Painting

Rich, beautiful and vital: John Craxton, at Pallant House Gallery, reviewed

The sensuality of the light in John Craxton’s painting ‘Two Figures and Setting Sun’ (1952-67) has to be seen to be believed. Viewing this large work in Pallant House, you feel its full force. Craxton was concerned with a scene’s essence, rather than simply its appearance and here he achieves not merely an effect but affect. In spite of most of the light being painted in yellows and oranges rather than white, the contrast and refraction of the rays produce a blinding sensation much like staring into the sun on a hot day.   It was as a chorister at Chichester Cathedral that Craxton’s daily encounter with two 12th-century Romanesque

Why did this brilliant Irish artist fall off the radar? 

Sir John Lavery has always had a place in Irish affections. His depiction of his wife, Hazel, as the mythical figure of Cathleen ni Houlihan, which appeared on the old ten shilling and subsequently on the watermark of the Irish pound notes, meant, as the joke went, that every Irishman kept her close to his heart. He was indeed Irish – born in Belfast – but was at home in Scotland, and was the best known of the spirited group of painters called the Glasgow Boys. Yet he lived most of his life in London, was friends with Winston Churchill (they took a painting trip together) and also with Michael

The force of nature that drove Claude Monet

There have been some really good biographies of artists over recent years and what distinguishes the best of them is their sense of context and a lucid prose free from the jargon of the art historian. In the end, of course, any work of art has to be able to stand by itself, but for Jackie Wullschläger her appreciation of Monet’s paintings has been immeasurably deepened by her sense of the man behind them. ‘My approach,’ she writes, ‘stems from the belief that painters transform the raw material of experience into art’, and that material, both the familiar external events and, more illuminatingly, the inner man, is what she gives

How Philip Guston became a hero to a new generation of figurative painters

Why do painters represent things? There was a time when the answers seemed obvious. Art glorified power, earthly and divine, and provided moral exemplars of how to behave – in the case of sacred paintings – or how not to in the case of profane ones. When modernism threw all that into doubt, the picture frame remained. The question for modern artists was, what to put in it? Fifteen years of non-representational painting prompted Guston to question its usefulness For the first decade of his career, Philip Guston had an old-fashioned answer: the murals he painted in the style of Italian Renaissance frescoes in the US and Mexico during the

Proof that Rubens really was a champion of the female sex: Rubens & Women, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery reviewed

‘She is a princess endowed with all the virtues of sex; long experience has taught her how to govern these people… I think that if Her Highness could govern in her own way, everything would turn out very happily.’ The ‘princess’ in question was Isabel Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain and regent of the Spanish Netherlands; ‘these people’ were the pesky, ungovernable Flemings and the author of the glowing testimonial was Peter Paul Rubens who, since the death of Isabel’s husband the Archduke Albert in 1621, had become her trusted diplomatic adviser. It was quite a step up for a mere court painter, especially one with a skeleton in the

The splendour of Edinburgh’s new Scottish galleries 

For nearly 50 years, the Scottish collection at Edinburgh’s National Galleries has been housed in a gloomy subterranean space beneath the main gallery, rarely visited, never celebrated. If you didn’t know it was there, don’t be ashamed. Just 19 per cent of visitors ventured into the bowels to find the jumble of Scottish paintings, dimly lit and hanging on colour-sucking, mucky green walls above a depressing brown carpet. Of those who did get there, lots immediately turned and fled back upstairs to the luminous comforts of Titian, Velazquez and Rubens. Safe to say, the space was not exactly showcasing Scottish art; a puzzling strategy for the country’s flagship gallery. The

Why is Frans Hals still not considered the equal of Rembrandt?

