Honor Clerk

The force of nature that drove Claude Monet

28 October 2023 9:00 am

A compulsion to paint en plein air would remain with the great Impressionist for life, as well as a questing need to find new ways to express what he saw and felt

Jim Ede and the glories of Kettle’s Yard

13 May 2023 9:00 am

Honor Clerk celebrates Jim Ede and his matchless collection at Kettle’s Yard

Heavenly beauty: Doppelmayr’s Atlas Coelestis

29 October 2022 9:00 am

It seems something of a disservice to a work of this seriousness to say how beautiful it is, but that…

You’d never guess from her art how passionate Gwen John was

2 April 2022 9:00 am

‘Dearest Gwen,’ writes Celia Paul, born 1959, to Gwen John, died 1939, ‘I know this letter to you is an…

Pink for boys, blue for girls and a worldwide mania for mauve

9 October 2021 9:00 am

Honor Clerk explores the history of the world through colour, from the Stone Age to orbiting the Moon

From light into darkness: the genius of Goya

14 November 2020 9:00 am

The great Spanish artist Francisco Goya was born in Zaragoza in 1746, the son of a gilder whose livelihood was…

How long is long enough to look at a work of art?

15 February 2020 9:00 am

There is a vogue at the moment for books which use art as a vehicle for examining the writer’s wider…

The genius of Reynolds Stone: a private man in a public world

21 December 2019 9:00 am

You may not know the name of Reynolds Stone, but it is almost impossible that you haven’t come across his…

Free of Lucian Freud — Celia Paul’s road to fulfilment

16 November 2019 9:00 am

I was looking the other day at a video of the artist Celia Paul in conversation with the curator of…

Picturing paradise: the healing power of art

9 November 2019 9:00 am

Some 35 years ago I visited the National Gallery of Sicily in Palermo on the hunt for the ‘Virgin Annunciate’…

Drawing from the deck: superb sketches by sailors

18 May 2019 9:00 am

Working in the Public Record Office some years ago, I ordered up the logbook of the badly damaged HMS Scylla…

Henri-Charles-Ferdinand of Artois, Duke of Bordeaux and his sister Louise-Marie-Therèse of Artois at the Tuileries, by Louis Hersent (1777–1860)

How any mother — or baby — survived childbirth before the 20th century is astonishing

15 December 2018 9:00 am

Between 1300 and 1900 few things were more dangerous than giving birth. For poor and rich, the mortality rate was…

Mary Magdalene washing Christ’s feet by William Blake, c.1805

A feast for foot fetishists

18 August 2018 9:00 am

It is always interesting to see what art historians get up to when none of the rest of us is…

Pathos and humanity in pictures of abject misery

21 April 2018 9:00 am

In 1971 the late Linda Nochlin burst onto the public scene with her groundbreaking essay, ‘Why Have There Been No…

Who could underestimate the experience of witnessing ‘Inside Australia’ at dawn or dusk?

The subtle magic of Antony Gormley wraps the world

27 January 2018 9:00 am

Martin Caiger-Smith’s huge monograph on Antony Gormley slides out of its slipcase appropriately enough like a block of cast iron.…

Portrait of Gabrielle Renard and Jean Renoir. Gabrielle was an important part of the Renoir household, both as nanny and artist’s model

August Auguste

7 October 2017 9:00 am

In 1959 the formidable interviewer John Freeman took the Face to Face crew to the 81-year-old Augustus John’s studio. The…

What narrative can be teased out of Gustave Caillebotte’s ‘The Bridge of Europe’?

The art critic who loved to provoke the Establishment

14 May 2016 9:00 am

Richard Dorment doesn’t do whimsy. Or Stanley Spencer. He’s a fan of Cy Twombly and Brice Marden, Gilbert and George…

‘Beachy Head’ by Eric Ravilious

Let there be light

2 April 2016 9:00 am

There has been extraordinarily little bright sunlight in the far northwest corner of Britain over the past year. Damp, drizzling…

Self-portrait at the spinet by Lavinia Fontana, 1578 and ‘Birthday’ by Dorothea Tanning, 1942

Sexy selfies through the ages

26 March 2016 9:00 am

At nearly eight foot high and five foot wide, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s portrait of herself with two of her students is…

Velázquez’s portrait of his Moorish assistant Juan de Pareja. The glorious lace collar would surely have fallen foul of Spain’s sumptuary laws

Velázquez’s vanishing act

2 January 2016 9:00 am

This is an extraordinary story. In 1845 John Snare, an unremarkable Reading bookseller, goes to an auction in a defunct…

Rory McEwen: man of many talents — and among the greatest of all flower painters

25 July 2015 9:00 am

It seems odd that a singer, musician, television performer and sculptor who typified the 1960s as vividly as Rory McEwen…

A John Craske painting from the Sylvia Townsend Warner Collection

The self-taught maritime artist who transcends ‘naïve’ cliché

4 April 2015 9:00 am

In the manner of Richard Holmes’s Footsteps, Julia Blackburn’s story of John Craske is as much autobiography as biography, as…

Filippino Lippi’s fresco of St Peter being freed from prison by an angel

The hidden history of one of the greatest treasures of the early Renaissance: Florence’s Brancacci chapel

10 January 2015 9:00 am

In 1439 Abraham of Souzdal, a Russian bishop visiting Florence, was in the audience in Santa Maria del Carmine for…

Ali Smith's How to be Both: warm, funny, subtle, intelligent – and baffling

30 August 2014 9:00 am

Pity the poor art historian writing a survey of painters from Giotto to, say, Poussin. In order to produce a…

Detail of St Christopher, 15th century, Church of St Botolph, Slapton, Northants

Wonders written on the wall

19 April 2014 9:00 am

‘Take away, utterly extinct and destroy all shrines … pictures, paintings and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry…