Books By James Reeve - Author

Born in a Salvation Army Home for unmarried mothers (there was no room in the local hospital), James Reeve was sent, age six, to the then inevitably eccentric prep school. Following five years of misery at Rugby School, a scholarship took him to Oxford, but after only three months this seemed not the place to pursue a mission to paint; so he removed to Florence and then to Madrid where the Real Academia Bellas Artes de San Fernando was unique as an art school in providing instruction in Anatomy. Here he enrolled to study for five years, and observe the dissection of vagrants’ corpses in the morgue. Then to his surprise, a Divine Revelation in the Metro convinced him to enter the enclosed Order of the Jeronomites in Segovia as a novice. But at length the intense winter cold, the rigours of nightly interruptions to pray, and a diet of water and lentils, persuaded him (and the Prior) that, after all, he should rejoin the world and begin in earnest to paint. From a slum house in London, James Reeve set forth to