Forget name and fame. Choosing a portraitist by reputation alone is the quickest way to make an expensive mistake, because no amount of renown can make up for a mismatch between the painter’s style and the patron’s taste. ‘There’s no point commissioning an artist who paints with very wild and vibrant colours when you’re quiet and sober and don’t want your pictures jumping off the walls,’ says portraitist Nicky Philipps.

Confident sitters know this and trust their instincts: ‘I was starting out, 28 years ago, and one of the wealthiest girls in the world came to my stand at my first-ever art fair,’ says Sara Stewart, the founder of Fine Art Commissions, an agency that connects sitters and painters. ‘She commissioned a young artist I had just taken on — it was £500 for a full length. She could have paid £20,000, but she chose that artist because she liked his style and that should be what it is all about.’

Even before finding the right painter, however, the very first step to a commission is figuring out why to do it and what a portrait actually entails. ‘There are wrong reasons,’ cautions Stewart, ‘principally, when someone is given a portrait as a present and doesn’t actually want it.’ In those cases, what invariably seems to happen is that the sitter doesn’t enjoy sitting, the artist faces an uphill struggle and the picture ends up in an attic. It is also important for prospective sitters to understand from the outset that a painted portrait is very different from a photographic one. ‘As well as being a record of their appearance, it’s the artistic interpretation by whichever painter you choose,’ notes portraitist Isabella Watling.

Indeed, suggests another painter, Jamie Coreth, people should approach a commission as if they were buying a picture from the artist, rather than their specific likeness: ‘They are first and foremost commissioning the painter’s artistic judgement. From my standpoint, it is important to be given the freedom to pursue ideas and to follow creative instinct. The best ideas can be missed if the brief is too controlling. Give the artist time and space to do their thing, with vision and excitement. I know from experience that, if I am happy with a painting, it’s often a result which the sitter will be happy about, too, and I am happiest with works where I have been able to realise an original vision for it.’

Portraiture, believes artist Isabel Douglas-Hamilton, is a collaborative process: ‘It gives me permission to study the sitters and really get to know them, and allows me to make 1,000 different decisions about who they are. I don’t want to capture a definitive version of that person, I want to capture their presence.’ Assuming they are happy with all this, sitters should plan their commission as far ahead as possible: ‘Artists have pipelines, so you might have to wait a year,’ says Douglas-Hamilton — and this is without considering the time it will take to paint the picture or the fact that the final varnish happens some 12 months after the painting is completed. ‘If you have, say, a big birthday at the end of 2027, now would be the time to think about commissioning,’ recommends Philipps.

What happens next, however, slightly differs, depending on whether this is a private or a corporate portrait. Livery companies or universities will usually want any new picture to fit in with their existing collection, so this will to an extent dictate a sitter’s choice of artist, medium and portrait size. Private commissions have more latitude, which is at once thrilling and potentially paralysing. Size is perhaps the easiest to determine: ‘My portraits are always life size, so the sitter has to decide between a head and shoulders, a three-quarters or a full length,’ says Watling.

Guiding factors in picking what to go for are budget, wall space and the amount of detail you would like to include. ‘With head and shoulders, you can’t have a backdrop,’ explains Philipps. ‘There’s nothing worse than people putting a painting or something on the wall behind their head. It interferes with the person and the character. If it’s a full-length picture, that’s a different story. I painted somebody in America sitting at his desk with the object that made his career: false hips, you know, the titanium thing that goes into a leg.’

The choice of medium and artist can often be linked, although many portraitists are equally happy to produce a painting or a drawing. There are advantages to both media, according to Stewart: a painting has great wall presence; a drawing is timeless and generally quicker.

Identifying the right portraitist, on the other hand, is often what first-time sitters find most challenging. As Stewart pointed out with her wealthy-patron example, sitters should pick a painter to whose style they respond naturally, much as they would if buying curtains or furniture. The problem is that art is often wrapped up in an intellectual mystique that tends to make people anxious and leads them to question their own opinion. ‘My job, first and foremost, is to make sitters feel relaxed and trust their own judgement,’ Stewart explains.

Knowing what kind of artworks patrons already have and love and what their houses look like is a great starting point, but she also has another ace up her sleeve: rather than asking people what they like from a portfolio of paintings, she asks them to point out what they don’t. ‘That’s the most revealing and the most helpful. You can get a better idea of what style they would be happy to live with than if you ask them what they enjoy.’ This kind of preliminary research makes all the difference: Philipps recommends looking at a wide range of artist portfolios and narrowing them down into a shortlist.

However, finding the right painter isn’t only a matter of identifying the style that best suits the sitter’s taste. Personal rapport is what turns a good commission into a great one. ‘[People] need to be furnished with all the idiosyncrasies, availability, price, everything of that artist, so that there are no unwelcome surprises,’ believes Philipps.

Coreth recalls as one of his favourite commissions a portrait that required several trips to paint his sitter at home: ‘We spent a lot of time together and became great friends as a result. The better we got to know each other, the clearer I felt about how to paint the portrait in a way that resonated as true to the individual.’ This is why, notes Stewart, ‘you have to work out the chemistry — whether the sitter will get on with the artist. Being an agent is a little like being a creative psychologist.’ For example, conversation is rather like Marmite for artists — some love it, some hate it — so Stewart would never pair up a sitter who dreads silence with a portraitist who likes to work quietly.

Philipps falls into the talking camp, because she finds that it helps dispel nerves: ‘I like to chat to sitters as much as possible, particularly at the beginning, because that creates the dynamic, the vibrancy of the sitting.’ Her secret to breaking the ice is to share ‘some unbelievably ludicrous stories about art’, such as, she laughs, when, at one important art show, a sculptor presented a head positioned on a plank: ‘It was so heavy that the men who took it past the judges had to bring it in two bits; the head came in first, followed by the stand with its little peg — and the judges rejected the head and took the plank.’ This helps sitters relax, which in turn opens the door to a better portrait. ‘Most people are stiff and nervous. They don’t know what they’re in for and they’re terrified of their image being in the hands of some stranger, so the best thing you can do is to chat, have a fun, jokey time, and then they will sink into themselves. They will tilt their head one way or the other and then you’ll find a more interesting pose.’

What if they don’t stop chatting? ‘Then, you just ask them to be quiet when you’re painting their mouth,’ as, indeed, Philipps once did with Elizabeth II.

These days, laments Stewart, there has been an increase in people asking for portraits from existing photographs. In her view, that kind of commission is very hard to do well, as the artist needs to be able to compose the sitter under the correct light: ‘I recommend people to choose artists that paint from life if they have time and want the full “sitting” experience, but the key thing is that they should have at least one sitting from life.’ Indeed, Philipps asks even members of the Royal Family for a sitting, preferably more.

