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This is a painting which combines a tight, even claustrophobia-inducing built environment with wondrous heavenly remoteness. The juxtaposition of these differing spatial conceptions is oddly disturbing. The viewer is placed at ground level with a view up to the dizzying heights of the building on the right, the Virgin Mary’s home, with its overhanging parapet and revealing its ornately painted ceiling on the upper floor, heights which are usually considered great for mere mor

Having just completed an article, published elsewhere, on a Max Beckmann painting whose theme was an allegorical vision of a journey, and following the critical discourse that accompanied the recent release of the Christopher Nolan-directed film The Odyssey, an adaptation of Homer’s classic about an archetypal epic expedition, our minds were swirling with what journeys mean to us. So, it was maybe not surprising that we felt prompted to take one more look at another depiction

Raphael, Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, 1514-15, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris The sitter for this portrait, Baldassare Castiglione, was not only a diplomat, polymath and humanist but he was also a friend of the artist. They shared a philosophy, an outlook on their respective writerly and artistic practices that was given expression through their work. Castiglione became famous for his book, Il Cortegiano, a highly influential manual in the form of a series of dial

J.M.W.Turner, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art This is one of two depictions in oil of the same event that Turner painted – the other is in The Cleveland Museum of Art – but I have chosen this one, now housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to write about. Both are great works, but I prefer this version for the sense of immediacy in its composition. It is a painting of high drama and elemental ener

We both really enjoyed the Francisco de Zurbarán exhibition which we saw together at The National Gallery in London this summer (it will move on to Paris later in the year and Chicago early next year). Its organisers deserve recognition for what is a really well-focused representation of the artist’s oeuvre with just over forty works on display, including a few by his son Juan, so unlike some of the worthy but overwhelming and exhausting blockbuster shows dedicated to other a

This is a powerful and disturbing piece of art by one of the foremost anti-patriarchal artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Paula Rego. Like others from the same series, it was inspired by a novel, The Crime of Father Amaro by Eça de Queirós, first published in 1875 and which became a major succès de scandale in Portugal. Although it was not widely read outside the Lusophone world at the time, a much later film adaptation renewed the controversy with its relea

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

A few years ago, the ingeniously mordant comedian Stewart Lee performed a ‘bit’ in which he talked about his grandfather’s love of eating crisps (bear with me on this – I will be coming to Cézanne shortly). As in many of Lee’s shows combining satire with ridiculousness, you wondered where he was going with a narrative, but slowly and with each recurrence of the word ‘crisps’, the funnier it became. You realised what a peculiar word it seemed, how fundamentally absurd. Of cour

Andrea Mantegna, The Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, c 1455, tempera on panel, National Gallery, London This narrative painting shows us the figure of Jesus praying to God the Father that he might be relieved of the terrible fate that lies in store for him. In response, a posse of cherubs sent to stiffen his resolve is seen at top left, born aloft by a cloud. Rather than providing succour however, by this account they instead only signal foreboding. The leading putto carri

The May ’26 edition of the British Literary Review magazine has a striking front cover. On it, the wonderfully accomplished illustrator, Chris Riddell, has created an homage to Neue Sachlichkeit artists like Otto Dix and George Grosz, painters who depicted the life of inter-war Berlin through a satirical and politically censorious lens. Riddell’s cover drawing is a reference to a commentary inside the journal on two new books about Weimar Germany. One of these accounts, Weima

This work has a special place in art history. Paul Sérusier made it while staying in Pont-Aven the artists’ colony in Brittany, in the late 1880s. The twenty-four-year-old was a well-educated artist and self-professed intellectual who had formed an attachment to the forty-year-old Paul Gauguin who had encouraged him in new, what we now call post-impressionist, ways to paint. His was an approach which eschewed the need for mimesis or perspective depth and which, although inspi

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