The National Gallery on London’s Trafalgar Square holds one of the finest surveys of European painting from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. Its treasures include Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait and Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers.
There is a hare in this painting and most people never find it. It runs on the track, ahead of the locomotive, on the right-hand side — a dark streak against dark ground. According to the painter George Dunlop Leslie, who as a child watched Turner finishing the canvas on varnishing day, that animal, and…
This ship could not have looked like this. Before the Temeraire was sold for breaking, everything had been stripped from her: masts, rigging, guns, even part of the planking. What went up the Thames was a bare hull. Turner gave her masts back — and set her sailing towards the sunset, though in reality she…
Here is a fact that stops most people in their tracks: Vincent van Gogh painted the iconic Sunflowers series not as a simple still life exercise, but as a deliberate act of friendship — decorating his home in Arles to welcome fellow artist Paul Gauguin, hoping the vivid blooms would impress his guest and cement…
Hidden inside one of the most studied paintings in Western art history, a tiny convex mirror reflects two figures standing in a doorway – one of whom may be the artist himself, silently witnessing the scene he painted. The Arnolfini Portrait, completed in 1434, is packed with so many layers of meaning, technical wizardry, and…
England did not want this painting. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1821, it failed to find a buyer and sat in the studio for three years. It took the Paris Salon of 1824 to change that — a gold medal from Charles X, and a generation of French painters who took what they saw…