Sometimes, people are hesitant to be painted from life because they are very self-conscious. This happens more frequently with women than men, particularly older ones, for whom, says Philipps, it is often sufficient to ‘put in front of them a glass of whisky, ask them to talk about themselves and they’re away’.

The more bashful sitters should not fear, however, as portraitists are adept at making people feel at ease. ‘One thing that is very useful is to find something they’re good at,’ believes Philipps. ‘I had one girl who sat; she said she had come from her cello practice and I said “Oh my gosh, so clever! I would so love to do that!” and I could visibly see her coming at me at a different level. Those little human touches — they really help.’

Other prospective sitters are concerned about the toll that being painted from life might take on their days. It is true that a commission should allow enough sitting time. ‘I wouldn’t want the portrait to feel performative and I hope getting to know the sitters allows them to be at ease and be themselves,’ says Douglas-Hamilton. ‘I think the worst thing you can do, if you’re commissioning a portrait, is expecting it to be done to a very quick deadline — you might as well just get a photograph, at that point. You want to give the artist time to really get to know you.’

One of her favourite commissions was a portrait of a young man, Victor Hope, who she painted against the backdrop of an elaborate interior. ‘You almost don’t notice the sitter at first — he is completely engrossed in reading and then there’s a dog at his feet, which gives an atmosphere of leisureliness, calmness. It’s like you’re entering into their private world.’ That said, ‘you don’t have to sit for 40 hours for a great portrait,’ reassures Stewart. Every picture is a law unto itself, but, as a rule of thumb, Douglas-Hamilton mentions three to four sittings, each lasting one to two hours, for a small oil head and shoulders. Philipps also tends to do two-hour sittings. She has done longer ones on occasion, but, crucially, a good portraitist can read the room: ‘If people are getting tired or fed up, you just stop the sitting.’ Watling suggests bored sitters ‘listen to something on earphones’.

Thorough preliminary research and a solid relationship with the painter of choice should go a long way towards ensuring patrons will like the resulting portrait. To assuage any residual fears, many artists, such as Douglas-Hamilton, will show people a sketch: ‘What I would do with a commission as big as the Victor Hope one, I would do a small, intimate oil sketch, then show it to the people who’ve commissioned me and say: “This is my idea for the big painting. What do you think?” I’ll never embark on a huge painting without them knowing roughly what my commission or my composition idea is.’

Many artists, even those as experienced as Philipps, are open to feedback from sitters, either directly or, more often, through an agent such as Stewart: ‘I don’t want to have something in the picture that bothers them,’ Philipps explains. ‘That would be awful. I’m not such a diva to think I get it right the whole time.’ If a sitter is being especially sensitive about a facial or body feature, she will endeavour to sort it out. ‘There are various mechanisms you can use to un-highlight something, if necessary. It doesn’t happen very often, but I wouldn’t want to stand there and tell people to get over it, because they wouldn’t. They’d put the painting in the attic and the whole thing would be pointless.’

This article first appeared in the October 14, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

‘Nothing can prepare you for the size of the Karakoram mountains and their glaciers,’ says art dealer and mountaineer William Mitchell. ‘From Concordia, K2 looks like it is just beyond the moraine in front of the camp — when in fact it takes eight hours to walk to its base. Everything is on a gigantic scale.’

In July 2025, he and artist James Hart Dyke, a veteran of painting Mont Blanc, Mount Everest and Patagonia, had set out to journey from Askole, in Pakistan’s Braldu Valley, to K2, the world’s second highest mountain, and back. The result of their extraordinary endeavour is an exhibition of Hart Dyke’s paintings, presented by Mitchell at Marquis House, London.

1. Artist and art dealer followed in the footsteps of Italian photographer Vittorio Sella, who had travelled to K2 in 1909 and taken large-format photographs that have since inspired generations of mountaineers. So rugged and difficult is the terrain that Hart Dyke had to prepare for more than a year for his expedition. Once there, he sketched almost every day of the three-week, 124-mile trek, creating an extraordinary visual record of one of the world’s most inaccessible mountains.
2. The two took on the 40-mile-long Baltoro Glacier. ‘They were long days and, in altitude terms, we were already much higher than the top of most ski resorts in Europe,’ says Mitchell. ‘The midday sun seared straight down on us. As a result, we covered much of the distance from well before dawn, using headtorches over our woollen hats, and then stopping in the early to mid afternoon’.
3. The weather was decidedly not their friend. ‘On our way to Concordia, we passed through a few miles of very steep gullies running between the glacier and the southern flanks of the peaks. Our lead guide, Gul, said we should be very thankful that it wasn’t raining, as this was the most treacherous part of the voyage, because of rockfall,’ recalls Mitchell. The group cheered at the news that they would return a different way, via the Hushe Valley — only for that pass to be snow-bound. ‘We had to come back through these gullies — and it was raining. For two very fraught hours, we had to run in single file through a “bowling alley” of small rocks and even boulders tumbling from both sides. It was extremely unpleasant.’
4. The Balti porters who accompanied Mitchell and Hart Dyke loved cricket. ‘On the way down from K2, we passed through a military checkpoint by a bridge and Ali, the cook, managed to fashion a cricket bat from a piece of abandoned decking. At our last camp before the end of the trek, using a hard, blue physiotherapy ball, we staged a “Pakistan versus the Rest of the World” match. The tourists lost, but it was played at 3,250 metres [10,663ft]’.
5. Hart Dyke’s paintings will be on show until November 22, after which they will travel to Italy, where they will be displayed at Forte di Bard, a fortress at the mouth of the Aosta valley that also hosts the Museum of the Alps, next to 20 photographs by Sella.

‘K2 Artistic Expeditions: James Hart Dyke’ is at Marquis House, London, from November 16–22.

This article first appeared in the October 28, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

On his deathbed, Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai had one regret: ‘If heaven had granted me five more years of life, I could have become a true painter.’ The story may be apocryphal, but it’s perfectly plausible — Hokusai’s entire life reads like a legend.

Born in October 1760 in Honjo, Edo, he was only three when he was adopted into a family that made mirrors for the shogun. After a spell as a block-cutter’s apprentice, he joined the studio of ukiyo-e painter and printmaker Katsukawa Shunshō — ukiyo-e being the ‘floating world’ of theatre and pleasure houses.

