George D. Painter

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George Duncan Painter , known under the name George D. Painter (born June 5, 1914 in Birmingham , † December 8, 2005 in Hove , East Sussex ) was a British author, translator and incunabula researcher. He became internationally known as the biographer of Marcel Proust .

Life

George D. Painter was born in Birmingham to a teacher and his mother was an artist. After attending King Edward's School in Birmingham, he studied at Trinity College , Cambridge. In 1937, after completing his studies, he got a job as a Latin lecturer at the University of Liverpool, but the following year he accepted a position as deputy curator of the incunabulum department of the British Museum . Painter was responsible for incunabula from Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. His main activity for the following years was the work on "The Catalog of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century", a catalog of the museum's early prints , which had been started by Alfred W. Pollard .

Painter was responsible for the library's major acquisitions during this period, including a copy of the Book of Saint Albans [1486], a print by Wynkyn de Worde [1496], and a reprint of William Caxton's The Mirror of the World . In 1974 he left the British Museum.

Painter, who played the violin himself and had a trained singing voice, was interested in music - especially by Schubert, Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner - and in 19th and 20th century French literature. In 1952 he published a biography of André Gides , followed the next year by a translation of André Gide's satires Paludes and Le Prométhée mal enchaîné into English. 1956 came out his translation of Proust's letters to his mother ( Proust's Letters to his Mother ). In 1956 and 1959 the two volumes of his Proust biography appeared, which were soon translated into French, German, Spanish and Polish and for which he received the renowned Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. This was followed by biographies of Chateaubriand , for which he received the Tait Black Memorial Prize, and finally a biography of the English printer William Caxton .

Painter had been married to Joan Britton since 1942, with whom he had two daughters.

Prizes and awards

In pop culture

Fonts (selection)

  • The Road to Sinodun. A winter and summer monodrama . London: Rupert Hart-Davis 1951.
Poems.
  • Marcel Proust. A biography . Vol. 1. London: Chatto & Windus 1959. ISBN 0-70111000-7
Marcel Proust. A biography . Vol. 2. London: Chatto & Windus 1965
Translation into German by Christian Enzensberger and Ilse Wodtke. 1962, 1968.
  • William Caxton. A quincentenary biography of England's first printer . London: Chatto & Windus 1976. ISBN 0-70112198-X
  • With Raleigh A. Skelton, Thomas E. Marston: The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation . New Edition. Yale Univ. Press 1996. ISBN 0-300-06520-5

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Lobster. Fairport Convention. Text by George D. Painter

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Painter, George D.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Painter, George Duncan (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British author, translator and incunabula researcher
DATE OF BIRTH June 5, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Birmingham
DATE OF DEATH December 8, 2005
Place of death Hove , East Sussex