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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

Reading Judith Mackrell’s perceptive and illuminating double biography of Augustus and Gwen John, Artists, Siblings, Visionaries recently, I came across a reproduction of this painting which seemed like such a compelling reflection of the artist’s character and sensibility that had been so insightfully described by the author. Mackerell relates how, after studying at The Slade and always overshadowed by her flamboyant brother, Gwen made her own life in Paris to escape the str

It sometimes feels as if AI fakery is nothing new. The manipulation of digital photos to ensure subjects are all-smiling, skin blemish-free, the ‘best’ versions of themselves living wonderful lives in desirable, Instagrammable locations is commonplace today. But something similar was happening in Northern European Renaissance art too. In this painting, van der Weyden relocates the Virgin and Child to an elevated palace room with a centrally framed view to outside. This archit

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