Martin Gayford

Internal affairs | 23 March 2017

The National Portrait Gallery’s brilliantly conceived new show, Absent Friends, offers insight into the essence of this late, great painter’s art

issue 25 March 2017

Over 20 years ago I wrote about Giambattista Tiepolo in The Spectator. Shortly afterwards I went to visit Howard Hodgkin in his spacious, white, light-filled studio close to the British Museum. It turned out that he had read my column and was pleased that someone had been discussing this 18th-century Venetian, who was just his idea of what a painter should be: a subtle master of colour, poetic, sensual, a bit neglected — in other words, much as he saw himself.

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