No tendency to corrupt here

Two things about this book — the first on the artist for over a century — are immediately off-putting: intermittent mustard-coloured pages, which make it look like a magazine, and the insistence of Robyn Asleson, a fledgling American historian, that Albert Moore’s paintings transcend words. Nonetheless she manages to hold the reader’s attention, despite the additional disadvantage that her subject had an uneventful life.

Albert Moore (1841-93) was an important figure in the Victorian neo-classical revival, which in painting meant endless pictures of nude or draped beauties in a style derived from ancient Greece and Rome — none of it looking in the least classical, usually because the subject matter was clearly an excuse to paint a pin-up. But Moore, who began as a recorder of nature in the all-inclusive style advocated by John Ruskin, genuinely aspired to aesthetic perfection. His female idylls, a hybrid of classical and Japanese art, never arouse a prurient thought, least of all when fully frontal in the buff — six-pack diaphragms and chaste non-naturalism making them disconcertingly manly and inhumanly statuesque.