Desperately Young

Vern G. Swanson was born in Central Point, Oregon, and studied at Brigham Young University and the University of Utah. He received his doctorate at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Swanson has been researching, authenticating and cataloguing British andContinental classical and academic paintings since 1973. He was Museum Director of Springville Museum of Art, Springville, Utah for thirty-two years until his retirement in 2012. His authored publications include J.W. Godward: The Eclipse of Classicism,as well as two major books on Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, six books on Russian and Soviet art, and five books on Utah painting and sculpture. Angela Swanson Jones,daughter of Vern Swanson, grew up in an art museum and followed her father throughout the world visiting libraries, galleries and auction houses. Also a graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art (master's degree), she is now the Director of Swanson-Jones Fine Art Consulting and an avid collector and writer in her own right. Her topics of research include Newlyn School Painting and Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Religious Art. She is currently writing a biography and catalogue raisonné on the German painter, Heinrich Hofmann (1824-1911). She has published essays and articles with Fine Art Connoisseur, among others.

• Contents: With works from Tommaso Masaccio, Frederic Bazille, Thomas Girtin, Egon Schiele, Henri Regnault, Ernst Klimt, Jeanne Hebuterne, Kaita Murayama, Hermann Stenner, Maurycy Gottlieb, Fyodor Vasilyev, Marie Bashkirtseff, Richard Parkes Bonington, Luisa Anguissola, Walter Deverell, August Macke, Pauline Boty and Jean-Michel Basquiat - among many others.

"It’s a testimony to Desperately Young’s worth that I was often engaged by remarkable talents I knew absolutely nothing about. The biographies never glamourise, instead offering insights on several remarkable individuals while historic events (primarily war) weigh heavily on the pages." - Garth Cartwright, The New European