A Mirror to My Life (Signed copy)

Signed by Perle Hessing

Author

Perle Hessing

Publisher

Henry Holt, New York, 1988

Printing Details

First US edition, first printing. Hardback in dustwrapper. 28 × 25cm, 120pp.

Signed and dedicated by Perle Hessing to the title page, with recipients bookplate to front pastedown.

Illustrated throughout in colour. From the dustwrapper: "The inspiration for Perle Hessing's boldly conceived pictures come from all the influences and experiences of an eventful life. She was born in Galicia, a region that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father, a craftsman printer and bookbinder, told her stories from the Bible and recounted old Hassidic tales which, with scenes from family life in Central Europe, form the main strand of her painting. She has produced strikingly personal interpretations of biblical subjects such as Adam and Eve; Mourning Abel; David and Bathsheba; the Vision of Ezekiel and the Flight into Egypt.

Other sources of inspiration have been literature and music: Goethe, Gogol and Mussorgsky are all represented. Perle Hessing's painting provides a wonderful panorama of a cultural heritage shared by millions of people throughout the world.

The events of Perle Hessing's adult life have also influenced her work. She has painted poignant images stemming from the Holocaust; and scenes of life in Israel, Australia and England. There can be few painters whose subject matter stretches from the ghetto of sixteenth century Prague to the Great Barrier Reef and from the life of Spinoza in seventeenth century Amsterdam to the hubbub of Speakers' Corner in present-day London. The paintings themselves combine a kind of innocence and an exuberant use of colour with a highly personal and often sophisticated vision. Her talent for compressing many parts of a story or aspects of a scene into a single composition produces an extraordinary richness and emotional complexity, often simultaneously touching and humorous.

In this book, the summation of her oeuvre as a painter, Perle Hessing provides her own commentary to a selection of her finest work in colour. The overall effect is not that of an art book but of a spiritual autobiography in pictures."