Laura Gascoigne

Fog, tea and full English breakfasts: Monet and London, at the Courtauld, reviewed

12 October 2024 9:00 am

For the maids on the top floors of the Savoy, everything was in turmoil. The 6th had been commandeered by…

The art inspired by the 1924 Paris Olympics was a very mixed bag

28 September 2024 9:00 am

George Orwell took a dim view of competitive sport; he found the idea that ‘running, jumping and kicking a ball…

Inside the mind of Vincent Van Gogh

21 September 2024 9:00 am

Van Gogh only got one major review in his career, and he was mystified by it. When the critic Albert…

Why has Leonora Carrington still not had a big exhibition?

7 September 2024 9:00 am

‘It had nothing to endow it with the title of studio at all,’ was Edward James’s first impression of Leonora…

The importance of copying

31 August 2024 9:00 am

The lunatics were once in charge of the asylum. The first six directors of the National Gallery were all artists:…

Porcelain-painting during the French revolution

17 August 2024 9:00 am

People don’t accumulate stuff any more. When the late Victorian houses on our street change hands their interiors are stripped…

This British surrealist is a revelation

10 August 2024 9:00 am

When the 15-year-old Maggi Hambling arrived at Benton End in Hadleigh, Suffolk – home of the East Anglian School of…

The tragic fate of Ukraine’s avant-garde

3 August 2024 9:00 am

In a recent interview Oleksandr Syrskyi, the new commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, said that he spends his time off…

How a market town in Hampshire shaped Peggy Guggenheim

27 July 2024 9:00 am

On 24 April 1937 Marguerite Guggenheim – known as Peggy – of Yew Tree Cottage, Hurst was booked by a…

Are kids’ games under threat?

20 July 2024 9:00 am

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

13 July 2024 9:00 am

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

22 June 2024 9:00 am

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

15 June 2024 9:00 am

‘Can you come Saturday morning to my studio, 19 bis rue Fontaine?’ Degas wrote to Edmond de Goncourt in 1879.…

The craft renaissance

8 June 2024 9:00 am

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?

1 June 2024 9:00 am

‘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

18 May 2024 9:00 am

‘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

18 May 2024 9:00 am

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

11 May 2024 9:00 am

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

20 April 2024 9:00 am

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

13 April 2024 9:00 am

For centuries no one knew who it was by or even what it was of. The picture that had hung…