Interior Life

A highly personal account of a lifetime spent collecting art, curiosities, literary treasures and objects of wonder. What does a collection tell us about the collector? It may reveal beauty and chaos, order and whimsy, art and purest fantasy: and taken together, the objects of a collection tell their own story, and perhaps hint at the interior life of its collector. Patrick Mauriès has collected, and written about collectors and collecting, for more than forty years. Visitors who are accorded a rare glimpse of his homes in Paris or Nice find themselves entering another world, where imagination and compulsive curiosity have the upper hand. No object is without its own tale of invention and discovery; no artefact, whether handmade or crafted by an unseen force of nature, resembles any other. All have earned their place. This is a memoir of a collector, or more accurately of a collection, in which the objects themselves prompt a stream of insight and recollections into worlds that Mauriès has inhabited for his whole life. Whether literary rarities from the Bloomsbury Group, enchanting caprices from artists of great renown or none, plaster or stone sculptures, found objects or curiosities of natural history, everything is drawn together in a touchingly beautiful account of this extraordinary collection from the pen of its master: a chronicle of an interior.