Culture

Tirzah Garwood, wife of the more famous Eric Ravilious, is having a well-deserved moment in the sun, benefiting from this era of equality in which artists’ and composers’ wives and sisters (such as Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn and Elizabeth Siddal) are having the spotlight shone on their under-appreciated works. It’s not profound art but it’s

Christmas, and in every city already crowds congregate around the festive department store displays in defiance of the apparent disappearance of the ‘high street’. For despite digital merchandising and online delivery, adults as much as children delight in this annual extravaganza, and such windows prove more popular than ever precisely because they cannot be enjoyed

Scent and the Art of the pre-Raphaelites… there’s an obvious problem here: how do you represent one sense by another? Synesthesia is a neurological condition whereby some people do just that: they experience colour when they hear music, or taste words – think of the Revd Sydney Smith describing heaven as eating foie gras to

You have to hand it to the curators of this excellent survey of Francis Bacon’s portraits. Not only have they alighted at an obvious but under-explored vantage point from which to reconsider this most mythologised of postwar painters, securing some serious loans to make their point, they have also dared to open their show with

Decades after its inclusion in the Hippie Trail, Afghanistan is again open to tourism, according to the Taliban’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid. It is perhaps a source of regret for the group that the 6th-century Buddhas of Bamiyan are missing in action. They were blown up in 2001 either, depending on who you ask, because of

There is a popular Japanese television show that features a segment called ‘Candy Or Not Candy?’. Contestants are presented with objects and must guess if they’re edible or not. Is that a dish sponge – or a steamed sponge cake? I might not consider afternoon tea to be art, but the confectionery artifice required to

For the maids on the top floors of the Savoy, everything was in turmoil. The 6th had been commandeered by wounded Boer War officers, and since February 1900 a suite of rooms on the 5th had been taken over by a French painter, who was using one as a studio. The officers were nice enough,

In 2022 the Wellcome Collection caused a stir by closing its Medicine Man exhibition on the grounds that it was ‘based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language’. Director Melanie Keen had previously talked of reinterpreting the collection but had now evidently decided it was beyond redemption. ‘We can’t change our past,’ she said

George Orwell took a dim view of competitive sport; he found the idea that ‘running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue’ absurd. ‘Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play,’ he wrote in Tribune after scuffles broke out during the Russian Dynamo football team’s 1945 tour. ‘It is bound up

Van Gogh only got one major review in his career, and he was mystified by it. When the critic Albert Aurier described his six paintings in the 1890 Brussels exhibition of Les XX as the product of a ‘terrible and distraught genius’, the artist responded that, far from being a genius, he was ‘very secondary’

‘It had nothing to endow it with the title of studio at all,’ was Edward James’s first impression of Leonora Carrington’s Mexico City workspace in 1946. ‘The place was combined kitchen, nursery, bedroom, kennel and junk store. The disorder was apocalyptic: the appurtenances of the poorest. My hopes and expectations began to swell.’ Carrington blended

The lunatics were once in charge of the asylum. The first six directors of the National Gallery were all artists: before art history became an academic discipline, artists were the leading authorities on art. Founded more as a teaching resource than a visitor attraction, until the mid-1940s the gallery was reserved for artists two days

People don’t accumulate stuff any more. When the late Victorian houses on our street change hands their interiors are stripped of all decorative features and the walls painted white, unrelieved by pictures: if their Victorian owners returned as ghosts, they would go snow-blind. The Victorians’ passion for accumulating stuff was close to an addiction, and

When the 15-year-old Maggi Hambling arrived at Benton End in Hadleigh, Suffolk – home of the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing – with two paintings to show the school’s founders, Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, she was ushered into the dining room where Morris was having dinner. He made some criticisms but was

On 24 April 1937 Marguerite Guggenheim – known as Peggy – of Yew Tree Cottage, Hurst was booked by a certain PC Dore for driving an unlicensed vehicle through nearby Petersfield. What was the founder of the famous Venice museum doing in a market town in Hampshire? It’s a long story, vividly told in an

