Laura Knight, A Balloon Site, Coventry, 1943, oil on canvas, Imperial War Museum, London Laura Knight was commissioned as an official artist during the second world war and many of her works from the period serve obvious propaganda purposes. This one depicts women from the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) wrangling a barrage balloon into position and shows them ‘doing their bit’ on the home front, heroically playing their part in the defence of the country against enemy att

This profoundly meta work is befuddling both intellectually and visually, and I can’t stop looking at it. During its restoration in the late 1990’s, its curators discovered that the artist had originally painted the female figure’s left arm in a different position and decided to leave this visible for a time so as to reveal something to us about the artist’s thought processes during its making, only to paint it out again in 2002. The image above shows both left hands, while t

James Tissot, The Shop Girl (La demoiselle de magasin), 1883-85, oil on canvas, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Viewers of this painting find themselves standing in as imagined shoppers, customers of a fancy Parisian draper’s shop. The young assistant looks towards us, politely holding the door open with her immaculately manicured fingers resting on the handle as she prepares to usher our departure. She holds two wrapped parcels of goods, one pink, one white. These are the pu

Commentators writing about Richter’s abstract paintings made in the 1990s and 2000s often dwell on the technique used to make them. They focus on the way in which he would utilise a large, custom-built squeedge to draw layers of paint across the surface of the canvas, as if they were discomfited by the ‘easy’ means of achieving its ‘accidental’ effects. Just as critics from an earlier generation would endlessly worry over Jackson Pollock’s dripping and spattering methods in h

Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) was only in his early twenties when he made this painting, and it certainly demonstrates a certain youthful rebelliousness by violating artistic conventions of the time. Its subject is neither obviously religious nor mythological and so might have been thought unworthy of an artist’s attention in the period, and even if regarded as a portrait, it does not respect the earlier Renaissance tradition of showing figures of significance in profile nor