At nearly eight foot high and five foot wide, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s portrait of herself with two of her students is by any reckoning a tour-de-force. Painted in 1785, it shows the artist seated at her easel, palette, brushes and mahlstick in hand, as though looking up briefly before adding to the large canvas before her.
This is an extraordinary story. In 1845 John Snare, an unremarkable Reading bookseller, goes to an auction in a defunct boarding school where he buys, for £8, a painting catalogued as a half-length portrait of Charles I, ‘supposed’ to be by Van Dyck. In mid-19th century Britain a Van Dyck is a known and immensely
It seems odd that a singer, musician, television performer and sculptor who typified the 1960s as vividly as Rory McEwen should now be known principally for his botanical paintings. From the early 1950s until his tragically early death in 1982 he was everywhere and knew everyone, but as The Colours of Reality shows, McEwen was
In the manner of Richard Holmes’s Footsteps, Julia Blackburn’s story of John Craske is as much autobiography as biography, as much about the hunt for information as the processed results of the search. The facts of John Craske’s life are briefly told: born in Norfolk in 1881 into a fishing family, he suffered some sort
In 1439 Abraham of Souzdal, a Russian bishop visiting Florence, was in the audience in Santa Maria del Carmine for the famous Ascension play, arranged by the members of the lay confraternity, the Sant’Agnese. Sitting in the body of the church, Abraham looked up and saw, on top of one end of the huge stone
Pity the poor art historian writing a survey of painters from Giotto to, say, Poussin. In order to produce a history that is as gender-balanced as possible it is absolutely necessary to include every woman painter ever heard of, some perfectly worthy of their place, some less so. How the art historian might envy the
‘Take away, utterly extinct and destroy all shrines … pictures, paintings and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and superstition so that there remain no memory of the same in walls, glass windows…’. These were the instructions handed down to churches in the reign of Edward VI, the death-knell for medieval church wall
If ever there was a time to write a book about self-portraits, this must be it. ‘Past interest in the genre,’ James Hall tells us in his introduction to this cultural history, ‘is overshadowed by the obsession with self-portraiture during the last 40 years.’ What he could not have foreseen was that self-portraiture would feature
A couple of years ago, while tracking down paintings for the Public Catalogue Foundation in the far north of Scotland, I had the chance to see a rarely displayed sequence of banners, created in 1993, telling the story of Earl Rognvald’s epic voyage to Jerusalem in 1151. Suspended between the pillars of the shadowy nave
In the vast Benedictine monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore between Siena and Rome, the cycle of frescoes depicting the life of St Benedict by Giovanni Anionio Bazzi includes a charming self-portrait of the artist standing with a couple of pets at his feet, for all the world a 16th-century Italian Dorothy with a brace of
On 14 April each year, nori fishermen gather on a hillside overlooking Ariake Bay on Kyushu in southern Japan to pay homage to ‘the Mother of the Sea’. There is a shrine and an altar for votive offerings but this is not a religious rite. The mother in question is Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker, a Lancashire-
It must have been hard to settle on a title for this book; but then this is not the book that Richard Cork originally had in mind. In his introduction to The Healing Presence of Art he describes how he was approached to write on the contemporary role of art in hospitals, but in beginning
Something in the air is arousing an interest in collectors and collections — both private and public — of which the success of The Hare with Amber Eyes and The Children’s Book are perhaps the most visible recent examples. Something in the air is arousing an interest in collectors and collections — both private and
Paul Torday’s phenomenal success with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was always going to be a hard act to follow. Paul Torday’s phenomenal success with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was always going to be a hard act to follow. The idea of it was the thing — a wonderfully funny, mad idea, carried out
The Angel’s Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón Standing behind the high altar in Prato Cathedral last week, binoculars trained on a fresco some 40 feet above, I found myself puzzling over a barely discernible detail in a scene of the nativity of St Stephen. At the foot of the new mother’s bed a winged figure,
A Most Wanted Man, by John le Carré Location, location, location is as much the mantra of espionage fiction as it is of another profession’s literature celebrated for making things seem what they are not. And location, not just in the sense of topographical reality, but of mood, atmosphere and the specifics of time and
Honor Clerk on Siri Hustvedt’s latest novel Born into a second generation Norwegian immigrant family, Erik Davidsen is a divorced New York psychoanalyst with his fair share of sorrows and with a close circle of relations and acquaintances who in turn have their sorrows too. He is a compassionate and sensitive man and the troubles
In one of his more endearing flights of fancy, Eddie Izzard once speculated on what the Greeks did with themselves in the Wooden Horse while waiting for nightfall in Troy. It was clearly something that Homer had never got round to thinking through properly, but for Izzard, once a chap has got into his breastplate,
The Slade of the years immediately before the first world war has always been fertile ground for novelists. As Sarah MacDougall pointed out in her engaging biography of Mark Gertler, Gertler himself and his fellow students have provided copy for anyone and everyone from D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf to Katherine Mansfield, V.S. Pritchett and
It is a curious phenomenon of the modern novel that so many writers entrust their narrative voice to a character that in real life they would go a long way to avoid. In the right sort of hands, of course, it can be brilliantly effective, but imagine a Jane Austen novel narrated by Miss Bates