The not-quite-yet Hokusai — he went under a different name at the time — began making actor prints, but was expelled, or left, soon after his master’s death. He found a new niche illustrating kyōka, witty poetry books, and in 1798 passed his name on to a pupil, a customary practice at the time, becoming instead Hokusai Tokimasa. The name wouldn’t last: the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco recorded at least 20 different monikers for him — and 90 house moves.

The dawn of the 19th century brought Hokusai fame and fortune. He gave painting performances at temples and in front of the shogun, creating pictures of such a scale — his 1817 depiction of Buddhist patriarch Daruma covered more than 2,000 square feet — that would dwarf many of Western art’s monumental works. Five years earlier, in 1812, the freshly renamed Katsushika Hokusai had also published his own drawing manual, Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing.

Then, disaster struck. In the 1820s, soon after turning 60, he lost both a daughter and his second wife, contended with a grandson’s gambling debts and may have even had a stroke. His work suffered and, in 1830, affairs were so dire the artist lamented to his publishers that he had ‘no money, no clothes to wear, nothing to eat,’ as Matthi Forrer wrote in Simiolus in 2018.”

A lesser man would have probably given up — but not Hokusai. His daughter Ōi joined him and, together, they set out to revive his fortunes. The artist sailed through his seventies, producing some of his most celebrated work, including Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, soon to be the subject of an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

Japan’s highest peak and one of its three holy mountains (forbidden to women until 1872), Mount Fuji had long been a favourite artistic motif, with one of the earliest depictions, Hata no Chitei’s Shōtoku Taishi E-Den, dating from 1069. Hokusai portrayed it from different angles and seasons. In Red Fuji, the mountain, bathed in a fiery glow under a vivid blue sky speckled with fluffy clouds, towers above the trees, almost filling the entire picture, which is devoid of people. In Thunderstorm Beneath the Summit, the peak soars above rain and lightning.

Yet, many of the 36 views also show a slice of early-19th-century Japan, not least the celebrated Mitsui kimono shop, which owed part of its fortune to a groundbreaking policy: it accepted ‘cash only’, doing away with deferred payments, but promised ‘no padded prices’. Both signs appear in Hokusai’s picture, where triangular roofs echo the shape of Mount Fuji.

The revered mountain is also little more than a backdrop in the most famous of the 36 views, Under the Wave off Kanagawa, more familiarly known as The Great Wave. The swell hovers like a menacing talon above fragile oshiokuri-bune, the boats that supplied Edo, modern-day Tokyo, with fresh fish. Thought to be the most widely reproduced piece of non-Western art, The Great Wave was already hugely sought-after in Hokusai’s times, when about 8,000 impressions were made, according to the British Museum.

Perhaps the most intriguing of the 36 views, however, is much less known: Reflection in Lake at Misaka in Kai Province. In this scene, Hokusai shows the reflection of Mount Fuji in the water, its peak clothed in snow — but the mountain above the lake has not a single flake.

In the USA, the Metropolitan Museum in New York suggests this may represent two seasons, but Yale University Art Gallery interprets it as an invitation to question what is real and what isn’t.

Although the Fuji theme was traditional, the 36 views were anything but: this was Japan’s first landscape print series to appear in a large format and among the first to use Prussian blue, a fade-resistant pigment imported from the Netherlands and China. Nor were they 36 — with sales booming, the publisher added another 10, but kept the original title. The prints’ popularity was fuelled by their affordability: in the mid 19th century, one cost about as much as two helpings of noodles, according to the British Museum.

By 1836, Hokusai was secure enough to dictate conditions to his publisher: ‘He requests that Egawa Tomekichi, whom he regarded as the best blockcutter working in Edo at that time, be engaged to cut the blocks,’ noted Ellis Tinios in Print Quarterly in 2015. ‘He explains that Egawa had cut the blocks for Fugaku Hyakkei [One hundred views of Mount Fuji] and, after closely checking every page of that book, he declared that he could not find any fault in Egawa’s realisation of his intentions.’ Nor did he mince words when unhappy: he once complained to a blockcutter about the cutting of eyes and noses, adding sketches for good measure: ‘Recently, these eyes and noses have been very popular. But I really, really hate them!’”

A self-proclaimed ‘old man mad about painting’, Hokusai was an early proponent of lifelong learning. In the afterword to the One hundred views of Mount Fuji, written when he was about 74, he noted: ‘Since the age of six, I had a habit of sketching from life. From 50 onwards, I began producing a fair amount of art work, but nothing I did before the age of 70 was worthy of attention. At 73, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If only I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am 80, so that by 90 I will have penetrated their essential nature. At 100, I hope I may have a divine understanding of them, while at 110 I may have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive.’

He didn’t quite live to 110, but after his death he continued to make waves, as it were — this time into the wider world, as Japanese prints became popular in Europe from the late 19th century. Comparing him to Eugène Delacroix, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo: ‘Hokusai makes you cry out the same thing — but in his case with his lines, his drawing, since in your letter you say to yourself: these waves are claws, the boat is caught in them, you can feel it.’

Claude Debussy hung a print of The Great Wave in his Paris studio and chose a detail of the design as the 1905 cover of the score of his orchestral triptych La Mer. Another devotee was Frank Lloyd Wright, who bought many prints, including Nihonbashi in Edo —with its crowded bridge in the foreground — and Snowy Morning at Koishikawa, where the cold is palpable as a white blanket envelops trees, roofs, fields and the slopes of an exceedingly tall Mount Fuji, to which a woman points from a window.

Indeed, it was the West and most notably a France gripped by Japonisme, that made Hokusai’s reputation as Japan’s greatest artist, according to cultural-exchange scholar Shigemi Inaga: as he noted in Japan Review in 2003, 19th-century French art critics such as Philippe Burty compared the ukiyo-e artist to Francisco Goya or Peter Paul Rubens— w hereas the Histoire de l’Art du Japon, published by the Imperial Japanese Commission for the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, only devoted to Hokusai 12 lines and a single plate.

Praise from abroad has long since filtered back home and The Great Wave is now in the pockets of most Japanese every day — it is printed on the back of 1,000-yen banknotes. The old man mad about painting would probably be delighted.

'Hokusai: Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji’ is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery from October 20–January 17, 2027.

This feature originally appeared in the October 14, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'

'Last night I did nothing but dream of you,’ wrote a passionate Horatio Nelson to Emma Hamilton in January 1800. Their love story unfolds through a treasure trove of letters gathered over 40 years by Clive Richards (1937–2021) — the largest collection of papers relating to the admiral created single-handedly ever since the days of Victorian bigwig Alfred Morrison.

