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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be made. ‘Window, Finsbury Park’ (1933) Born in 1908, Pasmore started out as a part-time painter. The sudden death of his father when Pasmore was 18 threw him off his intended course from Harrow to university; instead he took a job with the London County Council. Painting and educating himself about art in his spare time, he began to exhibit in the ...”