.  If you do, it doesn't diminish the story, in my estimation.   

The nonfiction book I have chosen as a companion to this fiction work is a brief history of the National Gallery of Art.  Significant collections donated to the Gallery are described.  The book even includes maps of the floors of the building, marked with the themes of the works found therein.  The rest of the volume is composed of plates of important paintings in the Gallery's collections, with a description and history of each work.  Following that are several pages of small monochrome images of each painting described in the main body of the book.  Finally, there is a list of the illustrations.  

The author, John Walker, was the Director of the National Gallery from 1956 to 1968.

 

 

The Tale of the Peripatetic Book

Probably my favorite book is Thomas P. F. Hoving's King of the Confessors, the story of his pursuit of the Bury St. Edmunds Cross, a beautiful and inspiring object which was known but which had been hidden for nearly eight centuries before Hoving got wind of its emergence, through the agency of a character worthy of a James Bond novel, Ante Topic Mimara Matutin.  The book is engagingly written by Hoving, who is obviously passionate about art, about the cross, and about his work.

I originally bought the book in paperback not long after it came out in 1981, and enjoyed it thoroughly.  I have reread the story a couple times since.  I lent the paperback to my friend Amanda, who lived in Crown Point, Indiana, at the time, and who was taking art lessons at the Chicago Arboretum.  She read the book and enjoyed it thoroughly, and talked it up to her classmates and her instructor.  They borrowed the book, and as Amanda told me later, by the time the book got to the instructor, it was in such rough condition that he had to do a restoration on it.  I was eagerly looking forward to seeing the restoration and getting my esteemed and beloved book back home.  Amanda, however, felt that I deserved better, and replaced the poor, well-traveled, and eagerly-devoured paperback with a hardback copy.  The delight of the hardback is the photographs of details from the cross.

This book led me to a couple others Hoving also wrote:  Tutankhamun: the Untold Story, his theory of how and why King Tut died at such a young age, and his delightful memoir of enlivening the public relations program of the rather stodgy Metropolitan Museum of Art, Making the Mummies Dance.  I enjoyed all three, but King of the Confessors is the best of the three.
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