Who was Frans Hals? We know very little about him. He was baptised in either 1582 or 1583 in Antwerp. He died in 1666 at the age of 83 or 84. Approximately 220 works survive. One discredited narrative claimed Hals was a drunk – an inference probably based on his subject matter. There are several depictions of drinkers. On the other hand, there is his evident industry. Two streets in Haarlem, where he lived his entire life, have been identified, but not the actual houses. He was buried in St Bavo’s church in the Grote Markt, which was originally Catholic but became Protestant. There are two commemorative slabs next to

Lyrical and dreamlike: A World of Private Mystery – British Neo-Romantics, at the Fry Art Gallery, reviewed

‘My daughter’s moving to Saffron Walden, away from all this,’ said the railway man at Stratford station, gesturing at the tower blocks overlooking the platform. ‘It’s like going back to the 1970s and ’80s.’ For the neo-romantics the pastoral mode was an escape from the grimness of everyday wartime reality Further back, in the case of Saffron Walden’s Fry Art Gallery. Purpose-built by a Victorian banker to house his collection, this gem of a gallery has since been devoted to collecting and showing artists who have lived and worked in north-west Essex, beginning with the group that congregated around Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious in Great Bardfield from the 1930s.

The greatest artist chronicler of our times: Grayson Perry, at the Edinburgh Art Festival, reviewed

The busiest show in Edinburgh must be Grayson Perry: Smash Hits which, a month into its run, still has people queuing at 10 a.m. His original title, National Treasure, was rejected because ‘national’ is a politically loaded term in Scotland. But Perry’s lens is resolutely fixed on England and Englishness. Seen from a Scottish perspective, this riot of rococo folkishness is familiar and exotic. Grayson Perry is the greatest artist chronicler of our times, with an omnificent style that’s all substance The exuberant exhibition, which is curated by the National Galleries of Scotland but showing at the Royal Scottish Academy and ends on 12 November, slaps the viewer around the

An extraordinary woman: The Art of Lucy Kemp-Welch, at Russell-Cotes Art Gallery, reviewed

In March 1913 two horse painters met at the Lyceum Club to discuss the establishment of a Society of Animal Painters to raise the profile of their genre. Of the two, it was Alfred Munnings whose profile needed raising. Lucy Kemp-Welch had been a celebrity since her twenties when her 5x10ft canvas ‘Colt Hunting in the New Forest’ caused a sensation at the 1897 RA Summer Exhibition and was purchased by the Chantrey Bequest for the new National Gallery of British Art on Millbank. She threw herself into every activity she depicted, whether rounding up colts or hauling timber The daughter of a Bournemouth solicitor, Kemp-Welch had been riding and

Move fast to snap up one of Elizabeth Blackadder’s sleek cats at the Scottish Gallery

If there’s one thing the internet knows, it’s that cats sell. The Scottish painter Elizabeth Blackadder, who died in 2021 at the age of 89, knew it too. Her sinuous, characterful cat pictures, watercolours mostly but also oils and prints, helped cement her place as the nation’s favourite painter. She was an establishment favourite too, becoming the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy in London. In 1995, her cats adorned a set of Royal Mail stamps and, in 2001, she became the first woman to be appointed as Her Majesty’s Painter and Limner, a position unique to the Royal Household of

Huge, impersonal canvases designed for the walls of billionaires: Tate Modern’s Capturing the Moment reviewed

‘Photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. So shouldn’t painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things?’ argued Picasso. The inventor of cubism took advantage of his liberty in ‘Buste de Femme’ (1938) to turn Dora Maar into a precursor of Peppa Pig, flaring her nostrils to form a snout. Perhaps he wanted to teach a photographer a lesson about paint by rubbing her nose in it. Picasso didn’t abandon the subject or the anecdote. He was one of the first modern artists to turn

Fascinating forgeries: Art and Artifice – Fakes from the Collection, at the Courtauld, reviewed

In 1998 curators at the Courtauld Institute received an anonymous phone call informing them that 11 drawings in their collection were fakes. The caller intimated that he was an associate of the notorious forger Eric Hebborn, who had claimed in his 1991 memoir, Drawn to Trouble, to have sold the institute a fake Rowlandson. The Sienese turned their training as restorers of Renaissance paintings to more profitable use The Courtauld had, in fact, already rumbled the Rowlandson before Hebborn boasted of putting one over on it; now it looked like it could be more than one. The other ten included three sketches by Tiepolo, three by Guardi and a drawing

