Painting
A beautiful exhibition of a magnificent painter: Sean Scully at the National Gallery reviewed
Sean Scully once told me about his early days as a plasterer’s mate. At the age of 17 he was…
Absorbing – a masterclass in print-making: Edvard Munch at the British Museum reviewed
An eyewitness described Edvard Munch supervising the print of a colour lithograph in 1896. He stood in front of the…
Why were the Victorians so obsessed with the moon?
In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a group of slightly ramshackle workmen decide to put on a play. The play…
The joy of George Shaw’s miserable paintings of a Coventry council estate
All good narrative painting contains an element of allegory, but most artists don’t go looking for it on a Coventry…
Full of lovely paintings that might lead you astray: The Renaissance Nude reviewed
Early in the 16th century, Fra Bartolomeo painted an altarpiece of St Sebastian for the church of San Marco in…
Wicked, humorous and high-spirited: Dorothea Tanning at Tate Modern reviewed
Art movements come and go but surrealism, in one form or another, has always been with us. Centuries before Freud’s…
Enjoy a blast of Spanish sun from Joaquin Sorolla
Artists can be trained, but they are formed by their earliest impressions: a child of five may not be able…
A great example of how Radio 4 is using new technologies to enhance audio
‘It’s too familiar, too obvious,’ says Cathy FitzGerald at the beginning of her new interactive series for Radio 4, Moving…
The first great English artist – the life and art of Nicholas Hilliard
When Henry VIII died in 1547, he left a religiously divided country to a young iconoclast who erased a large…
If you’re tired of hygge then you’ll like Harald Sohlberg
If you’re tired of hygge then you’ll like Harald Sohlberg. The Norwegian painter eschewed the cosy fireside for the great…
The exceptional romantic cityscapes of Cyril Mann
The little-known painter Cyril Mann (1911-80) saw a lot from his council-flat window. Beyond the parks and trees and red-brick…
The odd couple: Bill Viola / Michelangelo at the RA reviewed
The joint exhibition of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Bill Viola at the Royal Academy is, at first glance, an extremely improbable…
Was Pierre Bonnard any good?
An attendant at an art gallery in France once apprehended a little old vandal, or so the story goes. He…
The joy of prints
Artists’ prints have been around for almost as long as the printed book. Indeed, they have similar origins in Gutenberg’s…
It’s hard to think of finer images of children than Gainsborough’s
When he knew that he was dying, Thomas Gainsborough selected an unfinished painting from some years before and set it…
The fascinating story behind one of the best-loved depictions of the Nativity
In the early 1370s an elderly Scandinavian woman living in Rome had a vision of the Nativity. Her name was…
A short history of ice skating
In landscape terms, the Fens don’t have much going for them. What you can say for them, though, is that…
Remembering the 1968 Apollo mission – when the world was reaching to the future rather than drawing in
Take yourself back to (or try to imagine) Christmas 1968; a year full of disturbances, dashed hopes and extreme violence…
It’s Christmas. You don’t want Götterdämmerung. You want a waltz-operetta
Grade: A– 1898: two Parisiennes and a housemaid secretly invite each other’s partners to the Paris Opera ball and… c’mon,…
In the 1960s the brightest star of British art was Richard Smith – and you can see why
It is easy to assume that the contours of art history are unchanging, its major landmarks fixed for ever. Actually,…
A charming celebration of Vuillard’s muse – his mum: Barber Institute’s Maman reviewed
Fin-de-siècle Paris was not just the art capital of the world, it was also the fashion capital. In 1901, 300,000…
Like today’s conceptual artists, Burne-Jones was more interested in ideas than paint
‘I want big things to do and vast spaces,’ Edward Burne-Jones wrote to his wife Georgiana in the 1870s. ‘And…
Wonderful, overwhelming, once-in-a-lifetime display of Bruegels – get on a plane now
‘About suffering’, W.H. Auden memorably argued in his poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, the old masters ‘were never wrong’. Great…
Bellini vs Mantegna – whose side are you on?
Sometimes Andrea Mantegna was just showing off. For the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, he painted a false ceiling above the…
The Spanish artist who is more gruesome even than Caravaggio
Last year my wife and I were wandering around the backstreets of Salamanca when we were confronted by a minor…
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