In this sumptuous, inventive, and precisely researched biography, celebrated poet and biographer Molly Peacock travels in Mary Hiester Reid’s footsteps, weaving together elements of biography, memoir, and art history to reveal the world of an extraordinary painter whom modernism almost swept aside.
Peacock uses her poet’s skill to thread her own marriage with Hiester Reid’s, following the history of empathy and examining how the artist managed the demands of creativity and domesticity, coping with relationships, stoves, and steamships, too. How do you make room for art when you must go to the market to buy a chicken for dinner? Hiester Reid had her answers, as Peacock gloriously discovers.
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