Rosemary Hill

In the early​ 1970s, the Scottish artist Rory McEwen painted several pieces he called True Facts from Nature. Like most of his work they are botanical subjects, sharply painted in watercolour on vellum, a technique that achieves a shimmering luminosity. True Facts from Nature No.12 (c.1973) sets out six specimens equidistant in a row. Each is a fragment, but each has the quality of...

Difficulty​ is a key principle of the Picturesque. In a landscape garden, the eye must never be allowed to take in the whole view at once. The visitor passes through successive scenes by way of transitions that are often carefully complicated. Stepping stones across a stream are slightly uneven, the gap in a hedge is too narrow to pass through without a small push, the scale shifts from...

The life​ and work of Dora Carrington have long been overshadowed by her death. As is often the way with suicides, later viewers find it hard to lose hindsight. For all the vivacity in many of her paintings, which seem to vibrate with joy in colour and form, she is often cast as a tragic figure. A less obvious factor in her relative obscurity is the obsessive cult of Bloomsbury. Lytton...

We all​ judge by appearances. Oscar Wilde said that it is ‘only shallow people’ who don’t, but it might be truer to say that they fail to pay attention to the judgments they are making while they dismiss appearances as superficial. Nothing, as Wilde added, is more superficial than thought. For women, who may be assaulted, imprisoned or killed because of what they do or do...

Ring of Brodgar, Orkney

Daniel Defoe​, in his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), was unimpressed by the prehistoric remains. Arriving at the circle of nineteen standing stones at Boscawen-Un in Cornwall, he noted with baffled irritation that ‘all that can be learn’d of them is, That here they are.’ Stonehenge left early modern viewers cold....