A Vast Horizon

Friends and Lovers, Freedom and War in 1937

Anna Thomasson

A story of friendship, love, and the pursuit of art—including Pablo Picasso, Lee Miller, Paul Éluard, and Man Ray—set against the precarious backdrop of the late 1930s, World War II, and its aftermath.

Late summer 1937. Europe is inching toward war. In the South of France a group of friends picnic in a secluded clearing. The women have peeled down their dresses to their waists. Shoes have been cast aside. A couple kiss playfully while the others look on, laughing. The moment is captured in a now-iconic image by photographer Lee Miller.

Some of the friends—the dancer Ady Fidelin, the poet Paul Éluard and his wife Nusch, the Surrealists Man Ray and Roland Penrose—are well-known, others less so. They are spending the summer at the Hôtel Vaste Horizon in Mougins with fellow artists Dora Maar, Eileen Agar, and Pablo Picasso.

In this evocative setting, biographer Anna Thomasson traces the group’s individual and intertwined lives through the photographs they took, the art they made, and the poems and letters they wrote. From the heady, fertile weeks of creativity, sex, and collaboration of that Mediterranean summer through the tumultuous years that followed, this is the story of rebellious lives and the redemptive power of art.

Anna Thomasson gained a master of philosophy in biography at the University of Buckingham and her thesis was shortlisted for the Daily Mail Biographers' Club Prize. Her first book, A Curious Friendship, was published to major acclaim in Britain. She lives in London.

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Endorsements & Reviews

Praise for Anna Thomasson’s A Curious Friendship:

“Tells the story of two wonderfully unlikely friends and allies during the years between the wars. Moving, thoughtful, entertaining and magnificently researched, Thomasson's account of a bohemian art student and sharp-witted—sometimes comically snobbish—spinster is an outstandingly accomplished and original first biography from a writer for whom we can predict a very bright future.”­ Miranda Seymour, author of In My Father's House and Noble Endeavours

“Thomasson has uncovered a remarkable story and brings these two fascinating but forgotten figures and their brilliant world vividly to light. An impressive debut.” Julie Kavanagh, author of Secret Muses: The Life of Fredrick Ashton and Nureyev

“Provides a window on to a fascinating world, and the story is narrated with elegant verve. Part of the interest lies in the enticing cast that quickly gathers in and around Daye House. But most of all, the interest—even the suspense—of Thomasson’s account comes from the central relationship itself. The curiousness of the relationship leaves the reader eager to know what will transpire. And Thomasson is an excellent guide, ready to answer the most difficult questions, but reluctant to judge or to simplify.” Laura Feigel, The Gaurdian

“Rex Whistler—this book’s ‘bright young thing’—was an artist of the 1920s and 1930s, and Edith Olivier, the ‘bluestocking’, was a novelist. They both deserve to be more famous than they are, and Anna Thomasson’s absorbing joint biography will doubtless make them so . . . [their] curious friendship, beautifully reconstructed here from their mountains of letters and Edith’s voluminous diaries.” The Spectator

"Part dual biography, part social history, part study of the circles within which Olivier and Whistler moved, A Curious Friendship charts the ebb and flow of their relationship and their interconnected histories. Thomasson . . . articulates with great sensitivity the uneasiness triggered in their relationship by the contrast between Edith’s single existence and Rex’s tumultuous romantic preoccupations with both men and women." The Telegraph

“An odd couple bound by celibate chemistry. Thomasson's biography is . . . sympathetic, and often fascinating in the connections of the people she portrays.” The Independent

“I loved A Curious Friendship. Anna Thomasson, in her first book, has brilliantly captured this strange coterie.” Roy Strong, author of The Story of Britain

“A vibrant, admirably researched debut, tinkling with famous artistic names. A sort of non-fictional Brideshead Revisited, it's piquantly evocative of that lost aesthetic echelon of 1920s & 1930s society which dissolved amid the shadows of war; and the convention-defying friendship threaded through it is enthralling.” Caroline Sanderson, associate editor of The Bookseller

“Thomasson is a wonderful writer, with a pitch-perfect ear and a marvellous sense of style. I was also impressed by the thoroughness of her research. I really felt she had come to know her characters intimately with the result that one completely trusted her judgment every inch of the way. She has, too, a brilliant visual sense so that one really sees Rex's paintings and those magnificent houses.” Selina Hastings, author of The Red Earl and The Secret Lives od Somerset Maugham