19th Century

Why was this fêted Mexican painter left out of the canon?

22 March 2025 9:00 am

Think of a Mexican painting, and chances are you’ll conjure up an image of an eyebrow-knitted Frida Kahlo, or a…

One hundred years of humiliation

10 June 2023 9:00 am

By the 1800s, the mechanical clock had become a status symbol for wealthy Chinese. The first arrived with Jesuit missionaries…

Lloyd Evans

28 November 2020 9:00 am

Sasha is angry. He’s a gay artist on his way to his niece’s birthday party and he keeps popping codeine…

Bigamists, lunatics and adventurers

21 March 2020 9:00 am

The world of 19th-century British music was raucous, but are there any masterpieces waiting to be rediscovered? wonders Richard Bratby

‘The Death of Sardanapalus’, 1846, by Eugène Delacroix

Wild at heart

23 January 2016 9:00 am

Delacroix’s frigid self-control concealed an emotional volcano. Martin Gayford explores the paradoxes that define the apostle of modernism

Hye-Youn Lee as Violetta in ‘La traviata’

Blood and lust

18 October 2014 9:00 am

Virtue, hide thyself! The Coronation of Poppea opens with a warning and closes with a love duet for a concubine…