National Gallery
Modest, interesting – no masterpieces: Millet at the National Gallery reviewed
Jean-François Millet (1814-75). One Room. 14 items. Eight paintings. Six drawings and sketches. Modest, interesting. No masterpieces. The show appeals…
Picture perfect: Locatelli at the National Gallery reviewed
I feel for Locatelli, the new Italian restaurant inside the National Gallery, whose opening coincides with the 200th anniversary of…
Decent redesign, ravishing rehang: the new-look National Gallery reviewed
A little under a year ago, it emerged that builders working on the redevelopment of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing…
Why was this fêted Mexican painter left out of the canon?
Think of a Mexican painting, and chances are you’ll conjure up an image of an eyebrow-knitted Frida Kahlo, or a…
The true birthplace of the Renaissance
The baby reaches out to touch his mother’s scarf: he studies her face intently, and she focuses entirely on him.…
Inside the mind of Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh only got one major review in his career, and he was mystified by it. When the critic Albert…
The importance of copying
The lunatics were once in charge of the asylum. The first six directors of the National Gallery were all artists:…
Are you a creative or a destructive?
There is a stage direction in The Glass Menagerie in which Tennessee Williams describes a tune that will recur through…
The ruff stuff
Why is Frans Hals still not considered the equal of Rembrandt, asks Craig Raine
Away with all the flesh
Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition? After years of exposure to his paintings of naked bodies posed like casualties…
Emancipation man
Winslow Homer may be too all-American for British tastes but a forthcoming retrospective could change all that, says Laura Gascoigne
Saint or hustler?
Laura Gascoigne dishes the dirt on Raphael
Stolen pleasures
The Duke is an old-fashioned British comedy caper that is plainly lovely and a joy. Based on a true story,…
Modern master
Gossipy, amusing, a little vain, Albrecht Dürer was a 16th-century Andy Warhol, says Martin Gayford
A licence for licentiousness
In the winter of 1861, visitors to the Louvre might have seen a young artist painstakingly copying one of the…
Fit for a king
What is the National Gallery playing at? Why, in this summer of stop-start tropical storms, is the NG making visitors…
When two become one
‘When pictures painted as companions are separated,’ John Constable wisely observed, ‘the purchaser of one, without being aware of it,…
Of man’s first disobedience
Obviously, we’re living through an era of censorious puritanism. Granted, the contemporary creeds are different from those of the 16th…
Selves examined
Gwyneth Paltrow has a new neighbour. On the same block in Notting Hill as Gwynie’s Goop store, with its This…
Rooms with a view
Not long after the pubs, big galleries have all started to reopen, like flowers unfolding, one by one. The timing…
‘I’ll show you what a woman can do’
The life of Artemisia Gentileschi is made for Netflix, says Laura Freeman, but it’s her art that really excites
A world apart
Holed up in her sixth-floor London flat, Laura Freeman finds solace in the art of the hermit
Strokes of genius
Martin Gayford
Inside stories
Nicolaes Maes (1634–93) relished the simple moments of daily life during the Dutch Golden Age. A woman peeling parsnips over…
Why did David Bomberg disappear?
David Bomberg was only 23 when his first solo exhibition opened in July 1914 at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea.…
