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This beautiful and informative volume,
inspired by the pioneering 1907 colour book, Cambridge, offers a new way of looking at the townscape and social
history of this much loved English city. Every painting from the original
book has been rescanned and enlarged, presenting them as they have not been
seen for a hundred years.
Opposite each painting is a page
containing related full-colour images, from period maps and postcards to
magazine adverts and railway tickets, together with a text placing the
painting in its contemporary context.
The new introduction sets the historical scene
for a lively town where far-reaching social and economic change sits, often
uneasily, alongside centuries of academic and ecclesiastical tradition, at
a time when many Edwardians believed that life was about as good as it
could ever get.
William Matthison was born in Satffordshire in 1853 and studied art in
Birmingham before becoming a professional artist in 1875. Later he and his
family lived in Banbury before moving to Oxford, where he received
commissions to paint postcards of the city and its surroundings. Further
postcards depicted London and Cambridge, and his illustrations "bright
and fresh in colour", were well suited to three-colour process and
used in A&C Black's book "Cambridge". Matthison's final years
were spent in Headington, Oxford, where he died in 1926.
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