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‘To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is, without creating still more of them.’  Pierre-Auguste Renoir To enjoy RENOIR you don’t need to know about the science or artifice behind those dappled scenes of bathers or revellers. They were painted for his pleasure, and yours. Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881) is the essence of Renoir. It combines figures – portraits of his Read More

‘Mondrian realizes the importance of line. The line has almost become a work of art in itself… Each superfluous line, each wrongly placed line, any colour placed without veneration or care, can spoil everything – that is, the spiritual.’ Theo van Doesburg (1915) The art of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) is precise, austere even. ‘Curves are so emotional,’ he said. He wanted ‘nothing specific, nothing human’ in his art. The compositions of his mature period use only black, white and primary Read More

The Belle Époque in France was the exotic epoch between the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and the Great War of 1914. It witnessed a cultural explosion – Impressionism, Zola, the Ballets Russes, the Eiffel Tower, the Paris métro, the Paris Opéra and the Moulin Rouge. It was here that Toulouse-Lautrec, all four foot of him, drank absinthe (hidden in his cane), talked and loved and sketched the demi-monde – that eclectic classless mix of pimps and pansies, artists and aristos. Read More

There is no ‘school’ of Klee, he is unique. His art should ‘be read like poems, or listened to like pieces of music’ wrote the critic Georg Schmidt. They can be appreciated for their sound, and for their pure visual appeal; but also for the theory that lies behind. They are based on a ‘perfectly definite melody of colour’ and form. Klee loved Bach and Mozart, and his art mirrored the fusion of these two masters, the fusion of ‘art Read More

HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II (1926-2022) The late QUEEN ELIZABETH II was not born to rule. Her father, the stammering, diffident Duke of York was thrust on the throne as George VI when his elder brother Edward VIII chose Wallis Simpson over duty, and abdicated in 1936. It was just as well for the nation. Edward’s sympathy for Hitler was apparent, particularly to the PM Stanley Baldwin, whose subtle machinations speeded Edward’s exit. George was a good king and good Read More

A KING FOR OUR TIME KING CHARLES III did not waste his time as Prince of Wales, as a king in waiting – unlike the Duke of Windsor or Edward VII who both, when heir to the throne, abused their position to indulge in the pleasures of the flesh or racetrack. King Charles is an authority on architecture, horticulture, organic farming and history; he can fly a plane, sail, is an expert rider, climber, fisherman and shot, and a fine Read More

‘The movement of the present day to place women in the same position as men is mad and utterly demoralising.’ Queen Victoria Victoria’s views about suffrage were common at the time. Which was why women in the UK (and US) only got the vote in 1919. The 1832 Great Reform Act went so far as to define voters: ‘male personsʼ. [Not until 1973 did all 50 US states allow women to serve on juries.] This discrimination provoked campaigners like Emmeline Read More

Picturing Alice. ‘What is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’ Quite so. There have been hundreds of illustrators for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871); but John Tenniel is the greatest (and the best known). He established the image of Alice. Yet he was not the first. That was Carroll himself, whose real name was Charles Dodgson (1832-98), a shy but brilliant maths tutor at Christ Church, Oxford. He Read More

‘Their roar is around me. I am on the brink of the great waters – and their anthem voice goes up amid the rainbow and the mist.’ Grenville Mellen, 1881 Niagara Falls is a group of three waterfalls at the southern end of Niagara Gorge, spanning the border between New York State and Ontario. The falls – American Falls, Horseshoe Falls and the small Bridal Veil Falls – formed 12,000 years ago, when water from Lake Erie carved a channel Read More

THE SIXTIES  ‘It was the time of my time. I will never have so much fun again, ever.’ Even back then Michael Caine knew ‘it was the good old days’. ‘What we decided was f*ck it, leave your baggage of class, colour and religion at the door…’ It was the best of times. For some. The ‘pill’ liberated women, Mary Quant and the mini skirt liberated legs, Vidal Sassoon liberated hair, the Mini liberated the road, the constrictions of girdles Read More

P.G. Wodehouse admitted to knowing little about rugby except that ‘each side is allowed to put in a certain amount of assault and battery and do things to its fellow man which, if done elsewhere, would result in 14 days, coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench’ (Very Good, Jeeves, 1930). Rugby is of course a collision sport, and as the French scrum half, Pierre Berbizier, said – ‘if you can’t take a punch, you should play ping pong’.  Read More

‘Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest / Drink and the devil had done for the rest…’  Treasure Island, R.L. Stevenson’s story (1883) of peglegs, parrots and buried gold has immortalised (and glamourised) the cutthroat world of piracy on the Spanish Main. Some things are just fiction, like ‘walking the plank’ – as Captain Hook (an Etonian gone wrong) did in Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904). Yet the camaraderie of these outcasts is true; they were a collective, a sort of Read More

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (1923-1997)  ‘The cliché gave my work a certain power. It was brave, risky. I try to organize its forms to make it monumental. The difference is often not great, but it is crucial.’ Lichtenstein, a New Yorker born to a wealthy family, blurred the distinction between commercial art and fine art. With Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Jasper Johns he became a leading figure in the Pop Art movement. Although initially trained by an American realist who spurned French Read More

VERMEER AND THE GOLDEN AGE OF DUTCH ART Bertrand Russell wrote: ‘It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Holland in the 17th century, as the one country where there was freedom of speculation… Spinoza would hardly have been allowed to do his work in any other country.’ Alongside freedom to speculate, to philosophise, there was freedom to reinvent art, unencumbered by church or state. Realism, particularly in genre painting, flourished in the seven northern provinces of the Dutch Republic in Read More

PAUL CÉZANNE (1839-1906): Father of Modern Art ‘I point the way. Others will come after.’ The Post-Impressionist Cézanne was, according to Picasso, ‘the father of us all – my one and only master!’ Braque’s revolutionary Cubist painting Houses at l’Estaque (1908) owes everything to Cézanne. The critic who coined the term ‘Cubism’ was being rude when he wrote that Braque ‘reduced everything, places and figures and houses, to geometric schemes, to cubes.’ But it was essentially what Cézanne invented: the Read More

FILM NOIR ‘I have done many pictures which I suppose are film noir. And I can see the roots of that in Citizen Kane… but I couldn’t define it for you, then or now.’ Robert Wise, director of noir classics like Born to Kill (1947) and The Set-Up (1949), was wary of a definition, perhaps because film noir encompasses many genres from private eye thrillers – like perhaps the first noir, Huston’s ‘depraved’ (LA Times) The Maltese Falcon, 1941 –  to erotic Read More

ALFRED HITCHCOCK (1899-1980), Master of Suspense Hitchcock knew how to manipulate: ‘I enjoy playing the audience like a piano,’ he admitted. ‘There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it…’ He recognised that ‘everybody likes to be scared. Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the Big Bad Wolf.’ And he knew how to scare. Through anticipation, tension. And through the unexpected, as in Psycho (1960), perhaps his most original film. Rope (1948), made Read More