On the back of the British £20 note, J.M.W. Turner appears against the backdrop of his most iconic image. Voted the country’s favourite painting in 2005, ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ (1838) was Turner’s favourite too. It remained in his possession until his death; the 70-year-old artist swore in a letter of 1845 that ‘no consideration of

You could be forgiven for assuming that the citizens of Paris weren’t exactly bursting with joy at the prospect of this summer’s Olympic Games. They’re annoyed at everything: road closures, public transport price hikes and – would you believe it? – the prospect of their country being taken over by extremist cranks before the month

In 1958 an elderly gentleman staying at the Castle Hotel in Berwick-upon-Tweed gave the receptionist a doodle he had made on the hotel’s notepaper. She kept it in a box and 43 years later, on the advice of Antiques Roadshow, sold it at auction for £8,000. ‘I don’t think anyone since Turner has looked at

‘Can you come Saturday morning to my studio, 19 bis rue Fontaine?’ Degas wrote to Edmond de Goncourt in 1879. ‘From 10.30 to half-past noon, I will have my négresse and her partner who will come expressly to be at your disposal.’ Not content with dangling from a rope by her teeth, she suspended a

Work – in the sense of toil – is about the last thing a 19th-century painter wished to be associated with. Inspiration and success were gifts bestowed on the lucky few – about as easy to grasp as smoke. For Mary Cassatt, however, art was nothing more than work. ‘Effort upon effort,’ is how she

‘The tyrannical rule of nature morte is, at last, over,’ announced Paul Nash in the Listener in 1931. ‘Apples have had their day.’ Since Cézanne fulfilled his famous boast that he would astonish Paris with an apple, artists had been trying the same trick in London, with limited success. Astonishment, unfortunately, only works once. Nash

In a Victorian art dealer’s shop a woman waits with her young son while the supercilious owner examines her work; behind her two top-hatted gents interrupt their inspection of a drawing of a dancer in a tutu to give her the once-over. The woman’s shabby umbrella, propped against the counter, awaits reopening in the rain

More than seven centuries ago, the medieval cartographer Richard of Haldingham created Hereford Cathedral’s Mappa Mundi; I say ‘created’ because when he drew his map it was largely a work of the imagination. Its terra incognita is populated with bizarre creatures born of the fever dreams of early travel writers: his Africa is inhabited by

You’re pushing 60 and an important patron asks you to repeat an artistic feat you accomplished in your thirties. There’s nothing more daunting than having to compete with your younger self, but the patron is the Pope. How can you say no? Besides, it’s an excuse to get away from Florence, where your work for

‘We invented the name Blaue Reiter whilst sitting around a coffee table in Marc’s garden at Sindelsdorf… we both loved blue, Marc liked horses and I liked riders, so the name came of its own accord.’ Christened so casually by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in 1911, the Blue Rider was always more of an

Last week’s opening of the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale marks a watershed for the art world. In much of the festival’s gigantic central exhibition, curated by the Brazilian museum director Adriano Pedrosa, as well as in many of the dozens of independently organised national pavilions and countless collateral events, it more obviously than

The term drawing is a broad umbrella, so in an exhibition of 120 works it helps to outline some distinctions. A good place to start is to ask what drawings are for, and that is what Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum has done with its current show of sketches by Flemish masters – staged in collaboration with

The time that elapsed between the fall of the Paris Commune and the opening of the first proper impressionist exhibition amounted to less than three years. Over the course of that period, the city had witnessed the collapse of the Second Empire, suffered a siege at the hands of the Prussian army and seen vicious

‘In some curious way, the practice of art and the awareness of the imminence of death are connected,’ Frank Auerbach said in 2012. ‘Otherwise, we would not find it necessary to do the work art finally does – to pin something down and take it out of time.’ There’s no sense of the imminence of