Naomi Grant is an artist and teacher.
In ‘The Best Picture’, an essay written in 1925, Aldous Huxley calls Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection ‘the greatest picture in the world’:
Great it is, absolutely great … because its author possessed almost more than any other painter those qualities of character which I most admire and because his purely aesthetic preoccupations are of a kind which I...
In the early 1860s, Edgar Degas made a copy of Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Louisa Georgina Augusta Anne Murray. The original, now in Kenwood House, is thought to have been completed between 1824 and 1826 and shows the four-year-old goddaughter of the Duke of Wellington prancing before her audience like a 19th-century Shirley Temple. There are ribbons and rosy cheeks and ringlets and...
Iam looking at a painting by the American artist Lennart Anderson, a still life from the 1960s. It’s a simple work: five objects arranged on a table top. A loaf of bread, a terracotta jug, a red pear, a funnel and a shape I can’t identify. The painting is a rare achievement of balance and spacing. No two objects are placed in the same relation; every interval is considered. The...
A few miles south of Soledad, California, not far from the Salinas river, George Milton and Lennie Small arrive at a ranch. Itinerant workers who have been forced to flee their last town, they are assessed by the boss – an unnamed figure in a Stetson hat, high-heeled boots and spurs; unlike them, he is no labouring man. ‘What stake you got in this guy?’ he asks George. ‘I never seen one guy take so much trouble for another guy.’ I was reminded of the scene earlier this year, in the week of Trump’s inauguration. I was on a bus in North London, when the driver pulled to a stop and went across the road to help a woman who had collapsed. Some passengers got angry. ‘What’s he doing helping someone else?’ one of them barked. In 2014, OCR (the major exam-awarding body in the UK) announced that it would be scrapping John Steinbeck’sOf Mice and Men from the GCSE English syllabus. Other American texts, such as The Crucible and To Kill a Mockingbird, were also to be dropped. Michael Gove, then the education secretary, complained about the ‘narrowness’ of a syllabus that he went on to make even narrower. He was disappointed that 90 per cent of candidates were studying Of Mice and Men. I’ve taught the book to pupils of all abilities and I’m always struck by its power to engage and move them.
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