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Showing posts from January, 2026

The Fabric of Faith

We must confess that religious paintings are not our favourite subject, and we've tended to regard Spanish Catholic art as being, well, just a little too religious to cope with. So we approached the Francisco de  Zurbarán  exhibition at the National Gallery in London with a certain amount of trepidation. A degree of contrition is due.... Yes, there were monks, altarpieces and lots of saints, but we were blown away by Zurbarán's ability to depict textures and fabrics and to convey an intensity of feeling.  It's an absolutely excellent exhibition, full of truly beautiful paintings. Such religious art was intended to bring the faithful closer to God, to bridge the gap between Heaven and Earth, in an age when many could not read. Zurbarán was a master at it. Let's start with a saint: Just take a look at the fabrics, trimmings and gems in this picture. And the garments are even more striking when you are stood in front of this nearly life-size figure.  This is Casild...
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New Exhibitions in February

Georges Seurat devised the Neo-Impressionist painting technique popularly known as Pointillism. He didn't live long and left only a small body of work, of which seascapes were a recurring motif; a couple of dozen paintings and drawings from summers spent on the northern coast of France will be brought together for  Seurat and the Sea   at the Courtauld Gallery in London from February 13 to May 17. Lucian Freud gained recognition as one of the greatest of British portrait painters for his intensely observed works, often of nudes. From February 12 to May 4, the National Portrait Gallery is putting on  Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting , which will be the first exhibition in Britain to focus on his creations on paper, some of which have never been on public display before.   Ramses and the Pharaoh's Gold  is a travelling exhibition of treasures from Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities: 180 of them, with the coffin of the long-lived Ramses II among highlig...
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Fire and Water, Sun and Sky

"Fire and water.... the one all heat, the other all humidity -- who will deny that they both exhibit, each in its own way, some of the highest qualities of Art?" That was the Literary Gazette 's verdict in 1831 on JMW Turner and John Constable, probably the most admired of all British landscape artists. Almost exact contemporaries whose work is being celebrated at Tate Britain in  Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals , a thoroughly engrossing exhibition that bathes you in the drama of Turner's golden sunlight, contrasted with perhaps the more understated charms of Constable's cloud-filled skies.  "The Sun is God" are supposed to have been Turner's last words, and throughout this show you can't get away from his solar worship -- one striking watercolour records The Sun Rising over Water . And that's it, that's all there is, but to be frank, you don't really notice the water. It's the bright yellow Sun that holds your eye,...
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The Singular Stanley Spencer

A day at the seaside: stripey deckchairs, a pebbly shore, groynes, choppy sea, swimwear and towels drying on a line and the edge of a brightly coloured beach hut. It's a very English scene. And look, even the sun is out. Surely everybody's having fun?  Sadly, the painter -- a very English artist -- wasn't enjoying himself. Stanley Spencer had come back to Suffolk, a place where he'd previously known happiness, seeking solace after divorce from his first wife and the almost immediate breakdown of his second marriage. On the beach at Southwold, there was an air of "suburban seaside abandonment", he wrote in his notebook. But painting it, he was separated from the jollity by the high sea wall. "I felt a kindred feeling with the bathing suits in the line in front of me in the scene that they seemed to be taking no part, as I was not, with the activities on the beach."  The tale is told and the painting can be seen in Suffolk now, at Gainsborough's Ho...
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The Mesmerising Power of Bridget Riley

There's no denying it: Bridget Riley's art has a physical effect on you. So much so that gallery attendants at Turner Contemporary in Margate for  Bridget Riley: Learning to See  have been advised to avert their eyes from the paintings regularly.  Stand in front of those curves and waves, or the precise narrow brightly coloured vertical stripes that fill some works, and you may feel you are swaying. You become slightly dizzy or a little queasy, even perhaps a bit seasick; well, it can get pretty choppy out there on the North Sea, just beyond the gallery walls. Nothing too alarming or extreme, though; it's just a perception.     When we went to see this Bridget Riley show w e knew what to expect, having been  in July 2019   to the  blockbuster exhibition   at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh that brought together half a century of pictures in a dazzling extravaganza of Op Art abstraction.  It moved to the Hayward Gallery in...
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