Born in a Salvation Army Home for unmarried mothers, James Reeve was sent to the misery of Rugby School, won a scholarship to Oxford, quicky moved to Florence and then Madrid where he studied art and the dissection of corpses, joined an enclosed religious order, but after a diet of water and lentils he rejoined the world to begin in earnest to paint. From a slum house in London he set forth to work in 'then' remote places - Uganda, Jordan, the Australian Outback, Haiti, Madagascar, Rajasthan, the Yemen and at last he found his proper home in Mexico - first in a house he built in a cloud forest, and then when tourists discovered the place, a tenement in the old centre of Mexico City. Encoraged by authors Rachel Billington, Selina Hastings, Alexander Waugh, Antonia Fraser and Tom Roberts, James Reeve has at last put his talents together in a series of chapters recalling travels, anecdotes and encounters which he has illustrated with his vividly colourful vignettes. Always travelling with the purpose of work, in Italy he meets Harold Acton, in the Outback he draws among other things dumps and decrepit dwellings, and here too is Madam Tongere catching a Wichetty grub. He meets Princess Elizabeth of Toro in Uganda and is captured by pygmies in the Congo forest. He paints the fearsome Mrs Gilbert Miller's portrait in Palm Beach and travels in Rajasthan with Diana Wordsworth, a last relic of the Raj. Living in Mexico for 35 years, among his friends are Doña Olive, the retired prostitute, and the Dominican nuns of an enclosed order who let him in to teach them how to make marmalade. Approximately 100 colour illustrations throughout these 314 beautifully designed large pages.
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