Andrew Lambirth

To be called ‘the squinter’, which is what ‘il Guercino’ means, might not seem an auspicious nickname for an artist, but it doesn’t appear to have stood in the way of Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591–1666), who became one of the most famous Italian artists of the 17th century. Not only was he a distinguished Baroque

If ever there was an exhibition which warranted a speedy and assessing first look, and then a longer, more lingering concentration on certain pictures, then Citizens and Kings is it. Subtitled ‘Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760–1830’, it doesn’t have an exactly prepossessing moniker. Citizens and Kings sounds like something out of one of

William Hogarth (1697–1764) was a rambunctious figure, controversial and quarrelsome by nature, but the first British artist to achieve worldwide recognition. He did this not through his paintings but through his prints, which were easier and cheaper to obtain, distinctly portable and offered a clear indication of his ideas. For Hogarth was a man of

I’m talking to Maggi Hambling in the downstairs studio of her south London home, because her beautifully light upstairs painting space is being given a new coat of white paint, the first for years. She always says that if she ever comes to sell this house the agents can market it as having ‘four reception

Canaletto is one of the best-loved of foreigners who visited these shores and attempted to capture the English spirit through depictions of our countryside and buildings. London was the magnet, inevitably, when commissions began to run short in his native Venice. Canaletto had sold a great deal of work to the English aristocracy as they

When Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in 1915 while fighting for the French, he was only 24. It’s hard to believe that so young a sculptor could have done as much or left as large an imprint on art history. When Gaudier’s partner, the mercurial Zofia Brzeska, died intestate in 1925, it was indeed fortunate for

Here are two exhibitions which remind us of the richness of art, the many approaches and lines of inquiry which became available to the artist in the 20th century. Picasso, that protean genius, managed to encapsulate most of these revolutionary developments in one career and one gargantuan personality. Aubrey Williams, no slacker or shrinking violet

Born in Gujarat, western India, in 1951, Shanti Panchal studied art in Bombay before coming to London on a British Council scholarship in 1978. He has made his home in this country ever since, with regular trips back to India, and enjoys a justly high reputation for the distinctive large-scale watercolours he specialises in. However,

Although it must be a nightmare to administer a museum in these philistine and turnstile-obsessed times, the nation’s galleries are still doing their best to provide a service of sorts to the minds and hearts of the populace. If there is a perceptible drift towards dead-cert favourites, who can blame the institutions which now have

Another major show at the V&A, this time devoted to the more distant past, and thus inevitably of less general interest than a survey of, say, Modernism. It’s not always easy to bring to life a period so different from ours as the courtly and sophisticated Renaissance, though the mix of civilisation and barbarity that

Georg Gerster (born 1928) is a Swiss photographer who specialises in shooting from above. For more than 40 years he has been taking aerial photographs, and has flown over 111 countries. Concentrating on archaeological and heritage sites, Gerster has made what might accurately be called an ‘overview’ that has greatly enhanced our archaeological understanding. His

Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) and Francis Bacon (1909–92) were near contemporaries but their work holds little in common. Although both are painters of crisis and intensity, their very individual achievements may be said to embody diametric opposites — the heaven on earth of Spencer’s beloved Cookham, and the ‘hell is others’ Grand Guignol of Bacon. Distinguished

This is an example of the kind of exhibition which flourished for a while in the 1950s and 60s, and has sparked up occasionally since, like a partially active volcano — a show of work selected by a critic because he or she cares passionately about it. There was a famous series of Critic’s Choice

‘I am going to work to the best of my ability to the day I die, challenging what’s given to me,’ the American artist David Smith told an interviewer in 1964. Tragically he was killed in a car crash the following year, and one of the most original and inventive of 20th-century sculptors was lost,

The first thing to be said is how good this exhibition looks upstairs in the main body of the National Gallery, hung in large, well-proportioned rooms, in natural light, rather than in the dungeons of the Sainsbury wing, where most temporary shows have been consigned in recent years. At last common sense has prevailed at

Roger Hilton (1911–75) is one of our greatest abstract painters, an artist associated with the St Ives School (he lived in Cornwall for the last 10 years of his life, and visited regularly for a decade before that) whose work overleaps constraining categories. Abstract yes, but also profoundly figurative — he was one of the

It’s difficult to believe that the golden boy of British art — as David Hockney remained for so many years — now has more than half a century of work behind him, or that he will celebrate his 70th birthday next summer. His technical versatility and immense skilfulness have seen him through many different guises

Regular readers of this column will be aware that I champion small exhibitions which combine judicious selection with sufficient breadth to give an adequate representation of the artist under discussion. With Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610) there is no choice: the fullest retrospective must needs be a small exhibition. An artist who worked slowly, suffered from depression

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543) needs no introduction: his vision of kingship in the person of Henry VIII has become part of our national identity, despite Holbein himself being a German whose first taste of success was in Basel. It’s a strange fact that, although endowed with a robust tradition of drawing and linear ornament