Painting
I spy
Where was Degas standing as he sketched his ‘Laundresses’ (c.1882–4)? Did he watch the two women from behind sheets hanging…
Fickle fortune
Here’s an intriguing thought experiment: could Damien Hirst disappear? By that I mean not the 52-year-old artist himself — that…
Mothers’ ruin
At the heart of Basic Instincts, the new exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London, is an extraordinarily powerful painting…
Snap, crackle and op
Stand in front of ‘Fall’, a painting by Bridget Riley from 1963, and the world begins to quiver and dissolve.…
What lies beneath
Last year, Gary Hume made a painting of himself paddling. At a casual glance, or even a longer look, it…
Nothing is quite what it seems
One day, somebody will stage an exhibition of artists taught at the Slade by the formidable Henry Tonks, who considered…
Object lesson
Why did Henri Matisse not play chess? It’s a question, perhaps, that few have ever pondered. Yet the great artist…
Maximum wattage
On his deathbed in 1904, George Frederic Watts saw a extraordinary spectacle. He witnessed the universe coming into being: the…
Diary
It has been an unqualified delight, even if it is mildly absurd: I have been chairing the judges for this…
A tale of two artists
Wherever one looked in the arts scene of the 1940s and ’50s, one was likely to encounter the tragicomic figure…
Match made in heaven
Tennis is best played with a wooden racket on a shady lawn somewhere close to Dorking. There is no need…
Repo women
Aren’t you getting a little sick of the white cube? I am. I realised how sick last week after blundering…
Happy ending
‘In many ways,’ Georg Baselitz muses, ‘I behaved against the grain of the times I grew up in.’ The era…
Close encounters
A story John Piper liked to tell — and the one most told about him — is of a morning…
Surreal, strange and scatological
Why do we put one work of art beside another? For the most part museums and galleries tend to stick…
Wings of desire
Maria Sibylla Merian was a game old bird of entrepreneurial bent, with an overwhelming obsession with insects. Born in Frankfurt…
Is it art or science?
William Henry Fox Talbot had many accomplishments. He was Liberal MP for Chippenham; at Cambridge he won a prize for…
Sound and fury
There was a genteel brouhaha last year — leaders in the Times, letters to the Telegraph, tutting in the galleries…
Old masters
The Fitzwilliam Museum is marking its bicentenary with an exhibition that takes its title from Agatha Christie: Death on the…
Repeat prescription
Walter Sickert was once shown a room full of paintings by a proud collector, who had purchased them on the…
Paranormal activity
In 1896, a group of five young Swedish women artists began to meet regularly in order to access mystical zones…
Topsy-turvy
When Tom Birkin, hero of J.L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country, wakes from sleeping in the sun, it…
Hellzapoppin’
The 20th-century painter who called himself Balthus once proposed that a monograph about him should begin with the words ‘Balthus…
Sweet and sour
Dear, good, kind, sacrificing Little Nell. Here she is kneeling by a wayside pond, bonnet pushed back, shoes and stockings…
On the trail of Piero
Piero della Francesca is today acknowledged as one of the foundational artists of the Renaissance. Aldous Huxley thought his ‘Resurrection’…
