National gallery

In any epoch most of what is built is mediocre, though we may not realise it at the time because our neophilia persuades us of merit where there is none. Equally, we may fail to distinguish the few exceptions — those instances where architects and builders have ascended to a higher standard of mediocrity or have even escaped its dulling clasp. It takes time for public taste to catch up with architects’ taste. Today, 40 years after brutalism dissipated in an assault of bien-pensant hostility and oil crises, few weeks pass without a new book or blog hymning its sublimity, energy and gravity. It is, of course, all a bit

William Henry Fox Talbot had many accomplishments. He was Liberal MP for Chippenham; at Cambridge he won a prize for translating a passage from Macbeth into Greek verse. Over the years he published numerous articles in scholarly journals on subjects ranging from astronomy to botany. One thing he could not do, however, was draw well — and it was this inadequacy that changed the world. While on holiday in Italy in 1832, he became so frustrated by his failure to draw Lake Como satisfactorily using a pencil and a drawing aid known as the camera lucida — his efforts were well below GCSE art standard — that he resolved to

At the Louvre the other day there was a small crowd permanently gathered in front of Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’. They constantly took photographs of the picture itself, and sometimes of themselves standing in front of it. No such attention was given to the other masterpieces of French painting hanging nearby, including many by Delacroix. This painting from 1830 — with its glamorous, bare-breasted personification of liberté, Tricolore in hand, followed by heroic representatives of the working and middle classes — has become an international shorthand for France itself. Whether or not this is a valid symbol of the country, it is a misleading guide to Delacroix’s own feelings

Until a decade and a half ago, we had no national museum of modern art at all. Indeed, the stuff was not regarded as being of much interest to the British; now Tate Modern is about to expand vastly and bills itself as the most popular such institution in the world. The opening of the new, enlarged version on 17 June — with apparently 60 per cent more room for display — will be one of the art world events of the year. But, like all jumbo galleries, it will face the question: what on earth to put in all that space? Essentially, there are two answers to that conundrum.

Sometimes, contrary to a widespread suspicion, critics do get it right. On 17 August, 1798 an anonymous contributor to the Diario de Madrid, reviewing an exhibition at the Royal Spanish Academy, noted that Goya’s portrait of Don Andrés del Peral was so good — in its draughtsmanship, its freedom of brushwork, its light and shade — that all on its own it was enough to bring credit to the epoch and nation in which it was created. He (or she) was absolutely correct. The same could be said of many of the exhibits in Goya: The Portraits at the National Gallery. The people in these pictures rise up, as Vincent

It has often been related how, towards the end of his long life, a critical barb got under J.M.W. Turner’s skin. ‘Soapsuds and whitewash!’ Turner apparently snorted, repeatedly, to himself. However, until now no one has traced the perpetrator of this memorably tart comment. Now we know. It was the scandalous, super-rich patron and novelist William Beckford, who made it in 1831 while taking a visitor on a tour of his collection. They paused in front of a watercolour of Fonthill Abbey, Beckford’s erstwhile house — and folly — that Turner had painted some three decades earlier. The guest remarked that the painter did not paint like that these days.

When it was suggested that a huge exhibition of Impressionist paintings should be held in London, Claude Monet had his doubts. Staging such an exhibition, he wrote to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, would be ‘unwise’ and only likely to baffle a London public that ‘knows very little about us’. That was in 1904. What, one wonders, would Monet make of Inventing Impressionism, which has just opened at the National Gallery 111 years later? It can hardly be said now that the British know little of the Impressionists. On the contrary, you could argue we’ve seen quite enough of them in recent decades. The challenge for a gallery planning to put

The New Year is a time for reflections as well as resolutions. So here is one of mine. In the art world, media and fashions come and go, but often what truly lasts — even in the 21st century — is painting. Over the past 12 months, there has been a series of triumphs for pigment on canvas, including the glorious Veronese exhibition at the National Gallery, and a demonstration by Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy that we still have painters of towering stature among us. What will 2015 hold? Well, as far as painting is concerned — both old master and contemporary — there are some extremely promising

You won’t have heard of Peder Balke. Yet this long-neglected painter from 19th-century Norway is now the subject of a solo show at the National Gallery. And it’s an absolute revelation. Walking around, I marvelled at the intensity of a man obsessed with revealing the frozen grandeur and elemental drama dominating his country’s northernmost shores. Like Turner, he was driven by a restless urge to travel, discovering landscapes that enlarged and transformed his vision of the world. In 1832 he took an arduous sea journey to the far north of Norway, ceaselessly sketching the rugged coast and mountains along the way. His excitement grew as he passed the primal North