Among the manuscripts are two poignant letters by Hamilton to Nelson, the only two remaining in private hands. She wrote them shortly before the Battle of Trafalgar — and they only reached the fleet after his death. Other correspondence traces the increasingly difficult relationship between Hamilton and Nelson’s family, as his brother William gained control of the Admiral’s inheritance. Riddled with debts, after a spell in prison, Hamilton moved in July 1814 to France, where she died a mere six months later.

Also in the collection are battle papers that offer eyewitness accounts of the greatest naval engagements of the time, from Cape St Vincent to the Nile, Nelson’s own reports and his plans for Trafalgar.

The Nelson papers are on show at Sotheby’s from October 21, the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, to October 28. The collection, which has an estimate of £4million–£6 million, will be offered in a single-lot sealed auction, with bidding closing on November 18. Proceeds will benefit the Clive Richards Foundation, which supports education, healthcare, heritage and the Arts.

This article first appeared in the October 21, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Ronnie Wood needs a coffee. He has just arrived at the Handel Hendrix Museum in Brook St, London, to introduce his latest paintings of Jimi Hendrix and his forthcoming conversation with music journalist Paul Sexton calls for a spot of caffeination.

Steaming cup in hand, hair as wonderfully jagged and bouffant as ever, he is ready for a riveting trip down memory lane. Because, as it turns out, the Rolling Stones lead guitarist not only knew Hendrix well, played music with him and painted him repeatedly — but even shared a flat with him and his dog.

Wood says he first met Hendrix at London club The Speakeasy in 1966. Word about the American had spread quickly, with Eric Clapton telling Wood he ought to see this new talent in town. What he heard blew the Rolling Stone guitarist’s mind: ‘It was like somebody swivelled the Earth a little bit more on its axis.’

He recalls that the American didn’t like his own singing voice: ‘And I said, you don't have to worry about your singing voice, Jimmy, when you play guitar like [that].’ Hendrix did play the guitar with his teeth, but that’s not what Wood is referring to: ‘Everyone takes a leaf out of his book, including me. I have little flourishes where I think, “Oh, that's like a Jimi riff”... But when it comes to interpreting the blues and rock and roll, like Jimi did, no one did it like him.’

He and Hendrix kept bumping into one another and even played together when Wood, who was then touring the USA with the Jeff Beck group, had temporarily switched to the bass: ‘There used to be a gathering place for everyone after the gigs and the Jeff Beck group were no exception. We got up and played a bit, me and Rod and Jeff, and then Jimi would turn up …and he'd say, “Hey, Jeff, let the bass player play, man, let him have a solo.” Every time Jimmy got up with us, he'd let me have a solo.”

It’s after Hendrix had begun making waves in London that the two shared a flat in Holland Park belonging to singer P. P. (Pat) Arnold. Not that it was a regular flatmate experience: ‘Food was never an option. We had a few peas to shove around the plate. I think that's about it. Everybody in rock and roll just shoved a few peas around the plate.’

Instead, they would play guitar, with the otherwise quiet Hendrix doing so both right- and left-handed: ‘Bobby Womack did that, too, but Jimmy was so fluent with it, without being deliberately showy. The guitar was like having a beautiful dog to him, you know, he did tricks, playing with his teeth or playing over the neck, upside down. Then he ran out of ideas and eventually set his guitar on fire. Follow that.’

However, there was also a real dog in the picture, which, as it happens, was not house-trained. As a result, says Wood, the flat sharing only lasted a few nights ‘because his dog would poop all over the house and Arnold threw us out’. Heading out on tour, Hendrix gave the pooch to Wood: ‘Loopy was the name. It was a Basset Hound, ears dragging on the floor. Lovely dog. I kept [her]. She was a girl.’

Hendrix fascinated his one-time flatmate — who had trained at Ealing Art College and has long pursued an artistic as well as a musical career — as much for his face as for his skill — ‘a bit like Mick, he's pretty hard to capture and so it's always a challenge.’ Which is why Wood has continued to paint Hendrix over the years. His two most recent portraits take pride of place, together with prints of earlier works, in one of the exhibition rooms at the Handel Hendrix Museum, the same house in which the legendary American musician lived for three months on the top floor.

In Wood’s pictures, a forever young Hendrix — he died on September 18, 1970, when he was only 27 — looks intense as he plays the guitar, but also relaxed, almost innocent, in a seated portrait, hat tilted on his head. Colours are always bright and that’s deliberate: ‘There's a picture of him somewhere…where he's wearing bright clothes. That's the Jimmy I knew,’ says Wood.

‘He always was wonderful — spread of colour everywhere, jewellery. He wasn't showing off, it was just a natural thing…He just loved to swing a saree on the bed and tie a handkerchief around his kneecap, wearing silly hats and stuff — because he could wear hats. I can't wear hats.’

The night Hendrix died is etched in Wood’s mind: ‘I was at Ronnie Scott's …and he was walking away with his arm around a girl, and I said, “Hey, Jimmy, say goodbye,” and he kept walking. I said, “Jimmy, say goodbye.” So he turned around and he went, “Bye.” And that was goodbye…My goodbye.’

‘Ronnie Wood: The Jimi Hendrix Portraits’ is at the Handel Hendrix House, 23 Brook Street, London, until April 11, 2027

Nomadic societies seldom have much to offer the world of interior design. Decluttering and travelling light are the essentials of life on the move. For the Ottoman Turks, however, the last stop was Istanbul. The imperial family liked the city so much, they stayed in one palace, Topkapi, for almost 400 years. They moved out in 1853, exactly four centuries after conquering the city. There must be something about the neighbourhood to encourage such high levels of resident satisfaction; the Byzantine rulers had lived in their palace for even longer.

The Ottomans’ first action after taking Constantinople was to repurpose. Hagia Sophia Cathedral became Aya Sofya Mosque. It went from being the largest Christian building in the world to one of the largest Muslim structures. The Church of St Irene — the second biggest — was turned into an Ottoman arsenal and never became a mosque. Many of the weapons were Western European, collected with the same excitement that their Christian opponents collected Ottoman arms and armour.

England’s Elizabeth I was, of course, on the other side. She was known to Sultan Murad III as Sultana Isabel and Ottoman furnishings had entered the British Isles before the Virgin Sultana struck any trade deals with her Continental Catholic enemies’ enemy. Her father had been a great admirer of ‘Turkey rugs’ and, indeed, some of Henry VIII’s most commanding images feature his well-appointed frame anchored to carpets from Ottoman Anatolia. He had hundreds of these floor coverings to choose from. Holbein the painter knew them well. For his less-regal sitters, the Oushak weavings were likely to have an honoured place on a table rather than underfoot.

