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“... Van Dyck the Antwerp prodigy, precocious master of the northern baroque, Rubens’s star pupil, a painter of mythologies and altarpieces – not just of portraits. In England, where Van Dyck spent most of the last decade of his 42 years, the demand for other genres was limited but the appetite for portraits was voracious. He became, like Holbein before him, a ...”

“... up my old friend Bob Smylie, the editor of the Irish Times, to tell him of the death of this great painter. Now, Bob is a very fat man with a very thin skin and to adapt the remark of the old priest in a sermon on the Holy Ghost, ‘the one thing, dear brethren, that the Holy Ghost can’t stand is fornication,’ the one thing Smylie can’t stand is fame ...”

“... all-or-nothing streak in human beings, once aroused, never entirely goes away. So the striving painter who, in the most successful of his schemes, took himself off to Arles, first working alone, then alongside Gauguin, then alone again, then in the mental hospital in Saint-Rémy, was continuous with that violently principled younger man: he had grown up to ...”

“... essays and an introduction Dr Barrell looks at the figures in the paintings of Gains borough, George Morland and Constable in order to trace changes in the way that rural workers and the rural poor in general were represented, and to suggest a tradition in which a gradual desire for greater naturalism was compromised and inhibited by considerations which ...”

“... Doors of Perception, that to take mescalin is to see the world as Vermeer saw it is typical of the painter’s canonisation in the 20th century. Pater’s Romantic flight of fancy established da Vinci as an artistic visionary for late 19th-century aesthetes: the modern Impressionist turns to Vermeer. In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Pater ...”

“... most of the music – as a bon vivant, propping up, or being propped up by, the bar of the George in Great Portland Street (the Gluepot, as it was known), keeping its regulars up till dawn with his brilliant conversation. There was a lot more to him than one-liners and limericks; and if one thing emerges from the thickets of Stephen Lloyd’s ...”

“... George Grosz made the drawings and paintings for which he will be remembered during the First World War and in the Twenties and Thirties. In his autobiography (first published in German in 1955), Old Grosz looks back at Young Grosz, and considers the change of direction which came in his work when he went to America ...”

“... of the Artists (1550) Vasari describes in some detail Andrea’s cold-blooded killing of another painter, Domenico Veneziano, apparently motivated by envy of Domenico’s skills as a fresco artist. Matters came to a head, Vasari tells us, when both artists were lodged at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, painting a fresco cycle, Scenes from the Life of the ...”

“... father, groom, animal, discipline – gave Francis a physical jolt that helped make him into the painter Francis Bacon.’Bacon left home when he was sixteen. ‘Did his father suddenly banish him for trying on his mother’s silky underthings?’ Stevens and Swan ask. ‘That was a story Bacon later told, and he had a taste for women’s ...”

“... Zeuxis, as Pliny admiringly observed, were so real that birds came and pecked at them. Vasari, a painter himself, believed that in his day art had rediscovered those lost antique skills, built on them, and was now close to perfection. To make representations look deceptively real, and to remain untroubled by considerations of what ‘real’ could possibly ...”

“... Dubuffet and Newman. He tentatively withdraws his estimate of Bomberg as ‘the finest English painter of the century’, and repents some early limiting judgments on Picasso; ‘the young critic cuts his teeth on Picasso. He proves his manhood by putting down Picasso, which is quite easy because he is so flawed an artist, is such a colossal figure that he ...”

“... autobiography, delivered out of the left-hand corner of his mouth. ‘When I was a boy in Chicago, George, selling small dogs for sexual purposes …’ Relations with Rexroth alternated between times of enthusiastic acceptance and times of harsh rejection, at least with men; towards women he was much more consistently benevolent. Perhaps the reason I never ...”

“... as a God-given liberation of the spirit, but they trembled for their livelihood. As the Strasbourg painter Heinrich Vogtherr observed, throughout Germany the gospel had brought the ‘diminution and arrest of all subtle and liberal arts’, so that ‘in a few years, there will scarcely be found anyone working as painter or ...”

“... Which famous Victorian poet-painter was the 20th child of a dodgy stockbroker? Yes, it was the man in the runcible hat, Edward Lear. His latest biographer, Peter Levi, confides to us that, like Lear’s mother, his own grandmother also had 21 children. Easily lured into digression, Levi adds that ‘it is not uncommon in such families that by some mysterious compensation of nature a number of the children or grandchildren should be childless, and that is what happened in Edward’s family ...”

“... On​ 27 December 1950, 66 years ago, at the age of 66, the German émigré painter Max Beckmann suffered a heart attack and died on the corner of Central Park West and 69th Street, where for the past eight months he had rented a small apartment and a studio. He had been on his way across the park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to view the latest (and last) of his self-portraits, the rather gaudy and saddening Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket (and Orange Shirt and Purple Sweater-Vest), where the almost unrecognisably pinched-looking painter has lost a couple of hat sizes (as if a lifelong thumb were now an index finger ...”