IN: Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim (August 26, 1898 - December 23, 1979) was an American art collector, bohemian and socialite. Born to the wealthy New York City Guggenheim family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912, and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who would establish the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Peggy Guggenheim created a noted art collection in Europe and America primarily between 1938 and 1946. She exhibited this collection as she built it and in 1949, settled in Venice, where she lived and exhibited her collection for the rest of her life.

When Peggy Guggenheim realized that her gallery, although well received, had made a loss of PS600 in the first year, she decided to spend her money in a more practical way. A museum for contemporary arts was exactly the institution she could see herself supporting. Most certainly on her mind also were the adventures in New York City of her uncle, Solomon R. Guggenheim, who, with the help and encouragement of Hilla Rebay, had created the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation two years earlier. The main aim of this foundation had been to collect and to further the production of abstract art, resulting in the opening of the Museum of Non-objective Painting (from 1952: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) earlier in 1939 on East 54th Street in Manhattan. Peggy Guggenheim closed Guggenheim Jeune with a farewell party on 22 June 1939, at which colour portrait photographs by Gisele Freund were projected on the walls. She started making plans for a Museum of Modern Art in London together with the English art historian and art critic Herbert Read. She set aside $40,000 for the museum's running costs. However, these funds were soon overstretched with the organisers' ambitions. In August 1939, Peggy Guggenheim left for Paris to negotiate loans of artworks for the first exhibition. In her luggage was a list drawn up by Herbert Read for this occasion. Shortly after her departure the Second World War broke out, and the events following 1 September 1939 made her abandon the scheme, willingly or not. She then "decided now to buy paintings by all the painters who were on Herbert Read's list. Having plenty of time and all the museum's funds at my disposal, I put myself on a regime to buy one picture a day." When finished, she had acquired ten Picassos, forty Ernsts, eight Miros, four Magrittes, three Man Rays, three Dalis, one Klee, one Wolfgang Paalen and one Chagall among others. In the meantime, she had also made new plans and in April 1940 had rented a large space in the Place Vendome as a new home for her museum. A few days before the Germans reached Paris, Peggy Guggenheim had to abandon her plans for a Paris museum, and fled to the south of France, from where, after months of safeguarding her collection and artist friends, she left Europe for New York in the summer of 1941. There, in the following year, she opened a new gallery which actually was in part a museum at 30 West 57th Street. It was called The Art of This Century Gallery. Three of the four galleries were dedicated to Cubist and Abstract art, Surrealism and Kinetic art, with only the fourth, the front room, being a commercial gallery. Peggy Guggenheim held important shows, such as the show for 31 Women artists, at the gallery as well. Her interest in new art was instrumental in advancing the careers of several important modern artists including the American painters Jackson Pollock and William Congdon, the Austrian surrealist Wolfgang Paalen, the sound poet Ada Verdun Howell and the German painter Max Ernst, whom she married in December 1941. She had assembled her collection in only seven years.
QUESTION: was the new gallery in France?
IN: Patrick O'Brian, CBE (12 December 1914 - 2 January 2000), born Richard Patrick Russ, was an English novelist and translator, best known for his Aubrey-Maturin series of sea novels set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, and centred on the friendship of the English naval captain Jack Aubrey and the Irish-Catalan physician Stephen Maturin. The 20-novel series, the first of which is Master and Commander, is known for its well-researched and highly detailed portrayal of early 19th-century life, as well as its authentic and evocative language. A partially finished 21st novel in the series was published posthumously containing facing pages of handwriting and typescript. O'Brian wrote a number of other novels and short stories, most of which were published before he achieved success with the Aubrey-Maturin series.

O'Brian returned to writing after the war, when he moved to rural Wales. His non-fiction anthology A Book of Voyages (1947) attracted little attention. A collection of short stories, The Last Pool, was published in 1950 and was more widely and favourably reviewed, although sales were low. The countryside and people around his village in Wales provided inspiration for many of his short stories of the period, and also his novel Testimonies (1952), which is set in a thinly disguised Cwm Croesor, and which was well received by Delmore Schwartz in Partisan Review in 1952. In the 1950s O'Brian wrote three books aimed at a younger age group, The Road to Samarcand, The Golden Ocean, and The Unknown Shore. Although written many years before the Aubrey-Maturin series, the two naval novels reveal literary antecedents of Aubrey and Maturin. In The Golden Ocean and The Unknown Shore, based on events of George Anson's voyage around the world from 1740 to 1744, they can be clearly seen in the characters of Jack Byron and Tobias Barrow in the latter novel. Over four decades he worked on his own writings, his British literary reputation growing slowly. He became an established translator of French works into English. His early novels and several of the translations were published by Rupert Hart-Davis from 1953 to 1974. O'Brian wrote the first of the Aubrey-Maturin series in 1969 at the suggestion of American publisher J.B. Lippincott, following the death of C. S. Forester in 1966, a writer of popular nautical novels. The Aubrey-Maturin books were quietly popular in Britain; after the first four volumes they were not published in the United States. In the early 1990s the series was successfully relaunched into the American market by the interest of Starling Lawrence of W. W. Norton publishers, attracting critical acclaim and dramatically increasing O'Brian's sales and public profile in the UK and America. Paul D. Colford notes that when O'Brian "visited the United States a few weeks ago, fans waiting to meet, lunch and have tea with him included Walter Cronkite, Sen. Dirk Kempthorne (R-Idaho) and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who invited O'Brian to attend a session of the high court. Hollywood also wants a piece of the press-shy storyteller." The novels sold over 3 million copies in 20 languages. In its review of 21 (published in 2004), Publishers Weekly says that over 6 million copies have been sold. Thus O'Brian's greatest success in writing, gaining him fame, a following and invitations to events and interviews came late in his life, when he was well into his seventies, and accustomed to his private life. Shortly before his last completed novel was published in October 1999, O'Brian wrote an article for a series of the best in the millennium ending, titled Full Nelson, choosing for his topic Admiral Nelson's victory in the Battle of the Nile in 1798.
QUESTION:
What is he most famous for?