This is one of the most often expounded upon of Courbet’s paintings, notorious at the time of its creation for its realism and its scale and remarkable, looking back from today’s perspective, as a milestone in the development of artistic expression. At 6.6m wide, it was of a size that would normally be dedicated to a classical subject or to some momentous historical event, but here it shows ordinary people attending a burial in a small country town. Ornan, in the Jura mountai

The gas station in this painting sits beside a narrow road empty of traffic, away from the rushing urgency of a highway. It is dusk and the light within the building and above the three signal-red pumps and particularly the light that illuminates the Mobilgas sign, stand as beacons to welcome travellers. The station is a refuge, a place of safety at which to stop and rest a while, and also a place where a longer journey may be sustained; refuelling facilitates the voyage onwa

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