An Affair with Beauty — The Mystique of Howard Chandler Christy: The Magic of Youth
James Philip Head begins his An Affair with Beauty trilogy with The Magic of Youth, a sumptuous novel in which a young woman, Nancy Palmer, meets famed artist Howard Chandler Christy and quickly becomes involved in his glittering, high-society world. A world where Christy is known as one of the foremost commercial artists in the business, creator of the famous ‘Christy Girl’ icon of femininity in the burgeoning magazine and newspaper advertising venues of the early 20th century.
Head’s book is a generously illustrated and only very lightly fictionalized account of Christy’s life and career, and of the relationship between him and Nancy, who would go on to become his second wife.
The combination of novelistic insights and a wealth of straight-up biographical detail, ordinarily a very tricky thing to do well, is something Head does with remarkable confidence, bringing alive the frustrations and triumphs of a man who was once the most popular and sought-after artist in the United States. The reproductions of Christy’s artwork scattered throughout the book adds a great deal to the texture of the story.
I greatly look forward to the next volume.