These were among the first Ottoman products to enliven the interiors of Tudor homes in England. Using ‘Turkey’ rather than ‘Ottoman’ to describe the rugs was in some ways ahead of the times. In 2022, according to the UN, the nation known as Turkey since 1923 became Türkiye, just before the republic’s 100th anniversary, although it must be said that a century of Turkey/Türkiye has not furnished Britain with even a quarter of the previous four centuries of Ottoman interior-design concepts and products. Compounding this is the confusion between the Ottoman Turks, who built an empire in the eastern Mediterranean, and all their Turkic cousins who came out of Central Asia to create shorter-lived kingdoms.

Then there were the Turks whom English Crusaders identified (wrongly, on the whole) as being their foes in the Holy Land. Turk’s Head pubs used to abound in Merry England from the 13th century onwards. Occasionally, the name came closer to home. Folklore says the tavern by that name, which still exists in Penzance, Cornwall, was once thought to refer to an incursion by seasoned traveller Turks from Jerusalem — in fact, it appears that such raids may actually have happened. More certain is a raid by Spaniards in the 16th century. These intruders caused mayhem and even held a prohibited Catholic Mass before heading home.

The Muslim raiders, by contrast, appear never to have got down to Friday prayers in Penzance, if they ever reached there at all. They were an unspecified sort of Turk, possibly Seljuks, who took on the hapless People’s Crusade of 1095 in Anatolia, long before the arrival of the Ottomans, whose engagement with Crusaders was in eastern Europe rather than the Middle East.

A different type of ‘Turk’s head’ — a knot — also entered the English decor lexicon as long ago as the 13th century, in which case it wasn’t inspired by the Ottomans; or it might have been later, when English knot enthusiasts would have seen the full splendour of Ottoman headgear. Among Muslim societies that wore turbans, there were few as flamboyant as the conquerors of Constantinople. Suleiman the Magnificent is topped off with the most towering example of all. In a well-known painting by Titian, it is at least twice the size of the sultan’s head. Every elite Ottoman house would have had turban stands fixed to the walls to display these essentials, some of which were later incorporated into British interiors, without the original purpose in mind.

Shakespeare was, as usual, a pioneer in describing the people of the time rather than the products. Although it is not always clear which type of Turk he was referring to, one near-certain Ottoman appears in Henry IV: ‘This is the English Court, not the Turkish; Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds.’ The Amurath mentioned by the Bard is most probably Sultan Murad III, who killed five brothers en route to the top position.

Shakespeare’s references are less flattering than some of his contemporaries, whose sympathies were more with the warrior Muslim Ottomans than the conniving Byzantine Christians they overthrew. The Ottomans’ real contribution came later, when Britain began to have more contact with them. Until then, it was objects from the Ottoman court that came to dominate the imagination. Together with carpets, there was Iznik pottery. More colourful than the floor coverings, these ceramics achieved a brilliance that eclipsed even Chinese wares. Soon, the English traveller was making his way east to find out more.

It was never easy to meet the Turk in his — and especially her — domestic environment. The word ‘harem’ comes from the Arabic language, but was adopted into English through the Ottomans and remains a jokey byword for everything that a real harem was not. The practice never took off on these shores: English homes didn’t need any more ‘trouble and strife’; instead, additional ladies could be deposited in selected locations, so long as they were not in the same house. One of the few contenders for the title of a British Bey or Pasha would be the 7th Marquess of Bath with his 70-plus ‘wifelets’ installed around the harem of Longleat.

As if one word describing secluded accommodation for women were not enough, there is also the term ‘seraglio’. As much as this alternative name for Topkapi Palace appealed to Mozart, details of what was inside remained a mystery. The best-informed English observer was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. This 18th-century daughter of a duke didn’t gain access to the Imperial Harem, but was welcomed into others. One comment that would have puzzled her audience in England related to how the exterior of a Turkish building was of less importance than its interior.

The harem itself turned out to be less thrilling than the hammam. Lady Mary’s account of glistening bodies at the bagnio made a huge impression on readers in 1763: ‘...all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed. Yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest gesture amongst them. There were many amongst them, as exactly proportioned as ever any goddess was drawn by the pencil of a Guido or Titian…’ All they were missing was smallpox scars. As a victim herself, Lady Mary managed to take the Ottoman process of inoculation back with her to Britain, laying the groundwork for Edward Jenner.

The Ottoman-style hammam went on to be the most fashionable leap forward in Western hygiene since soap was brought home from the Middle East during the Crusades. The earliest British bath, the Royal Bagnio, had been built in 1679, probably by Sir Christopher Wren. During the 18th century, the Turkish bath’s influence was so ubiquitous that some English travellers to the Ottoman Empire believed the Turks had taken the concept from Britain. By the 19th century, the biggest and best was opened in Jermyn Street, London, by the London & Provincial Turkish Bath Company. Private homes had them, too, together with that less-wholesome Ottoman import: the smoking room. One of the few that remains, at least partly, is at the Wallace Collection. Built in 1872, it goes full Turkish with floor-to-ceiling Iznik tiles — or the Minton imitation of them.

Furnishings and their names were also indebted to the Ottomans. Not least among these was the so-called ‘ottoman’. The ‘sofa’ and the ‘divan’ were other names that came via Turkey. For England’s country houses, there were also ‘kiosks’ or, more often, tents (yurts). Less well known and taking a more circuitous route is ‘shagreen’. Originally meaning the back of a horse, saghri later became the stingray veneer that was so much a part of Art Deco interiors. It’s one more reminder of the Ottoman Turks’ distant nomadic past, before they found their forever home on the banks of the Bosphorus

From November 7 until May 9, 20207, the V&A Museum will hold the ‘Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires’ exhibition, which will examine two mega-cultures in the ultimate metropolis.

It was with mixed feelings that Athena heard the recent announcement by the Culture Secretary that national museums would ‘remain free for everyone’. The statement came in response to Baroness Hodges’s scathing review of the Arts Council last year, in which she suggested that consideration be given to charging international visitors for access to these institutions.

Her suggestion, it is important to underline, was predicated on the introduction of identity cards, which would have offered a straight-forward means of distinguishing between visitors and residents. The subsequent U-turn on identity cards effectively undermined the whole proposal and arguably made this response a foregone conclusion. That shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the fact that maintaining free access to national museums is not without its complications.

To be clear, in an ideal world, Athena would be delighted for these great institutions —indeed, national cultural institutions of all kinds — to be free for everyone. The problem is that we don’t live in that world. Instead, we have an extremely limited pot of Government money earmarked for culture that provides a small group of heavily visited museums, most of which are in London, with a disproportionate level of financial support. The cash that goes to them, meanwhile, is actually depriving other bodies of funding.

