Desperately Young: Artists Who Died in Their Twenties

The first book to celebrate great artists who died before their time providing a unique insight into their life, work and death.

Vern G. Swanson was born in Central Point, Oregon, and studied at Brigham Young University and the University of Utah. He received his doctorate at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Swanson has been researching, authenticating and cataloguing British and Continental classical and academic paintings since 1973. He was Museum Director of Springville Museum of Art, Springville, Utah for thirty-two years until his retirement in 2012. His authored publications include J.W. Godward: The Eclipse of Classicism, as well as two major books on Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, six books on Russian and Soviet art, and five books on Utah painting and sculpture. Angela Swanson Jones, daughter of Vern Swanson, grew up in an art museum and followed her father throughout the world visiting libraries, galleries and auction houses. Also a graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art (master’s degree), she is now the Director of Swanson-Jones Fine Art Consulting and an avid collector and writer in her own right. Her topics of research include Newlyn School Painting and Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Religious Art. She is currently writing a biography and catalogue raisonné on the German painter, Heinrich Hofmann (1824-1911). She has published essays and articles with Fine Art Connoisseur, among others.