art
Remembering Camille Claudel

The Auguste Rodin exhibition now at Tate Modern takes you beyond easy assumptions about the artist, based on the best-known works and a few fragments of biography. Rodin’s escape from the conventional beauties of classicism into reconstructing real human bodies came in 1876 with The age of bronze. Its realism scandalised the critics. But that’s […]
Prussian Blue

Like a teenager, C. has fallen hopelessly in love, with a visitor from the Continent. I didn’t see it coming. And the worst thing is that I’m not sure it’s a temporary infatuation that will soon pass. It’s taken a firm hold on her affections. Only time will tell whether everything will end in tears. […]
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 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 […]