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Giuseppe De Nittis was a hugely popular artist in his day but his work is sometimes dismissed somewhat sniffily by critics today - art historians are often more excited by those avant-garde contemporaries of his who pushed at the boundaries of what they thought art should be. Degas was an early admirer and lobbied for his inclusion at The First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874, but even he became a little more waspishly disparaging of the Italian’s later success, describing h

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

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

Titian returned to this subject many times, sometimes at the behest of patrons but also because the figure of the weeping woman, remorseful of her sinfulness, enabled him to depict a combination of religious piety, Mary’s new-found faith and devotion, and at the same time to indulge his clients’, and maybe his own, taste for sensuality under the convenient guise of virtue and sanctity. Titian, Penitent Magdalene , c.1561-65, oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg W

There is a danger in choosing this work by Morisot to write about, of reinforcing some of the early prejudices that her work provoked, those slights which emphasized her paintings’ femininity, their sentiment and a certain nebulousness to the brushwork. Some critics dismissed her as a mere dilettante, a relatively privileged bourgeoise  who, as a woman, couldn’t be seriously compared to male artists, especially since there is a clear tendresse that imbued much of her work -

Edgar Degas, Women on a Terrace Café in the Evening , 1877, pastel on paper, Musée d'Orsay, Paris Degas’s depictions of the reality of modern life were a far cry from the Salon-approved works of the period which presented viewers with grand historical or mythological subjects, formally and traditionally posed. Such academic paintings were characterised by scale and high levels of finish and detailing - the works of Ingres, whose greatest achievements had been executed earlier

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

Petrus Christus, Portrait of a Young Girl  (1465-70), oil on oak wood, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin The squint, or more correctly the strabismus of the subject in this painting is a little disconcerting. Her apparent look back at the viewer combined with a simultaneous look to the side, feels like she enjoys a wider comprehension of the world, as if in possession of some kind of quiet superpower. Known medically as exotropia (where one eye is directed outwards), the condition is re

The French dealer and restless champion of post-modern art Ambroise Vollard suggested that Derain visit London in 1906 following Monet’s earlier and successful example at the turn of the century, and this painting is one of a series of Fauvist views of the city’s river and skyline produced as a result. It’s a particular favourite of mine, partly because it depicts London, and a specific part of it that I know well and so I feel a personal connection to it because of the sense

I was recently enjoying reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow  by Gabrielle Zevin  when I came across a reference to this artwork. The novel is set in the 1990s world of pioneering computer game design and manages to appeal even to non-gamers like me, largely because it paints such a compelling picture of the central characters’ personalities, their brilliant minds, their motivations, their loves and losses and ultimately their more important friendships. It helps of cou

Giorgione, The Adoration of the Shepherds , c. 1505, oil on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Advent approaches (it’s the advent of advent) as I write this piece, so thoughts inevitably turn to Christmas and the subject of The Nativity. The barrage of ‘seasonally themed’ product advertising that we all endure at this time of year is the kind of onslaught which can easily distract us from the significance of Christ’s birth, even for non-practising Christians. The