How a market town in Hampshire shaped Peggy Guggenheim
On 24 April 1937 Marguerite Guggenheim – known as Peggy – of Yew Tree Cottage, Hurst was booked by a…
Are kids’ games under threat?
We hear a lot about the rights of the child, but the first I heard of the child’s right to…
The beauty of pollution
On the back of the British £20 note, J.M.W. Turner appears against the backdrop of his most iconic image. Voted…
The most original sea painter since Turner? Lowry
In 1958 an elderly gentleman staying at the Castle Hotel in Berwick-upon-Tweed gave the receptionist a doodle he had made…
How Miss La La captured Degas’s imagination
‘Can you come Saturday morning to my studio, 19 bis rue Fontaine?’ Degas wrote to Edmond de Goncourt in 1879.…
The craft renaissance
As long ago as the 1960s, the poet Edward James was worried that traditional crafts were dying out. Having frittered…
Is there still life in British still life?
‘The tyrannical rule of nature morte is, at last, over,’ announced Paul Nash in the Listener in 1931. ‘Apples have…
The woman who revolutionised British fashion: Barbara Hulanicki interviewed
‘I was one of your original customers in Kensington Church Street,’ I tell the founder of Biba when we meet.…
Beguiling: Yinka Shonibare, at the Serpentine Galleries, reviewed
More than seven centuries ago, the medieval cartographer Richard of Haldingham created Hereford Cathedral’s Mappa Mundi; I say ‘created’ because…
Fascinating insight into the mind of Michelangelo
You’re pushing 60 and an important patron asks you to repeat an artistic feat you accomplished in your thirties. There’s…
How flabby our ideas of draughtsmanship have become
The term drawing is a broad umbrella, so in an exhibition of 120 works it helps to outline some distinctions.…
The tumultuous story behind Caravaggio’s last painting
For centuries no one knew who it was by or even what it was of. The picture that had hung…
