The Reading Warehouse

Portraits by a master illustrator and engraver, Barry Moser.

Renowned for having illustrated over 200 books for children and adults, Barry Moser, a member of the National Academy of Design, has created a number of new engravings for this collection of greatest portraits.

Represented are poets (John Keats, William Wordsworth, Sylvia Plath, William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman), authors (Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Virginia Hamilton), composers (Fr d ric Chopin, George Frideric Handel, Richard Wagner, Jean Sibelius), activists (Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King), politicans and statesmen (Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and artists (Jean Cocteau, Winslow Homer, William Blake, Rembrandt van Rijn), as well as Moser's immediate family.

In the brief afterword, Moser discusses the sources for his portraits, including subjects of whom no accurate depictions exist, such as Chaucer. In those cases Moser utilized death masks, old photographs, and even ancient busts.

Printed on heavy matte paper, with spare titles including name, dates of birth and death, and occupation, One Hundred Portraits is a pleasure to study. The highly detailed engravings result in portraits of very expressive faces, and giving readers, according to Ann Patchett in the book's preface, "the chance to visit the people we were sure of and learn something more."