John Everett Millais, Mariana , 1851, oil on mahogany panel, Tate Britain, London A young woman stretches her aching back languorously having just risen from her stool where she has spent a lengthy time sitting, working on a piece of decorative needlework. This is a painting about feeling. Standing in profile as if unobserved by us the viewers, we recognise and can share in the sensuous pleasure of that delicious relief that spine elongation delivers – we’ve all felt it ourse

On a recent visit to Belgium to see the famous Ghent Altarpiece, also known as The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb , we took the opportunity to look at another of Jan van Eyck’s works hanging in the Groeningemuseum in Bruges. The Altarpiece was such an overwhelming work in its scope and scale that it was difficult to absorb in one sitting, let alone do justice to it in a short blog piece, so The Virgin and Child  provides an easier entrée to the art of this incomparable Northern

I stumbled across this 1890 painting by the Finnish artist Elin Danielson, and was attracted by its palette, its particular Scandinavian light, by its formal layout but most of all by the day-dreaming demeanour of the young woman smoking. I at first took the work to be a self-portrait but a little research revealed that the subject is the artist’s younger sister, Rosa. It doesn’t feel like a late nineteenth-century work – this was painted in a period in which women were still

This painting is all about heft and scale – the power and might of capital, commerce, industry, and the human cost of economics: the tough and precarious lives of dockers as cogs in this immense transactional machine. It’s a big canvas at 114 x 161cm, depicting a large steamship, its prow cropped to fit into the painting’s frame and its stern jutting commandingly towards the imposing New York skyline. The ship’s side, a huge grey and orange steel wall, soars above our viewpoi

In Edmund de Waal’s latest book, An Archive , the celebrated ceramicist and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes , has a chapter in it where he talks about how we can all find ourselves on the edges of still life, how just by picking up and setting down cups and other vessels we can create ‘serendipities, moments of cadence…This world of things is full of small epiphanies.’ He goes on to talk about Giorgio Morandi’s life-long preoccupation with the way that an object, often the