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“... Thuringia, or to learn that she left school at 15 because her insurance agent father and amateur painter mother decided she was needed at home? Perhaps not, until one discovers that it was only in 1912, at the age of 21, that she moved to Berlin to pursue her studies; and that she hoped to be a painter, but in deference to ...”

“... he spent time with, even in his palmiest days, were not social butterflies but fellow artists like George Sand and Chopin, and school friends who had become civil servants. Yet his intellectual isolation should not be underestimated. Wilson-Smith’s chapter describing Delacroix’s friendship with Chopin and ...”

“... reading. There were plenty of other prophets of woe among the bourgeoisie, including the American George Beard, whose influential Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia), Its Symptoms, Nature, Sequences, Treatment, was published in 1880 and almost immediately translated into German. Beard’s all too familiar argument was that nervous wear and tear was ...”

“... In a notebook entry written during the summer of 1743, the English engraver George Vertue paid tribute to his friend the ‘ingenious’ William Taverner, who ‘besides his practice of the Law ... has an extraordinary Genius in drawing and painting Landskips, equal if not superior in some degree to any painter in England ...”

“... Impressionism became ‘tighter and darker’ in England, it was largely because of Sickert, the painter of music halls and of men and women behind lowered blinds and closed doors. So, was it the cold? ‘If [the painter] lives in a northern climate,’ Sickert wrote in 1914, ‘and has no hankering for physical ...”

“... stores (Derry and Toms and Barkers) and the houses in Harrington and Collingham Gardens by George and Peto. The façades of the latter development suggest that the constituent buildings were, like those in the Flemish street front it resembles, ‘erected in casual but emulous sequence by individuals’. In fact, it was a speculation. Some of the ...”

“... latest book, but after that, he scarcely refers to Pound again. After all, what has Picasso, the painter of Guernica, to do with the traitor shrivelling in his Pisan cage? Nothing, it would seem. But to those who survived them, the terrors of modernism and fascism were sometimes difficult to keep apart. In an interview with Bruno Latour, Michel Serres talks ...”

“... have often found her exasperating. As in the case of Elizabeth Butler, the pre-eminent battle painter of Victorian Britain, Bonheur’s subjects don’t easily lend themselves to gendered analysis. Linda Nochlin deplored Bonheur’s indecision in both asserting and shunning her femininity (Nochlin called it ‘frilly blouse syndrome’). Bonheur ...”

“... In​ 1948, George Grosz sat for a portrait by Stanley Kubrick, then a young photographer for Look magazine. Grosz sits astride a backwards desk chair in the middle of light pedestrian traffic on Fifth Avenue. Neatly dressed in a suit and shiny black shoes, with a very slight smile, Grosz looks as though he’s conquering New York, as he did Berlin ...”

“... In February 1932, on the occasion of George Moore’s 80th birthday, a group of distinguished London literati published an encomium in the Times paying homage to ‘a master of English letters’. Today there are few critics who would find a place for him in a pantheon of English novelists – of his 16 novels and numerous short stories, only Esther Waters counts as a ‘Penguin Classic ...”

“... male – a self-declared ‘connoisseur’ of women, whether as lecher, or in rare cases, as painter – might tread. These baroque rules explain some painted facts: Degas had the freedom to place his focus anywhere in the theatre, the viewer’s nose and eye one moment butting up against a giant bassoon, the next swirling round a ballerina dans les ...”

“... exceptional quality, but because their owners are prepared to lend them. ‘The Martyrdom of St George’ (c.1565). ‘The Family of Darius before Alexander’ (1565-7) ‘Mars and Venus United by Love’ (c.1570) ‘The Wedding at Cana’ (1563) ‘The Supper at Emmaus’ (1555) ‘The Conversion of Mary Magdalene’ (1548) ‘The Anointing of ...”

“... Schwiter, which Degas later bought for his private collection. Degas’s own instincts as a painter throw the difficulties of the genre into relief. The ‘fancy picture’, as it was known, had become popular in England in the late 18th century. George Vertue first used the term to describe the paintings of Philip ...”

“... in Ottawa in 1913. She was in London before the Second World War and read, in a bookshop, some of George Barker’s poems. She fell for him in print. This was a visitation of love as the ancients knew about it, a sudden incurable and unconquerable malady. Or that was how it seemed to the victim, and how she presents it to us. She got to know Barker, who was ...”

“... Wasteground but also in Freud’s painting of studio rags. It has its own life. Turner was a great painter of litter: the people in some of his foregrounds are a sort of litter, and so are the odd still-lifes he disposed there (it is a feature that Ruskin attributed to a child hood spent near Covent Garden). Freud has discerned this in his beautiful drawing of ...”