Frank Gehry (1929-2025)

Frank Gehry was one of the great pioneers of architecture in history and certainly of the twenty first century. With his passing this weekend we think of some of the most innovative buildings of the world. His postmodern designs were characterized by their sculptural, often undulating exteriors and innovative use of materials such as titanium…

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…

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…

Maurice de Vlaminck, The Fauve at Chartres

Chartres is a city, some sixty miles west of Paris, that we have visited a number of times and we were there again this summer. It is a busy vibrant place and known the world over for its magnificent gothic cathedral, Notre Dame de Chartres. Like many buildings of the time its predecessor was consumed…