OUTSIDER ART: Peake could depict tragedy and wit
With a career encompassing 25 years that included five novels, a handful of plays and thousands of drawings, paintings and sketches, why isn't Mervyn Peake a more celebrated English literary and artistic hero? A cult figure today, Peake is best known for Gormenghast , his bleak but compelling gothic fantasy trilogy published in the 1940s and '50s about the hierarchy of a fictional castle, Gormenghast, and the Machiavellian machinations of its inhabitants. But he was also an accomplished illustrator, painter and war artist. "If somebody's good at everything, then they're never taken seriously, are they?" muses Chris Beetles, owner of...
