Publisher's Synopsis
Whistler, Munnings, Sargent, Steer, John, Orpen, Bateman, the New English Art Club, the war artists, the Royal Academy, the fight against Modernism. Scandals and crises, the Chelsea Arts Ball . . . In the years since its foundation in 1891, the Chelsea Arts Club has not failed to make its mark. In fact this is an unbuttoned history of a hundred years of British Art and Tom Corss's considerable achievement is to show how the main protagonists interacted within the framework of the Club membership to add a new, human perspective to our knowledge of their world. The warts-and-all story of this much-loved watering-hole in the heart Chelsea is so preoccupied with the world of artists that it would be unthinkable for the book to be unillustrated. Artists and Bohemians has gone to the other extreme and over 150 beautiful, wicked and always interesting drawings and paintings in colour and black-and-white - many previously unpublished - decorate the pages. The Chelsea Arts Balls - the great New Year celebrations, organized by the Club at the Albert Hall for a period of fifty years - may have been stopped by rowdyism in 1958, but at the Club the music still goes on.
