We were fortunate enough to see this painting back in 2018 while visiting the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna where it was on loan for a Bruegel exhibition that celebrated the 450th anniversary of the Flemish artist’s death. Amidst all the tumult of his Wimmelbilder (teeming) multi-figural works on show, this work stood out for its small size and relative simplicity. According to the caption card next to the artwork, art historians have offered competing interpretations of

Henri Matisse, The Pink Tablecloth, 1924-25, oil on canvas, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow The tabletop in this painting, covered by a patterned pink cloth, appears to renounce the normal ‘rules’ of perspective, as the artist imposes an uprightness on its aspect. Its square shape recedes but the pattern motif doesn’t, at least not consistently. More than half of the painting is covered by the soft, pastel, cherry blossom colour of this napery, and, with its magen

Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic), 1875, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art The central figure in this, one of the most celebrated realist paintings in all nineteenth century American art, is Dr. Samuel Gross, the illustrious trauma surgeon, seen here presiding over a thigh debridement operation - the excision of diseased tissue and bone. He stands in the well of a lecture hall amphitheatre with his students ranged behind him while his f

Anders Zorn was a Swedish painter born in 1860, so a near contemporary of such artistic luminaries as John Singer Sargent (b. 1856), Georges Seurat (b.1859), and Edvard Munch (b. 1863). Van Gogh (b.1853), perhaps now the most notorious and exalted of all of that generation, was born just a few years before. Zorn was internationally famous in his day and very highly regarded yet his name now doesn’t resonate (except of course in his Scandinavian homeland) in quite the way than

Andrea del Sarto’s painting of the Last Supper is sometimes unfavourably compared to Leonardo’s but the first thing to note is that it is so much better preserved than da Vinci’s, its imagery still largely intact, its particular fresco composition proving to be much more stable over the centuries since its creation. The second is that even an aesthetic comparison is invidious. In my view, the del Sarto work, while less histrionic and more restrained than the older rendition i