Matthew Sturgis
{{Short description|British historian and biographer}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}}
File:Matthew Sturgis 20181129.jpg, London, November 2018]]
Matthew Sturgis (born 1960)[https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/sturgis-matthew-1960 Encyclopedia.com] is a British historian and biographer.
Early life
Career
Sturgis has written art criticism for Harpers & Queen, travel journalism for The Sunday Telegraph, book reviews for The Independent, and cartoons for the Oldie and the Daily Mail.
The Independent called his 1998 Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography "impressively researched".{{cite web|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/aubrey-beardsley-a-biography-by-matthew-sturgis-6295210.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220512/https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/aubrey-beardsley-a-biography-by-matthew-sturgis-6295210.html |archive-date=12 May 2022 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live|title=Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography, By Matthew Sturgis|author=|date=27 January 2012|website=The Independent|accessdate=5 December 2018}}
Reviewing Walter Sickert: A Life, Sickert scholar Richard Shone concluded, "At last Sickert has the biography he deserves".[https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-painter-properly-portrayed/ Shone, Richard, "The painter properly portrayed", The Spectator, 12 February 2005] Another reviewer found Sturgis "marvelous in capturing the sparkling eccentricities of his subject along with the changing fads and fashions to which Sickert was throughout his long life so sensitive".[https://www.jstor.org/stable/20064695 Fox, Paul, untitled review in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Fall 2005), pp. 152-155]
Reviewing Oscar: A Life in The Guardian, Anthony Quinn wrote "he is a tremendous orchestrator of material, fastidious, unhurried, indefatigable."{{cite web|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/01/oscar-wilde-a-life-by-matthew-sturgis-review|title=Oscar: A Life by Matthew Sturgis – review|first=Anthony|last=Quinn|date=1 October 2018|publisher=|accessdate=5 December 2018|via=www.theguardian.com}} The Evening Standard, called it "sympathetic and insightful", and "much better" than the last major biography of Wilde, by Richard Ellman thirty years earlier.{{cite web|url=https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/oscar-a-life-by-matthew-sturgis-review-a3959531.html|title=Oscar: A Life by Matthew Sturgis – review|author=|date=11 October 2018|website=Evening Standard|accessdate=5 December 2018}}
Personal life
He is married to the art dealer and gallerist Rebecca Hossack, and they live in a Georgian house in Fitzrovia, London.{{cite web|url=http://www.thelondonmagazine.co.uk/interiors-gardens/celebrity-homes/rebecca-hossack-.html|title=The London Magazine|author=|date=|website=www.thelondonmagazine.co.uk|accessdate=5 December 2018}}
Publications
- 1992 and All This, Macmillan, 1991
- Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s, Macmillan, 1995
- Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography, 1998
- 1900 House: Featuring Extracts from the Personal Diaries of Joyce and Paul Bowler and Their Family with Mark McCrum, Macmillan, London, 1999. {{ISBN|978-0-7522-1711-6}}
- Walter Sickert: A Life, 2005
- Oscar: A Life, Head of Zeus, 2018. Published in the U.S. as Oscar Wilde: A Life, Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.
References
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Category:Alumni of the University of Oxford
Category:20th-century British historians
Category:21st-century British historians
Category:Place of birth missing (living people)
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