The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist By Phil Baker. 344pp, PB, 50 b/w illus, 16pp colour

This is a newly expanded paperback edition which includes a brand new afterword by the author, eight more colour pages, and some minor revisions.

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“What Phil Baker has accomplished here is little short of marvellous… a human study that neither confirms nor conclusively denies the extra-human properties attributed to its astounding and ambiguous subject… To my mind Phil Baker has established himself as among the very best contemporary biographers.” From the Foreword by Alan Moore.

London has harboured many curious characters, but few more curious than the artist and visionary Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956).

A controversial enfant terrible of the Edwardian art world, the young Spare was hailed as a genius and a new Aubrey Beardsley, while George Bernard Shaw reportedly said “Spare’s medicine is too strong for the average man.”

But Spare was never made for worldly success and he went underground, falling out of the gallery system to live in poverty and obscurity south of the river. Absorbed in occultism and sorcery, voyaging into inner dimensions and surrounding himself with cats and familiar spirits, he continued to produce extraordinary art while developing a magical philosophy of pleasure, obsession, and the subjective nature of reality.

Today Spare is both forgotten and famous, a cult figure whose modest life has been much mythologised since his death. This groundbreaking biographical study offers wide-ranging insights into Spare’s art, mind and world, reconnecting him with the art history that ignored him and exploring his parallel London; a bygone place of pub pianists, wealthy alchemists and monstrous owls.

This richly readable and illuminating biography takes us deep into the strange inner world that this most enigmatic of artists inhabited, shedding new light while allowing just a few shadowy corners to flourish unspoiled.