Claude Lorrain, Seaport at Sunset, 1639, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris Photographers and filmmakers often refer to ‘the golden hour’, the period just after sunrise or as pictured in this work, just before sunset, a time when natural light casts a particularly benign glow onto a scene. Places and people seem to enjoy a softness that they lack when the sun shines directly from overhead. When that light is diffused through the concentrated plane of the atmosphere at the ho

While this is a painting that examines through its mark-making technique, the diffusing effect of light through fog, a kind of optical enquiry if you like, it also speaks about stillness, transience and a felt opposition to time’s inexorability. Camille Pissarro, L'Île Lacroix, Rouen (The Effect of Fog), 1888, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art It pictures the Île Lacroix in Rouen, a section of the river Seine that was industrial rather than obviously picturesque. This

This is a painting which combines a tight, even claustrophobia-inducing built environment with wondrous heavenly remoteness. The juxtaposition of these differing spatial conceptions is oddly disturbing. The viewer is placed at ground level with a view up to the dizzying heights of the building on the right, the Virgin Mary’s home, with its overhanging parapet and revealing its ornately painted ceiling on the upper floor, heights which are usually considered great for mere mor

Having just completed an article, published elsewhere, on a Max Beckmann painting whose theme was an allegorical vision of a journey, and following the critical discourse that accompanied the recent release of the Christopher Nolan-directed film The Odyssey, an adaptation of Homer’s classic about an archetypal epic expedition, our minds were swirling with what journeys mean to us. So, it was maybe not surprising that we felt prompted to take one more look at another depiction

Raphael, Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, 1514-15, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris The sitter for this portrait, Baldassare Castiglione, was not only a diplomat, polymath and humanist but he was also a friend of the artist. They shared a philosophy, an outlook on their respective writerly and artistic practices that was given expression through their work. Castiglione became famous for his book, Il Cortegiano, a highly influential manual in the form of a series of dial