Michael Jacobs (writer)

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Michael Jacobs (born October 15, 1952 in Genoa ; died January 11, 2014 in London ) was a British travel writer and art historian .

Life

Michael Jacobs' mother Mariagrazia Paltrineri was an actress from Sicily , his father a Jewish-Irish business lawyer , British secret service officer in World War II and a writer. The family moved to London, where Jacobs attended Westminster School . He studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art from 1971 to 1974 . Its director Anthony Blunt supervised him until his dismissal with the dissertation, with which Jacobs received his doctorate in 1982.

Jacobs worked, without any particular economic success, as a freelance art historian and travel writer mainly in Spain and lived there since 1999 in the village of Frailes in the province of Jaén , about which he wrote the book The Factory of Light: Life in an Andalucian Village (2003). Jacobs translated from Spanish.

Jacobs has published 30 books for a wide reading public, including art handbooks and a few travel guides for Provence, Andalusia, Madrid, Barcelona and Czechoslovakia. For writing the book Alhambra he lived for several months in the Alhambra . A year before his trip to the sources of the Río Magdalena in Colombia, he met the writer Gabriel García Márquez in Cartagena de Indias . On the way he fell into the hands of a group of FARC rebels , but was released. His travel novel The Robber of Memories: A River Journey Through Colombia was published in 2013.

Fonts (selection)

  • Mythological Painting . New York: Mayflower Books 1979.
  • Nude Painting in the History of Art . New York: Mayflower Books 1979.
  • Traveller's Guide to Art: Great Britain and Ireland . Mitchell Beazley Traveller's Guides to Art 1984.
  • Good and Simple Life: Artist Colonies in Europe and America . Oxford: Phaidon 1985.
  • The Most Beautiful Villages of Provence . Photographs Hugh Palmer. New York: Thames and Hudson 1994.
  • Between Hopes and Memories: Spanish Journey . London: Picador 1994.
  • The Painted Voyage: Art, Travel and Exploration, 1564-1875 . London: British Museum 1995.
  • Alhambra . Photographs by Francisco Fernandez. New York: Rizzoli 2000.
  • Andalucia . Pallas Guide. 2003.
  • In The Glow Of The Phantom Palace . London: Pallas Athene 2000.
  • The Factory of Light: Tales From My Andalucian Village . London: Murray 2003.
  • Ghost Train Through the Andes: On My Grandfather's Trail in Chile and Bolivia . London: Murray 2006.
  • The Andes . Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint 2010.
  • The Robber of Memories: A River Journey Through Colombia . Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press 2013.
  • Everything is happening, journey into a painting . Posthumously. Foreword by Ed Vulliamy . London: Granta 2015.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Chris Stewart: Michael Jacobs obituary , in: The Guardian , January 21, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Jacobs, Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British travel writer and art historian
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1952
PLACE OF BIRTH Genoa
DATE OF DEATH January 11, 2014
Place of death London