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“... Thinking far away about my friend and teacher, who died a fortnight ago, I am aware of how many owed to William Coldstream, not necessarily, as I did, the circumstances of their whole lives, but the terms of reference through which they came to the painting and thought of their time. It must have been in 1936 that I met him at the suggestion of W.H ...”

“... In the future, when people are wondering whether they ‘like’ that cyclopean mass of concrete, the Hayward Gallery, or how they can endure the dictates of British Gaullism, or whether they love that faithful wing of it that is charged with cultural governance, I hope they will remember the successive anxiety, bafflement, reassurance, and ultimate aesthetic conciliation, which chased one another across their hearts in this cold spring of 1984 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... When I used to give a survey course for first-year students, I dreaded December. That was when I reached the High Renaissance and my audience fell away. It was not only the alternative seasonable employment that left the slopes of the theatre to echo vacantly my conventional claims for the ideal. Although I did not disbelieve the convention, it was hard to feel sure that the perfections of Leonardo and Michelangelo – the ideally empirical theory of knowledge and the ideal of human physique in the likeness of God – did not outclass the merely intelligent perfection of pictorial form, which was the apparent distinction of Raphael ...”

“... Day after day I find an excuse to be in Piccadilly and once there give up any attempt to stay out of the galleries at the Royal Academy.* Venetian art of the 16th century is running in one’s head like music, complete with its resounding orchestration. One abandons oneself to it. Yet it is not merely indulgence. One is drawn by the magnetism of an idea: the idea of art invented in Venice soon after 1500, at just the moment when this incomparable exhibition begins, an idea that one recognises, without reasoning how, as the modern idea ...”

“... Some of Lawrence’s earliest paintings are self-portraits in the mould of Courbet – the painter as Artist. Latterly the role was deepened in its tragic aspect, the artist as Marsyas flayed. Lawrence’s gift to us, his perennial celebration of substance, richness, colour, the great blossoming of form – to use one of his own phrases – all in the name of painting, was never unattached from a sense of mortality ...”

“... Maybe the opposite. It isolates it; it specifies it; it gives it the blank of the page to live in. Lawrence Gowing once said that Goya’s achievement ‘transcended the conditions of painting’ (or drawing) and that ‘Goya’s ultimate message might have been conveyed by a writer of comparable greatness in words.’ I’m not sure this is true. I see ...”

“... a little out of his time in thinking that anyone any longer cared to try for this sort of thing. Lawrence Gowing, writing of a painting by Thomas Jones who was in Rome a century and a half earlier, explains: ‘The normal way of gathering information about nature is in a drawing, but this oil sketch is nothing like a drawing. It is based not on line but ...”

“... In​ 1986, the art historian Lawrence Gowing wrote to Carolee Schneemann with a proposal. He would write a ‘substantial’ book on her work, but warned her that ‘I shall break your back with the weight of the devotion and the determination that I am unloading on you … You will have to hold my fanaticism down and teach it obedience ...”

“... were inclined to be contemptuous or dismissive, so some venerable commentators – the late Lawrence Gowing, Michael Levey, Richard Wollheim, Marina Warner and, singled out for a special treatment, Charles Hope – are, in this new edition, keenly reprehended. It should be said that Steinberg, a lively and resourceful writer, could not with any ...”

“... talking about everything. It was in this company that I made my first good joke. Julia and Lawrence Gowing were staying, and Lawrence plonked himself down at the supper table on a frail kitchen chair next to me. I saw the back legs begin to splay out. ‘...”

“... magic: they look as if they have escaped from a dream. It’s probably true to say that before Lawrence Gowing organised a comprehensive exhibition of Hogarth at the Tate in 1971-2, very few people thought of him as one of the great European painters of the 18th century. The paintings were always overshadowed by the engravings, and one is inclined to ...”

“... supports this view of Turner’s genius. John Gage ends his introduction with a remark made by Lawrence Gowing in 1966: ‘It is not certain that we are yet prepared to see Turner whole.’ Gage reckons it is time to renew the attempt. He uses another quotation from Gowing to epitomise the Modernist view of Turner ...”

“... life. I was drawn to them with a vehemence that matched my initial distaste.The art historian Lawrence Gowing, who wrote a monograph on Freud in 1984, told him in accepting the commission that Freud’s work put his teeth on edge. ‘One … shamelessly prizes the frisson,’ Gowing said, and it was no good hoping ...”

“... human predicament. Nearer home, the existential fervour surrounding the paintings was kept up by Lawrence Gowing – ‘The imagination that does not recognise its own dilemma in Bacon’s images simply does not know the score’ – and, indeed, by Sylvester himself: he ruefully owns up to a ‘gnomic and incantatory’ text of 1957 containing phrases ...”