Take the example of English Heritage, which manages a national portfolio of historic monuments on behalf of the Secretary of State. In recent years, to save the Government money, it has been converted from a quango into a self-funding charity. The insistent fiction remains that the charity can be financially self-sufficient, yet, according to the annual report of 2024/25, in only three years its finances have departed from those set out in its optimistic strategic plan to the tune of £19.5 million. This is not a sustainable arrangement.

There are, meanwhile, ironies to the situation of the national museums themselves. The Government support they receive does constitute an essential core of funding. That said, it is already totally inadequate to their needs and has been steadily diminishing as a proportion of their revenue for years. Not only, therefore, do they need to raise ever larger sums from commercial activities, but they are completely dependent on private philanthropic gifts. Those are positive things, but, in the circumstances, can the state claim credit for keeping national museums free?

The Government is now a major financial contributor, rather than sole underwriter of these institutions. Added to which, at up to £33 per adult ticket for the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition, it’s not as if the museum’s work is completely free anyway. The slogan of free access for all to national museums has beguiled governments of all political stripes over the past quarter century. Its real costs, however, are not being properly counted. At the very least, in Athena’s view, international visitors should be paying their way. Or perhaps, at a deliberately modest level, so should we all.

This feature originally appeared in the October 14, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Which city, would you say, is the artistic capital of the world? It’s a billion-dollar question that can be taken either one of two ways. The first: which is the world’s most creatively fertile city? The one home to the highest number of artists and the busiest scene? The second: which city commands the highest art sales? The two yield different answers. The first is probably Mexico City; the second is obviously New York.

London, by contrast, occupies more of a middle ground. The capital’s status as a cradle for artists and art dealers, respectively, has ebbed and flowed; both aspects are currently in flux. Emerging artists are returning to the city’s blue-chip galleries in greater numbers than they have in a while. The art market, disrupted by Brexit, has shifted to Paris and Milan.

Perhaps this is no bad thing. A city is unable to be a bastion of the art market and a well of countercultural activity to the same extent or at the same time. A glance at New York’s creative alumni since the city switched allegiance from artists to bankers in the 1990s reveals a dearth of names on par with those of the Downtown scene, such as Koons, Basquiat or Keith Haring. Basquiat could not have become Basquiat had he been unable to afford even a squalid flat in Lower Manhattan.

Contemporary artists have long been outpaced — and outpriced — by the same gentrifying forces that allow their predecessors to monopolise sales. Yet what goes up must come down. In London, the pendulum is swinging back. Although fewer buyers may be worrisome to dealers, our most prestigious gallerists are using such a moment to pivot towards new artistic subsets.

Pilar Corrias, a blue-chip gallery on Mayfair’s Conduit Street, has started showcasing young talent such as Sholto Blissett. At Halcyon Gallery on New Bond Street, works by Warhol (worth millions) sit alongside those by Wang Tingxin, whose pieces often sell for more modest five-digit figures. Over ten years, the Mayor of London has created what City Hall refers to as ‘ten football pitches’ of affordable studio space, allowing artists to rent these for far below market rates.

It is amid such circumstances that patrons begin to think beyond the household name — and to move the market forward even as they avoid buying a Magritte.

Such dips in the market are necessary for it not to remain static. As Frieze Art Fair returns to The Regent’s Park this month, opportunistic buyers are muscling in to play among the big leagues.

Frieze London and Frieze Masters run from October 14-18.

Dear like-minded travellers, are you thinking of heading south — of packing up your notebooks and chasing the same coruscating light that has always drawn dreamers to the Côte d’Azur?

Here, it is easy to imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald balanced on the rocks in Antibes, Jean Cocteau drafting angels in Menton or James Baldwin writing late at night at home in Saint Paul-de-Vence. Why don’t you follow them there?

For more than a century, the French Riviera has been more of a story than a coastline — written and rewritten by exiles, novelists and poets who came in search of silence, spectacle or to find themselves reflected in its mirrored sea.

It was not all down to the light. We should not deceive ourselves: luxury, peace and pleasure are tempting indulgences. Perhaps the greatest appeal of the Côte d’Azur for this new generation of modern artists was the sheer hedonism suggested by those blue skies and the warm sunshine.

As the 20th century dawned, the Riviera became a refuge for some of the world’s most famous painters. Renoir built himself a villa in Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1907 and was still painting fleshy nudes until his death in 1919. Matisse moved permanently to Nice in the early 1920s, when his favourite subject was painting semi-naked odalisques bathed in sunshine. This was also the era when socialites and writers such as Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Somerset Maugham were drawn to the Côte d’Azur.

After the Second World War, the reputation of the Rivera for hedonism and creativity was secure. The most famous artist in the world, Picasso, moved to the Golfe-Juan in 1946 and Marc Chagall was also a convert. He spent the last four decades of his life in the area, moving first to Vence in 1949 and then to the hilltop village of St-Paul-de-Vence. His subjects were more whimsical, but suffused nevertheless with the light and colour of the south.

The Riviera they knew, however, is not quite the one you will find. The bohemian hotels they once frequented have become five-star palaces and their beaches privatised; the cafés curated for Instagram. Today, you’ll find inspiration in the Riviera’s quieter corners: in small hotels scented with orange blossom, in the back rooms of restaurants where menus are scribbled in chalk and in garden cafés where a glass of rosé is poured without performance.

This is a slow journey along the coast towards places that still reward time and attention.

Who? F. Scott Fitzgerald and Pablo Picasso

Where? Antibes

Begin in Antibes, as Fitzgerald did before you. The American author arrived with his wife, Zelda, in 1925, in search of respite from the excesses of New York. They rented Villa Saint-Louis in Juan-les-Pins, rechristening it Villa America, where Fitzgerald began work on his semi-autobiographical novel Tender is the Night.

The light remains extraordinary. Stand on Cap d’Antibes as dusk falls and you will see what he saw: the sea wrapped around you like swathes of blue silk; the sky bruised pink and cream.

The difference is, of course, that Fitzgerald stayed on the Riviera when it was surprisingly inexpensive and known more as a winter refuge than a summer playground. Today, his villa masquerades as a hotel, the Belle Rives, where even the sun loungers come at a steep price.

Instead, head further round the cap to La Villa Fabulite, a 12-room hideaway shaded by fragrant pine and lemon trees. After a vermouth cassis cocktail, traverse the coastline on foot to the Musée Picasso. Look at them long enough and you’ll start to see the artist’s Cubist faces in the rock formations on Plage de la Garoupe.

