Blog
Bob Dylan as a visual artist
Long before Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature this year, pundits used to talk about “Dylan versus Keats”, as if you had to choose, and as if Dylan’s poetic transformations of folk song are really so different from what John Keats does in his eerie ballad La […]
Artemisia Gentileschi, the hero of her own life
Two women are holding a man down on a bed. One presses her first against his head, so he can’t raise it from the mattress, while her companion pins his torso in place. They are well-built with powerful arms but even so it takes their combined strength to keep their […]
Paintings and Reconstruction: the example of Warsaw
It is August 1944 and the Polish resistance are in violent clashes with the Nazi forces that have occupied Warsaw. The resistance intend to liberate the city from what the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz has called the “dark, black and red world of Nazi occupation“. During the Warsaw Uprising, the […]
Delacroix, an unheroic gentleman
Delacroix’s distinctiveness was in part due to the circumstances of the time. He was born in 1798 at the end of the French Revolution, the son of Charles-François Delacroix, ambassador to the Netherlands, and Victoire Oeben, the daughter of a celebrated cabinet maker. Since Eugène arrived seven months after Charles […]
Delacroix, an influencer
Eugène Delacroix today holds, for many people, a somewhat peripheral place in the pantheon of 19th-century artists. That he was a powerful influence on the likes of Manet, the impressionists and Seurat is taken for granted, but so too is the idea that they went on to outstrip him. For […]
Brueghel and painted engravings
It will soon be Fat Tuesday. Eggy batter will sizzle heartily in pans across the land. One of modern Britain’s last lovely echoes of pre-industrial life, our pancake festival on the last Tuesday before Lent is a homely relic of the great carnivals that once rocked every village in Europe, […]