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Explainer: Live Text
I’ve seen a few comments here and elsewhere from users who don’t think that Monterey has anything to attract them. In this article, I try to explain why one feature – Live Text – should prove one of...
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Channel Coasts: 1 England
Most days, if the weather isn’t too horrid, we walk about thirty minutes from our backdoor up to an obelisk on the Down to the west. From there, on a clear day, we can see the English Channel coast...
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Channel Coasts: 2 France
In yesterday’s article, we made our way eastwards along the southern coast of England, starting near Land’s End, and ending up at the white cliffs of Dover, ready to cross over to make the return trip...
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Don Quixote: Book 1 summary and contents 1
This is the first of two articles which provide a table of contents, summary and selected paintings for the first book of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Cervantes takes us to a village in La Mancha,...
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Still Life History: Fish
It was the great Douglas Adams who coined the farewell So long, and thanks for all the fish as the title of the fourth book of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s only appropriate that this...
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Francisco Goya: 10 The story of Friar Pedro
In the early years of the nineteenth century, Francisco Goya (1746–1828) was fully occupied painting portraits, mainly of the royal family, members of court, and the nobility. Francisco Goya...
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Reject: Ferdinand Hodler’s Night
It’s hard to think of a more inoffensive artist than Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918). From his early realist landscapes of his native Switzerland through to his last sublime views over Lake Geneva, his...
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Impressionist painting in Britain: 6 John Lavery
One of the many painters who returned from training in France during the 1880s was Irish by birth and had been living in Scotland. Nevertheless, he made much of his career working in England: he is Sir...
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Thomas Seddon: bicentenary of a Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter
On 28 August 1821, exactly two centuries ago today, one of the few dedicated Pre-Raphaelite landscape painters was born in London: Thomas Seddon (1821–1856). His father was a successful cabinetmaker,...
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Harvest moon: Palmer’s enchanted countryside
This is the time of year when farmers often work long into the night bringing in the harvest, traditionally by the light of the harvest moon. These days it’s not moonlight, of course, but the dazzling...
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Don Quixote: Book 1 summary and contents 2
This is the second of two articles which provide a table of contents, summary and selected paintings for the first book of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The group escorting Don Quixote from the...
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Still Life History: 0 Contents
This gives an overview of the series of articles covering the history of still life painting. Articles are divided into sections covering the history, reasons for painting still lifes and special...
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Francisco Goya: 11 War
In 1808, everything changed for Goya, the court, and the whole of Spain. Until then, the country had been allied with France, to the point where it was their joint fleet which was defeated by Nelson...
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Reject: Manet’s picnic
Life is no picnic, and when you’re Édouard Manet (1832–1883), you learn a lot about life from a picnic. He disappointed his father, a judge with all the right connections, first by rejecting law as a...
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Impressionist painting in Britain: 7 Jacques-Émile Blanche
If you’ve come across the paintings of Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861–1942), you’ll know of his portraits of famous figures around the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jacques-Émile...
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Painting the surreal before Surrealism 1
Surrealism as an art movement didn’t really arrive until the 1920s, and the term itself was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917. With the wisdom of hindsight, though, we sometimes consider much...
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Painting the surreal before Surrealism 2
In the first of these two articles looking at surreal paintings which anticipated the Surrealist movement of the early twentieth century, I showed examples from Hieronymus Bosch in around 1500 up to...
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Don Quixote 24: Fame
In the first book of Don Quixote, Cervantes explains how this hidalgo became addicted to tales of chivalry, which brought a madness in which he believed that he too was a knight. In his first brief...
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Landscape Composition: 1 Introduction to a new series
The composition of a painting is the way that its individual elements – figures, objects, trees, terrain, sky – are assembled into the complete image. Although artists have long had an interest in...
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Francisco Goya: Rebellion
At the start of 1814, Francisco Goya (1746–1828) had been a widower for nearly two years, was profoundly deaf, and hadn’t been paid any of his salary since early 1808. He was penniless, but still alive...
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