Lucian Freud
Best in show
Martin Gayford recommends the exhibitions to see — and to avoid — over the coming year
Why did Goya’s sitters put up with his brutal honesty?
Sometimes, contrary to a widespread suspicion, critics do get it right. On 17 August, 1798 an anonymous contributor to the…
Hitler’s émigrés
German-speaking refugees dragged British culture into the 20th century. But that didn’t go down well in Stepney or Stevenage, says William Cook
The only art is Essex
When I went to visit Edward Bawden he vigorously denied that there were any modern painters in Essex. That may…
Portrait of the artist as a madman
Charles Dickens’s description of Cobham Park, Kent, in The Pickwick Papers makes it seem a perfect English landscape. Among its…
Dizzying swirls of impasto
With a career of more than 60 years so far, Frank Auerbach is undoubtedly one of the big beasts of…
A 50-year infatuation
The subject of the least characteristic essay in this engrossing collection of meditations on painters, painters’ lives, painting and reactions…
The frog prince
It would not have surprised their friends in the 1930s when Peter Watson had a fling with my grandfather, Robert…
Easy does it
The artist Malcolm Morley once fantasised about a magazine that would be devoted to the practice of painting just as…
Life force
‘Love of the human form’, writes the painter John Lessore, ‘must be the origin of that peculiar concept, the Life…
Christmas art books
Art books fall naturally into various categories, of which the most common is probably the monograph. Judith Zilczer’s A Way…
Supreme painter of the inner life
Martin Gayford sees Rembrandt’s late works at the National Gallery – is this the greatest show on earth?
Brushes with fame
Philip Hensher on the precarious fortunes of even the most gifted 19th-century artists
High Life
This Christmas our thoughts need to be with our fellow Christians who are being threatened in the Bible lands. No…
Fishy fantasies
One of the more exotic attractions at the 1939–40 World’s Fair in New York was Salvador Dalí’s ‘Dream of Venus…
Breaking omertà
According to the medical historian Professor Sonu Shamdasani, Sigmund Freud was not the best, nor actually the most interesting, psychoanalyst…
