264 Caravaggio: If music… (b).

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Musicians, 1597. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The two one-painting exhibitions in London at the moment have a lot in common, and so do the artists who are represented. Apart from anything else, music and love are major themes, and in my blog last week I quoted theContinue reading “264 Caravaggio: If music… (b).”

248 – More value than many sparrows

Max Liebermann, Free Time in the Amsterdam Orphanage, 1881-82. Städel Museum, Frankfurt. German Impressionism – the subject of my talk on Monday, 19 May – was not a direct rejection of the pristine surfaces and clear, crisp colours of the Nazarenes, who I talked about earlier this week, but it so easily could have been.Continue reading “248 – More value than many sparrows”

225 – Necessity is the Mother of Inventiom

Angelica Kauffman, Invention, 1778-80. Royal Academy of Arts, London. Rather brilliantly, Tate Britain’s encyclopedic survey of Women Artists in Britain, 1520-1920, opens with Angelica Kauffman’s Invention. It was one of the four Elements of Art which she was commissioned to paint for Somerset House, where they were installed in the ceiling of the Royal Academy’sContinue reading “225 – Necessity is the Mother of Inventiom”