This article first appeared in Apollo magazine Apollo’s new Digital Innovation of the Year award commends organisations harnessing digital technology to advance access to, or knowledge of art. The winner will be chosen from the shortlist below and announced in the December issue of Apollo. Find out more about the Apollo Awards. After Dark Tate Britain, London For five nights in August, four robots equipped with cameras roamed the galleries of Tate Britain and live-streamed their journeys to a microsite. A few of the robots’ online observers were also allowed to log in and manoeuvre them by remote control. The project was conceived by London-based design studio The Workers, winners of the first IK Prize (Tate’s

Nothing could have prepared the art world for the astounding moment in 1970 when, at a Christie’s sale on 27 November, the world auction record for a painting smashed through the million-pound barrier for the very first time. It was Velázquez’s portrait of his assistant Juan de Pareja, and in the week leading up to its sale the international press became excited about the possibility that it would beat the previous record of £821,482, paid in 1961. I had recently become the art critic of the Evening Standard, and its enlightened editor, Charles Wintour, asked me to write a special article about this Velázquez portrait. Propped up on a chair

At the opening of Rembrandt: The Late Works at the National Gallery (until 18 January), I met a painter friend of mine in the final room. This was, he said, one of the most magnificent exhibitions he had seen in his entire life, which — considering he is perhaps 70 and a frequent visitor of galleries — was praise indeed (and entirely deserved). Mischievously, I mentioned that he had also been highly enthusiastic about Veronese at the National Gallery a few months ago. ‘Ah, but there is a huge difference between Veronese and Rembrandt,’ he vehemently responded. ‘When you look at a Madonna by Veronese, you see a glamorous model

Talking of Rembrandt’s ‘The Jewish Bride’ to a friend, Vincent van Gogh went — characteristically — over the top. ‘I should be happy to give ten years of my life,’ he exclaimed, ‘if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food.’ Without undergoing such rigours, visitors to Rembrandt: the Late Works at the National Gallery next month will be able to see the picture that drove Vincent to such a paroxysm of enthusiasm, along with many other masterpieces from the artist’s last years. It may be that in recent decades other 17th-century masters — Caravaggio

Nick Penny announced that he is stepping down as head of the National Gallery. Next door, at the National Portrait Gallery, Sandy Nairne also announced that he is leaving. Could he be after the job at the NG? Nick Penny’s predecessor, Charles Saumarez Smith, came from the NPG but his lack of knowledge about the NG collection is said to have led to an internal curatorial mutiny. Sandy Nairne could also be said to lack the knowledge of the collection necessary to do the job well. Furthermore, he is not currently popular with lovers of the gallery, some of whom believe that his dogged pursuit of the overpriced Van Dyck self portrait – an attractive work of so-so

Deans are a strange breed. Growing up in the Church of England, I met a wide range, their cultural tastes embracing everything from Chagall to In Bed with Madonna. In 2003, I didn’t know what appealed to the then Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, John Moses, but in April of that year it suddenly became crucial. I was proposing that St Paul’s commission the artist Bill Viola — dubbed by some the Rembrandt of the video age — to create a work for the cathedral. Since Moses had never heard of Viola and I didn’t work in the visual-arts world, it seemed a far-fetched proposition. Yet I was in no

Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) is one of the great painters of the Venetian School, often joined in an unholy trinity with Titian and Tintoretto. But he was not Venetian, and only arrived in the city when he was well into his twenties. His formative years were spent in Verona, hence his popular name (he was also known as Paolo Caliari, and before that as Paolo Spezapreda, in reference to his early training as a stonecutter, following his father and grandfather), which suggests a very different background from his two most famous confrères. He has also been categorised as a Mannerist, but this is more art-historical pigeonholing than useful elucidation. Veronese deserves

In 1857, the National Gallery’s pioneering director Sir Charles Eastlake bought one of Veronese’s most sumptuous paintings, ‘The Family of Darius before Alexander’. The purchase was met with strident and very personal opposition from a Tory, Lord Elcho, in the House of Commons, but his objections were swatted aside by Lord Palmerston and we were spared the irony of fighting to defend the Indian empire while rejecting the opportunity to buy the finest painted celebration of imperial conquest. ‘The Family of Darius before Alexander’ is the centrepiece of the first monographic show in this country dedicated to Veronese (until 15 June). This is the sort of triumphant exhibition that the