art
Thomas Jones’s ‘A wall in Naples’
This week Patrick McGuinness reminded his Twitter followers of a two-part poem he published in his 2004 collection The Canals of Mars, called ‘Two paintings by Thomas Jones’. The first part, ‘A wall in Naples’, goes like this: I look and look until the nothing that I seeperfects itself. I perfect its lack of interest,as […]
The Last Bard: loops of an invented tradition
By now the ‘invented tradition’ is itself a tradition. Since Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger published their edited collection The invention of tradition in 1983, we’ve become familiar with the idea that rituals, histories and beliefs that seem age-old were actually recent fictions devised with specific purposes in mind. One of the chapters in The […]
The revolutionary gaze of Constance Mayer
In a room a woman, about thirty years of age, sits alone. The room is plain, with two bare walls, dark and grey. Its furniture is sparse, just a chair and a round table with round brass handles. The woman wears a simple white cotton dress. It has a high waistband and lacks sleeves, leaving […]
The Black Flag
The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery is closed for ‘firewall’ fortnight, but when it reopens you could do worse than pay it a visit. There are several excellent temporary exhibitions, as well as some seldom-seen items from the permanent collection, including a small display of art on the theme of protest. Its centrepiece is a striking […]
Sophonisba’s game of chess
Not before time, the seventeenth century painter Artemisia Gentileschi is now receiving just acclaim, in response to the National Gallery’s new exhibition in London (alas, out of bounds for those of us who are locked down). Even if her ultra-violent ‘Texas chain-saw massacre’ dramas are too much for you, you can always admire her picture […]
Cornelius Varley in Wales
Among the many artists who came to draw and paint in Wales around the turn of the eighteenth century, Cornelius Varley is yet to receive just attention. The pictures he made in Wales are fresh, delicate and strong, the work of a young man with great visual intelligence who reacted with instinctive wonder and clarity […]
Chaos describ’d
These days chaos as a concept has been captured by mathematics and physics. (Sometimes it gets re-exported to the popular imagination through tropes like the butterfly effect.) But before that it was available to anyone. It was especially attractive to philosophers, theologians and mystics, and to creative people like writers and artists. Chaos has always […]
Time and Johannes Vermeer
Today’s the last day of my imaginary return visit to the city of Delft. As always, it’s been a time of rest and contemplation among the canals and step-gabled houses facing them. And as usual I’ve been thinking about Delft’s most famous citizen, Johannes Vermeer, and his paintings – this time, the early works that […]
The assassin waits
In my lockdown tour of Europe I’m still enjoying my virtual stay in the city of Delft. I’ve walked a little way from the Nieuwe Kerk to the Prinsenhof in Sint Agathaplein. Today the Prinsenhof is a museum, and a very good one, but in the late sixteenth century it was the government headquarters of […]
Carel Fabritius’s ‘A view of Delft’
You can take a train to Delft – or you could, in pre-Virus times – walk to the corner of Oude Langendijk and the Oosteinde in the city centre, look to the north-west, and see what the painter Carel Fabritius saw there on a bright summer’s day in 1652. A few things have changed, it’s […]