Pablo Picasso first came to the Côte d’Azur in the 1920s, but it was his return here 1946 that was to prove a turning point in his life. After enduring the Occupation in Paris, he had emerged from the war with renewed energy and a new lover, the young artist Françoise Gilot. That June, the two of them headed south to the Golfe-Juan and then, in September, he was offered an empty room on the second floor of a medieval château in Antibes.

For two months, he worked feverishly. With artists’ materials still scarce after the war, he improvised with boat paint, asbestos-cement panels and decorators’ brushes.

A succession of exuberant still lifes, nudes and humorous sailors poured from his brush. The masterpiece was La Joie de Vivre, a monumental celebration of peace, sunlight and sensuality, with Gilot dancing naked at its centre.

The couple then moved to nearby Vallauris and Picasso began to experiment with ceramics, producing thousands of pieces over the next decade, as well as the great murals War and Peace.

However, he was not an easy man to live with. In 1953, the relationship with Gilot failed and she was replaced in his affections by Jacqueline Roque — a 27-year-old girl who worked in the local pottery shop. They moved to Cannes, then, in 1958, the château at Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, which had a view of his hero, Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire.

After they married in 1961, Picasso spent the rest of his life with Jacqueline and he lies buried in Vauvenargues. Yet, it was the decade in the Golfe-Juan when he was perhaps at his happiest and you can still see the work he made during those golden years in the museums in Antibes and Vallauris.

Who? Alexandre Dumas and the Impressionists

Where? Nice

In 1841, Alexandre Dumas wrote: ‘A beautiful courtesan, softly lying on the edge of her azure mirror, in the shade of her orange trees in bloom, with her long hair abandoned to the sea breezes, and whose waves would come to wet her bare feet, for Nice is the city of sweet laziness and easy pleasures’ — and plus ça change.

If Antibes is the cocktail party, then Nice is the café the morning after: a little battered, but all the more alive because of it. Here, the Belle Époque façades are peeling, charmingly, the Cours Saleya market is a riot of flowers and the smell of socca drifts from wood-fired stoves in Old Town alleys.

In March 1882, Eugène Manet boarded a train from Nice to Paris with a stash of freshly made oil paintings in his baggage. They included a view of the fishing boats in the port at Nice and one especially charming and spontaneous depiction of his daughter Julie playing on the beach. The work of his wife, Berthe Morisot, both pictures were destined for the seventh Impressionist exhibition, which opened the following month on the rue St Honoré.

Morisot, the most prominent female artist of the group, had spent the winter in the Hôtel Richemont with Eugène and Julie. The mild winter climate of the Côte d’Azur had been a boon for an artist who was deeply committed to the new movement, which championed a more spontaneous approach to painting. As did her fellow Impressionists, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro, she strove to capture the fleeting effects of light and the atmosphere by working en plein air and immersing herself in her subjects.

Such an approach was fine during the summer in the coastal resorts of Normandy, where Impressionism was born during the 1870s, but it was not so alluring when winter came and the weather turned cold and grey. By heading south, Morisot was part of a new geographical trend — the moment when the light of the south began to filter into French painting. Over the next century, the landscapes of Provence and the sunny skies of the Riviera were to become one of the most important themes in modern art.

Nowadays, writers and artists seek out the Hôtel du Couvent, where a resident herbalist blends together teas and tinctures using herbs growing in the cloister garden, to help sharpen thoughts.

Stop by Les Grandes Caves Caprioglio — a family-run institution since 1910 — for a thoughtfully priced selection of local Bellet and Provence wines. Or Pizza Pili, where the montagnarde — crème fraîche, lardons, potatoes, reblochon — can be carried, hot, to the beach and eaten on the stones as the Mediterranean folds itself against the shore.

Who? W. Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau and Princess Grace of Monaco

Where? Cap d’Ail

There are few train journeys lovelier than the one that connects Nice and Cap d’Ail. The train pauses at Villefranche-sur-Mer—a station set directly above the water—where Cap Ferrat juts into view.

W. Somerset Maugham settled on this peninsula for much of his life, although he also described the south of France as ‘a sunny place for shady people’. His choice of guests — Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf — suggest otherwise.

Cap d’Ail is a pocket of calm at complete odds to Monaco. It was here that Greta Garbo retreated from Hollywood, where Sir Winston Churchill painted and where Gabrielle Réval lived and wrote about the town’s intimate relationship with the sea. She is buried here, overlooking the sea she so often returned to in her work.

From the train station, a staircase winds its way down, through palms and pines, to Plage Mala, a crescent of sand and stone. It feels like a secret. In this cove, it's not about being seen.

Villa les Camélias: Musée à Cap d'Ail is the only Belle Époque villa in Cap d’Ail open to the public and exhibits objects and countless photographs dating from the late 19th century to the 1950s, capturing the daily life of Cap d’Ail’s visitors and residents (Sacha Guitry, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Princess Grace of Monaco).

The Nietzsche Path, a steep mountain trail that starts here and ends in Èze, takes about 1½ hours to climb. The philosopher from which it takes its name was inspired to complete Thus Spoke Zarathustra when braving it. (‘All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,’ he once wrote.)

Èze, a medieval village, clings to the mountain like a mirage and is sometimes referred to as ‘the eagle’s nest’. Stay at Les Terrasses d’Èze, a hotel and spa in which you can partake in a form of float therapy. Lying in near silence, weightless, in saltwater, your imagination slowly starts to drift.

Who? James Baldwin, D.H. Lawrence, Henri Matisse, Auguste Renoir, Nicolas Poussins and Marc Chagall

Where? Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Vence

James Baldwin lived in Saint-Paul-de-Vence for 17 years and his house, Chez Baldwin, was a meeting space for intellectuals, artists and exiles. The Provencal landscape, he said, ‘demanded contemplation’. La Colombe d’Or, a historic restaurant with rooms, is Saint Paul’s calling card — its walls hung with Picassos and Braques, left behind in lieu of payment. Alternatively, there is Orion Treehouses, which sits in the middle of a cedarwood forest just around the corner from the Fondation Maeght.

The market town of Vence, Saint Paul’s larger and more authentic sibling, was the first resting place of D.H. Lawrence — before his wife, Frieda, had his remains exhumed and moved, five years after his death.

It was here that Henri Matisse found a second wind: Chapelle du Rosaire was, in his own words, ‘the culmination of a whole life of work and the flowering of a tremendous, sincere, and difficult effort’. Bathed in cobalt blue, lemon yellow and emerald green, the chapel is one of the most spiritual spaces on the Riviera. Pared back and radiant, it is a reminder that simplicity boasts its own kind of grandeur.

