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The People’s Goya

Nicholas Penny: A Fascination with Atrocity, 23 September 2004

Goya 
by Robert Hughes.
Harvill, 429 pp., £25, October 2003, 1 84343 054 1
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... contemporary; or that he was, at least, the first modern artist. Not unexpectedly, it is Goya as a painter of horror and atrocity who attracts most attention. Hughes contrasts the Meadow of San Isidro, painted in 1788 when the artist was 42, with the Pilgrimage of San Isidro, also in the Prado, of 1821-23. The former shows a pleasant picnicking scene while the ...

Get out

Julian Bell: Francis Bacon, 19 October 2000

Looking back at Francis Bacon 
by David Sylvester.
Thames and Hudson, 272 pp., £29.95, June 2000, 0 500 01994 0
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... and figures through the 1960s. The series of triptychs commemorating the death of Bacon’s lover George Dyer in 1971 is identified as a second plateau of high achievement – not that Sylvester doesn’t find things to admire in the increasingly muted manner of the painter’s old age. Following this survey, Sylvester ...

Italianizzati

Hugh Honour, 13 November 1997

A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701-1800 
compiled by John Ingamells.
Yale, 1070 pp., £50, May 1997, 0 300 07165 5
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... drawings; and went on to annotate the letters written from Rome in 1757 by a minor British painter who had mentioned Wilson and other British travellers and expatriates in the city. This led him to scour printed sources and consult Roman parish registers, then in the Vatican – tall, slender volumes in which, year by year and parish by parish, priests ...

Hare’s Blood

Peter Wollen: John Berger, 4 April 2002

The Selected Essays of John Berger 
edited by Geoff Dyer.
Bloomsbury, 599 pp., £25, November 2001, 0 7475 5419 6
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... of the same books, from the same canon of French revolutionary literature. He respected David as a painter because of his ‘revolutionary classicism’ and, in his book on The Success and Failure of Picasso, he cites Bakunin’s typically anarchist dictum that ‘the urge to destroy is also a creative urge,’ comparing it to Picasso’s observation that ‘a ...

Under the Brush

Peter Campbell: Ingres-flesh, 4 March 1999

Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch 
edited by Gary Tinterow and Philip Conisbee.
Abrams, 500 pp., £55, January 1999, 0 300 08653 9
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Velázquez: The Technique of Genius 
by Jonathan Brown and Carmen Garrido.
Yale, 213 pp., £29.95, November 1998, 0 300 07293 7
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... he got an invitation to visit England to do portraits – he could have given us the Court of George IV just as his hero Holbein gave us that of Henry VIII – but he saw history painting as a duty and he rejected the invitation with disdain. The transformation that Ingres worked on flesh does not obliterate personality. M. Bertin, the journalist, hands ...

At the National Portrait Gallery

Peter Campbell: Thomas Lawrence, 6 January 2011

... direct likeness. ‘Draw’ as much as ‘paint’ because, unusually for an 18th or 19th-century painter, he seems, from accounts given by sitters, to have started with a detailed drawing on the canvas in black chalk. Lady Elizabeth Leveson-Gower thought it ‘almost a sin’ to see it disappear below the paint. He was self-taught and it was drawing, not ...

Large and Rolling

Penelope Fitzgerald, 31 July 1997

The Scholar Gypsy: The Quest for a Family Secret 
by Anthony Sampson.
Murray, 229 pp., £16, May 1997, 0 7195 5708 9
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... Goch. Among the mourners were Gypsy harpers and fiddlers, scholars, civic officials and ‘the painter Mr Augustus John’. ‘Hundreds of spectators,’ it was reported, ‘waited for the coming of the mortal remains of Dr John Sampson, the well-known philologist and librarian of Liverpool University.’ As a specialist in Romani he had been known – not ...

Always There

Julian Barnes: George Braque, 15 December 2005

Georges Braque: A Life 
by Alex Danchev.
Hamish Hamilton, 440 pp., £35, May 2005, 0 241 14078 1
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Landscape in Provence 1750-1920 
Montréal Musée des Beaux ArtsShow More
Derain: The London Paintings 
Courtauld InstituteShow More
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... his way through various styles inclining more and more to the empty magniloquent gesture – a painter shouting not to be forgotten. A century on, the great adventure of Cubism still retains all its excitement, whether in the direct narrative of Alex Danchev’s impressive (and first ever) biography of Braque, or in oblique illustration. Landscape in ...

