‘All gilt and beshit’. That was Hogarth’s crisp verdict on French interiors when he visited Paris in 1748. As an image it is hard to fault, conjuring up gilded boiseries and the bird-droppings of rococo plasterwork. ‘In the streets [of Paris],’ the eye-witness report continued, ‘he was often clamorously rude.’ Hogarth sounds like a modern-day
Recently I found myself lured for the second time in as many years to what is surely one of the most alluring music festivals in the world, the Handel Festival in Göttingen, Germany, which has survived — nay, flourished — for more than 80 years now, come hell, high water and Hitler. It’s alluring in
It all sounds very kinky, really, bringing together the two Sir Johns under one roof; Sir John Betjeman, so amiable, house-trained and telly-friendly, and Sir John Soane, so arcane, Dumbledore-ish and stridently innovative. But I have to say I think it works rather well since, in such close proximity, each of the knights brings out
There’s something different about Tai-Shan Schierenberg’s new show at Flowers Central: it has a title, Myths. This may not sound like much — and Schierenberg shrugs it off — but when an artist abandons the neutrality of New Paintings for a title with so much historical baggage you suspect something is afoot. And when you
It’s very pleasant to be able to greet a small show at the V&A after the relentless stream of blockbusters we’ve seen in Brompton Road in recent years. Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design is confined to one gallery and consists of 60 drawings displayed in two banks of angled cabinets down the length
Welsh National Opera’s new production of Monteverdi’s finest surviving opera, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, is an almost unqualified success, and one hopes that the five cities that it tours to after leaving the company’s home in Cardiff will give it the reception it deserves, so that WNO’s cutting back of its tour next spring
At last the BBC has worked out what to do with Graham Norton. The series How Do You Solve a Problem Like Graham? (sorry, silly me, Like Maria) has just ended and it was so achingly, screamingly, dementedly camp it made its host, clad in a suit which appeared to have been woven from aluminium
Alasdair Palmer talks to the French artist who has discovered the secret of the Master’s technique How did he do it? Among the many great unanswered questions about Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’, that has long been one of the most puzzling. Part of the perennial appeal of the ‘Mona Lisa’, and one reason why, today,
In 1435 a young Tuscan poet and diplomat visited the court of James I in Edinburgh. The purpose of his mission remains something of a mystery. But he was impressed by the women of the country, whom he described as ‘fair, charming and easily won’. It also did not take him long to discover that
James Pryde (1866–1941) is one of those artists who enjoyed a considerable vogue in their own lifetime, and resurface now and again but never with anything like the same success. (The last solo show of his work I saw was at the Redfern in 1988. There was a museum show in Edinburgh, his native city,
The ancient tradition of arts patronage is being revived in Marbella, the Andalusian playground of the rich and famous. Here in the shadow of the Sierra Blanca mountains, next to the luxurious Marbella Club, built by Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe in the 1950s, The New World Trust, organisers of the Marbella Film Festival and the
There are, as we all know, many disadvantages to going away on holiday, not least the fact — so ably nailed by Alain de Botton — that we are forced to take ourselves with us. How relaxing it would be to leave home without one’s own deficiencies and inability to enjoy oneself when doing nothing.
The programme gets it right in rating Henry VIII ‘at the edge of William Shakespeare’s drama and theatre’. It’s from the very end of his working life, co-written with John Fletcher, and is but seldom given. This, as became abundantly apparent in AandBC’s production for the RSC’s Complete Works, is because it’s a dry biscuit,
The best-known exchange between artist and royalty must be George VI’s celebrated remark to John Piper, who had been painting the castle and surrounding parkland at Windsor: ‘You seem to have had very bad luck with your weather.’ It was the early 1940s, and Piper had invested his watercolours with a brooding quality he no
Recently the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interviewed me about some of my views on Wagner, as part of their featuring the first complete Ring cycle to be performed in Canada. In the course of the interview, I was asked how I would like to see the Ring and Wagner’s music dramas in general staged and produced,
These have been trying times for itinerant musicians. Anybody who had already built up a dislike for the way airport staff are entitled to treat their customers would have found the recent situation testing to the point of phobia. To be fair, my fellow-citizens showed remarkable good humour in those endless and often directionless queues
It is with great sadness that we heard of the sudden death of Michael Vestey on Friday. For more than ten years, he had been The Spectator’s radio critic — indeed the first and only one. His column was perceptive, authoritative, witty, sometimes caustic and opinionated, but always immensely readable. We asked him to file
Since every mafiosi’s favourite movie is Goodfellas and favourite TV programme is The Sopranos, I suppose similar rules apply to Islamic terrorists and Sleeper Cell (Channel 4). Probably, every Wednesday night secretive groups of sinister bearded men all over Britain tune in in the eager hope that this will be the episode when scary Faris
That eminent Victorian George Frederick Watts — Strachey thought of including him in his seminal study but was sadly deflected — is at last undergoing something of a revival. In his lifetime one of the most famous of contemporary painters (though his works never sold for quite the vast sums realised by Millais or Burne-Jones),
If you haven’t been abroad so far this summer, go and see Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver — it will have almost as invigorating an effect as a weekend in Spain. To see it is to be immersed in a strange and likeable culture, populated by agreeably batty characters whose tale is completely absorbing. So absorbing, in