Joseph Wright of Derby at the National Gallery

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734 – 1797) is undoubtedly one of the great English painters of the eighteenth century. He was tutored in London by Thomas Hudson, the master of Sir Joshua Reynolds. As with most artists of that period he was accomplished in portrait painting, to make his living, and landscape where he made…

Klimt Painting Sells For $236m at Sothebys

The Gustav Klimt painting that I wrote about last month Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, sold overnight in New York for $236m. It was sold at Sothebys in their new global headquarters: the historic Breuer Building on Madison Avenue. The painting is now the second highest priced painting behind Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi.

Ironbridge in Shropshire – Bridges in Art

Bridges can be found in many works of art such as Canalletto’s wonderful study of Old Walton Bridge in the Dulwich Picture Gallery or Turner’s Maidenhead Bridge which I wrote about here in 2019. But they can also be works of art in their own right. Some of the most beautiful examples of architecture in…

William Gear – Painting of the Month

William Gear RA is a special artist for us; not least because we have one of his paintings in our own collection. We bought his 1953 abstract,  Black and Green Verticals, from the Fosse Gallery in February 2015. It is my Painting of the Month for November as we were reminded of Gear’s work on a recent…

George Seurat, Radical Harmony and The National Gallery.

Georges Seurat was a giant in the modern history of European Art. A superb draughtsman, he was instrumental in bringing the curtain down on Impressionism and introducing new ways of thinking about painting using scientific calculation. He studied colour and instead of combining paint to produce different hues and tones he used pure colour and…