In 1887, the great novelist Henry James wrote about his friend and fellow American expatriate the artist John Singer Sargent, in Harper’s Magazine: In an altogether exceptional degree does he gives us the sense that an intention and the art of carrying it out are for him one and the same thing…   that perception with him is already by itself a kind of execution…. I mean the quality in the light of which the artist sees deep into his subject, undergoes it, absorbs it, discover

Fra Angelico, San Marco Altarpiece  (1438-43), tempera on wood, San Marco Museum, Florence Among the most vivid recollections of my early Catholic School education are of the macabre stories told to us by our nun-teachers about martyrs. Each year’s classroom was dedicated to a particular saint whose statue was displayed there as a way to focus our attention on their lives lived in the faith. Not all were martyrs of course (St Francis’ story was equally compelling and the othe

Like many of James Ensor’s paintings featuring skulls or skeletons, this one is an odd combination of the macabre and the joyful. The palette is bright, fresh, and the room depicted seems enticingly sunny. But the artist is represented as dead (or at least a zombie-like member of the living dead) and skulls other than his own are also strewn around the room. One sits on the floor at bottom left in profile, with what looks like a puncture mark or bullet hole visible on it. Ano

Of the five treatments of the Judith and Holofernes story depicted by Artemisia Gentileschi, I have deliberately singled out this one to write about, the one which hangs in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. I think it her best for the way it captures the compassionate complicity and sisterhood existing between heroine and servant, a bond which transcends anything to do with class or rank. The two figures stand close together and in front of one another shown in three-quarter len

Gustave Caillebotte, Dans un café  (1880), oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen (on loan from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris). A slightly doughy-faced and rumpled man stands with hands in pockets, his collar loose at the neck and with his back to a large gilt-framed mirror. He is loitering in an upscale Parisian café. His bowler hat identifies him as standing socially a rung below the upper bourgeois classes that continued to sport the black silk top hat, the chapeau haut-d