Taking the hint

David Craig, 5 January 1989

The King’s Jaunt: George IV in Scotland, 1822 
by John Prebble.
Collins, 399 pp., £15, November 1988, 0 00 215404 8
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... Prebble’s that all these tartans were nothing but hype: a stunt devised chiefly by Scott to make George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in August 1822 as splendiferous as possible. In his anonymous shilling pamphlet ‘HINTS addressed to the INHABITANTS OF EDINBURGH AND OTHERS in prospect of HIS MAJESTY’S VISIT by an Old Citizen’, Scott dubbed a principal ...

The Rainbow

Lawrence Gowing, 17 March 1983

Rubens and the Poetics of Landscape 
by Lisa Vergara.
Yale, 228 pp., £29, November 1982, 0 03 000250 8
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James Ward’s Gordale Scar: An Essay in the Sublime 
by Edward Nygren.
Tate Gallery, 64 pp., £2.95, November 1982, 0 905005 93 7
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... The idea of the painter as a power of nature, an organ of creation in himself, has been as deeply-rooted and long-lasting as anything in the Western legend of the artist. Rubens was every kind of power. He was the instrument of divinity, the tool of statecraft, the agent of dynastic aspirations, the wielder of philoprogenitive potency until the last month of his life and the progenitor not only of children but of generative images to match ...

Illustrating America

Peter Campbell, 21 March 1985

Willem de Kooning: Drawings, Paintings, Sculpture 
by Paul Cummings, Jorn Merkert and Claire Stoullig.
Norton, 308 pp., £35, August 1984, 0 393 01840 7
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Abstract Expressionist Painting in America 
by William Seitz.
Harvard, 490 pp., £59.95, February 1984, 0 674 00215 6
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About Rothko 
by Dore Ashton.
Oxford, 225 pp., £15, August 1984, 0 19 503348 5
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The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York 
by Peter Conrad.
Oxford, 329 pp., £15, June 1984, 0 19 503408 2
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... been made for palaces and chapels. Reginald Marsh’s Coney Island bathers were its Three Graces, George Bellows’s boxers its Laocoon. But then in the late Forties Abstract Expressionism came, producing something with the scale and power of public art, although these paintings, like the Chrysler Building and the Rockefeller Centre, were ...

Hopscotch on a Mondrian

Bridget Alsdorf: Florine Stettheimer’s Wit, 3 November 2022

Florine Stettheimer: A Biography 
by Barbara Bloemink.
Hirmer, 435 pp., £25, January, 978 3 7774 3834 4
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... with a complete set of original furnishings, crystal flowers, cellophane curtains and a shrine to George Washington (‘He is the only man I collect’). Like much of her work, her interior design was grand in concept and technically complex but didn’t take itself too seriously. She conjured a European aristocratic past out of flashy, ersatz materials and ...

A Smile at My Own Temerity

John Barrell: William Hogarth, 16 February 2017

William Hogarth: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings 
by Elizabeth Einberg.
Yale, 432 pp., £95, November 2016, 978 0 300 22174 9
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... as prints, Hogarth had gained more currency for his work than any other 18th or early 19th-century painter. There was no other whose name was commonly adjectivised: we don’t find ‘Reynoldsian’, for example, or ‘Turnerian’, in familiar use. But how far these prints were ‘Hogarthian’, as that term came to be understood, is debatable. The OED ...

Flowers in His Trousers

Christopher Benfey: Central Park’s Architect, 6 October 2016

Frederick Law Olmsted: Writings on Landscape, Culture and Society 
edited by Charles E. Beveridge.
Library of America, 802 pp., £30, November 2015, 978 1 59853 452 8
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... was a principle of design. ‘The artist in landscape gardening can never have, like the landscape painter, a clean canvas to work upon,’ he noted. ‘Always there will be conditions of local topography, soil and climate by which his operations must be limited.’ A cemetery in a dry and flat part of California should not be forced to mimic the ...

At the Whitechapel

Peter Campbell: ‘Faces in the Crowd: Picturing Modern Life from Manet to Today’, 6 January 2005

... the girl sleeping off a hangover out of something thicker and more oppressive than air. While George Bellows’s 1924 picture of a boxing match is lively, populist documentary, Carlo Carrà’s Leaving the Theatre of 1909 already gives a radical account of appearance: feathery marks are woven into bright cocoons of colour which allow you to sustain for ...

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