Painting
The ruff stuff
Why is Frans Hals still not considered the equal of Rembrandt, asks Craig Raine
‘Moons are in!’
‘My daughter’s moving to Saffron Walden, away from all this,’ said the railway man at Stratford station, gesturing at the…
Master of all trades
The busiest show in Edinburgh must be Grayson Perry: Smash Hits which, a month into its run, still has people…
Riding high
In March 1913 two horse painters met at the Lyceum Club to discuss the establishment of a Society of Animal…
Top cat
If there’s one thing the internet knows, it’s that cats sell. The Scottish painter Elizabeth Blackadder, who died in 2021…
Catching the zeitgeist
‘Photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and…
The great pretenders
In 1998 curators at the Courtauld Institute received an anonymous phone call informing them that 11 drawings in their collection…
The playful portraitist
In front of the banner advertising the RA Summer Exhibition, the swagger statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) by Alfred…
Ladies first
In the rush to right the historical gender balance, galleries have been corralling neglected women artists into group exhibitions: the…
Away with all the flesh
Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition? After years of exposure to his paintings of naked bodies posed like casualties…
Emancipation man
Winslow Homer may be too all-American for British tastes but a forthcoming retrospective could change all that, says Laura Gascoigne
We get the picture
Philip Guston is hard to dislike. The most damning critique levied against the canonical mid-century American painter is that he…
A sharp instant in nature
‘I like the way he puts on paint,’ Milton Avery said about Matisse in 1953, but that was as much…
The art of window-peeping
Themed exhibitions pegged to particular pictures in museum collections tend to be more interesting to the museum’s curators than to…
Read his lips
Of all the photos of artists in the studio, the one of Glyn Philpot being served a martini by his…
Wet wet wet
In April, ten years after opening its gallery on the beach in Hastings, the Jerwood Foundation gifted the building to…
Northern exposure
When Nikolaus Pevsner dedicated his 1955 Reith Lectures to ‘The Englishness of English Art’, he left out the Scots. The…
Doors of perception
Describing the Venice Biennale, like pinning down the city itself, is a practical impossibility. There is just too much of…
Old cud and fleshy frumps
Artist, actor, social justice warrior, serial killer. Laura Gascoigne on the many faces of Walter Sickert
High and mighty
Dan Hitchens on the beauty of gasholders
Kindred spirits
‘Dearest Gwen,’ writes Celia Paul, born 1959, to Gwen John, died 1939, ‘I know this letter to you is an…
Out of this world
Notoriously, the past is another country: what’s more, it’s a terrain for which the guidebooks need constantly to be rewritten.…
Low life
Catriona has a commission to paint the 17th-century façade of the chapel of St Joseph’s. She’d made a start when…
Renaissance radical
‘Camp,’ wrote Susan Sontag, ‘is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe-l’oeil insects and cracks in…
Face time
In September 1889, Vincent van Gogh sent his brother Theo a new self-portrait from the mental hospital at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. ‘You…