Joshua Reynolds’s revival

In front of the banner advertising the RA Summer Exhibition, the swagger statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) by Alfred Drury stands garlanded with flowers. But the Academy he founded won’t be marking his tercentenary with a retrospective, just a small display and a series of artists’ lectures. For an anniversary show, you have to travel to his native Devon. Ever since the Pre-Raphaelites dubbed him ‘Sir Sloshua’, Reynolds has been out of fashion Ever since the Pre-Raphaelites dubbed him ‘Sir Sloshua’, Joshua Reynolds has been out of fashion: blame the outmoded ideals of beauty he promoted in his Discourses and his role as portraitist to the Georgian establishment. But

The quiet genius of Gwen John

In the rush to right the historical gender balance, galleries have been corralling neglected women artists into group exhibitions: the Whitechapel Gallery rounded up 80 women abstract expressionists for its recent Action, Gesture, Paint show. But imbalances can’t be corrected retrospectively. Rather than elevating women artists who didn’t make it in a male-dominated world – not all of whose work, if we’re honest, helps the female cause – we should be celebrating the grit and talent of the few who did. And Berthe Morisot and Gwen John – currently the subjects of solo shows at Dulwich Picture Gallery and Pallant House – had both in spades. What’s remarkable, in the

Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition?

Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition? After years of exposure to his paintings of naked bodies posed like casualties of a car crash in a nudist camp, we might have reached the ‘move along, nothing to see here’ point. But it seems we can’t get enough of the monstre sacré. To mark the centenary of his birth in 1922, London is being treated to a Freud fest of no fewer than seven exhibitions, the most prestigious of which is at the National Gallery. Subtitled New Perspectives, the National’s show promises a change of viewpoint from the perspective now most commonly associated with Freud (that of looking down on figures

The unsettling business of painting the Queen’s portrait

In March 1995, I entered the Royal Society of Portrait Painters annual exhibition with a portrait of the Right Revd Michael Adie CBE, Bishop of Guildford. A new prize had been created that year to be awarded to the best portrait in the show. Unusually, the reward was in the form of a commission to paint someone in public life. The identity of the sitter was a secret. The evening before the opening, I was informed, to my astonishment, that I had won and the sitter would be Her Majesty the Queen. I had to wait nearly six months before my first sitting. During that time there was very little I

There’s much more to Winslow Homer than his dramatic seascapes

Until the invention of photography war reportage depended on old-fashioned illustration, and even after that the illustrated press took a while to catch up. Photographic reproduction didn’t work on cheap newsprint, which demanded a crispness of definition that early photography couldn’t provide. So reports on the American Civil War in the new illustrated periodicals aimed at the middle classes continued to rely on wood engraving, and it was as a print designer that the 25-year-old Winslow Homer was sent by Harper’s Weekly to cover the fighting in 1861. Apprenticed to a commercial lithographer at the age of 19, Homer had no formal training as an artist but he had a

Guston is treated with contempt: Philip Guston Now reviewed

Philip Guston is hard to dislike. The most damning critique levied against the canonical mid-century American painter is that he is too uncontroversial, his appeal too broad, his approach altogether too winsome. None of that stopped the team behind Philip Guston Now – a travelling mega-survey of his work, which will reach Tate Modern in 2023 – from announcing otherwise. In 2020, the year the show was due to open, the curators announced that in light of the ‘racial justice movement’, the artist’s works might now legitimately be read as racist, and the show could not go forward as planned. This was and is quite obviously nonsense. The works in

As cool and refreshing as a selection of sorbets: RA’s Milton Avery show reviewed

‘I like the way he puts on paint,’ Milton Avery said about Matisse in 1953, but that was as much as he was prepared to say. Contemporary critics tried to ‘pin Matisse’ on him as if art criticism were a branch of police work. He resisted, and remains a slippery customer. Post-impressionist or abstract expressionist? Colour field painter with added figures? To those who view art history as the march of progress towards modernism, he looks like a backslider. Clement Greenberg thought as much, dismissing him in 1943 as ‘a “light” modern who can produce offspring of Marie Laurencin and Matisse that are empty and sweet with nice flat areas