If Nietzsche hasn’t made you feel Human, All Too Human, climb to the peak of Baou de Saint-Jeannet, an enormous cliff whose viewpoint attracted Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Nicolas Poussins and Marc Chagall. It’s a lesson in perspective: climb higher, see further.

(St Tropez: Best left to the superyachts and paparazzi. A writer will find little here but distraction.)

Who? Blaise Cendrars, Patti Smith and Anthony Bourdain

Where? Marseille

Marseille, France's second-most populous city (above), is all too often dismissed as being rough around the edges, but it’s never felt more vibrant. Novelist Blaise Cendrars described it as ‘a mess after my own heart’; Patti Smith performed at the Gare de Marseille-Saint-Charles; Anthony Bourdain wanted to retire here. ‘Wherever you are from, you feel at home in Marseille,’ observed Jean-Claude Izzo, the author of the Fabio Montale hard-boiled detective novels. He was right.

The city is raw, restless and constantly being refashioned. There is, right now, a new wave of chefs determined to do more than bouillabaisse and looking to its migrant population, past and present, for inspiration.

At La Friche la Belle de Mai — a multifaceted public space that’s part restaurant, part Arts centre, part market, part skatepark — enjoy a glass of pastis with panisses (chickpea fritters), then slip into Atelier Renata, an exclusive supper club venue without a menu, where dinner is whatever the chef picked up that day. In the morning, browse the sap green Librairie Mazette for something to read before moving east along the coast.

Who? Frédéric Mistral and the Fauvist painters

Where? Cassis

‘He who has seen Paris and not Cassis, has seen nothing’ wrote the poet Frédéric Mistral. The colourful fishing port, with its limestone cliffs, terracotta houses and sheltered, fjord-like inlets known as calanques, once drew in the Fauvist painters — André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck — who captured its magic on canvas, in bold and vivid tones. Linger here.

At Le Petit Oyster Bar, work your way through oysters, razor clams, shrimps, and moules gratinées, washed down with bone-dry Cassis AOC whites. And then onto the Calanques, where the water is so clear that boats look like they’re suspended in mid air. The Calanque d'En-Vau, a narrow limestone cove backed by sheer cliffs, can be reached by boat or a steep, two hour-long trail that’s worth every uphill step.

For writers and artists, this fabled coastline has long offered lessons in how life is best lived. Good writing, like sculpture, removes excess to reveal essence. Inspiration is found not in the opulence of hotel lobbies, but in winding, cliffside paths with the promise of a view at the top. Carry a notebook, and let the landscape do the rest.

Nick Trend’s new book, ‘France: In the Footsteps of the Great Artists’, is out now (Thames & Hudson, £50).

‘Painting the French Riviera’ is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, until January 31, 2027.

Cool Britannia ruled the airwaves (and the column inches) in the 1990s.

As the last decade of the 20th century dawned, the country, poised between a gritty past and the promise and fears of the new millennium, emerged triumphant to lead the world in art, design, fashion, music and pop culture, as a forthcoming Tate Britain exhibition, ‘The 90s; Art and Fashion’ reveals.

The creative energy that coursed through Britain in those years had many facets and faces. Here are some of my favourite moments that I believe best demonstrate this, from the show and beyond:

1. The supermodels When British Vogue asked Peter Lindbergh to photograph the woman of the 1990s, he couldn’t settle on one and chose five: models Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz and Christy Turlington. That January 1990 cover sanctioned their global fame, crystallising the era of the supermodel. Then, three years later, a waifish British girl appeared on a Calvin Klein advertisement and defined a new beauty ideal, in contrast to the polished glamour of the previous decade. With her undone, ‘heroin chic’ look, Kate Moss became, perhaps more than any other, the face of the 1990s
2. Sir Steve McQueen In his 1993 silent film, Bear, a faceoff between two men that has both erotic and aggressive undertones, the video artist and film director put the spotlight on the left behind, those that were seemingly not part of the Cool Britannia wave, but who in that decade eventually found some visibility through the work of Sir Steve and others such as Chris Ofili and Keith Piper

3. Lee Alexander McQueen: Nothing sent a clearer signal about Britain’s creative eminence than the country’s most rebellious, provocative, avant-garde designer taking the helm at a historic French couture house, Givenchy, in 1996

4. The YBAs When the Royal Academy staged an exhibition of more than 100 pieces from Charles Saatchi’s contemporary-art collection in 1997, it caused a stir. There was blood, graphic nudity, even a portrait of murderer Myra Hindley — and picket lines of vocal protesters outside Burlington House. Yet, the Young British Artists featured in that show, whether Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin or Jenny Saville, would go on to dominate the international art scene

5. Geri Halliwell In the decade of club culture and Britpop, the Spice Girl singer encapsulated the spirit of the times when she turned up at the 1997 Brit Award in a Union Flag mini dress. A year later, the frock — a homemade affair, as Halliwell and her sister had stitched a Union Flag teatowel on a black Gucci garment — would become the most expensive pop-star outfit sold at auction, although the record has since been topped

‘The 90s; Art and Fashion’ is at Tate Britain, London, from October 8–February 14, 2027.

On the fifth day of the eighth lunar month of AD527, Buddhist monk Ichadon faced the execution he had himself engineered. The man he advised, Beopheung, ruler of Silla, one of the three kingdoms of Korea, had been grappling with a thorny problem: he was determined to make Buddhism the state religion, but his council of nobles opposed him.

Ichadon came up with an extraordinary solution: the king would make the proclamation, then deny all knowledge of it. The monk would then admit to having forged the document and pay for this with his life — but his sacrifice, he believed, would persuade the court to embrace Buddhism.

As the executioner lifted his great sword, Ichadon is reputed to have said: ‘If Buddha is worth believing in, let there be a wonder after my death.’ There was: as his head was severed, the sun vanished, thunder and lightning ripped through the sky, monkeys shrieked and milk, not blood, spurted from Ichadon’s neck. The miracle may be only a legend, but the monk’s martyrdom did persuade the court of the power of Buddhism, sowing the seeds of a cultural blossoming that would last for centuries.

Religion is one of the forces that has historically shaped Korean art, as revealed by a forthcoming exhibition at the British Museum, which traces the past 2,000 years of the country’s history, art and material culture through the 23,000-piece collection bequeathed to the nation in 2021 by the late Samsung chairman Lee Kun-Hee.

Another catalyst, says lead curator Sang-ah Kim, is the relationship with the outside world, particularly China and Japan, and how the country’s skilled craftsmen filtered these influences through the prism of their own creativity. ‘Korea was the second culture in the world after China to master high-fire stoneware,’ Dr Kim explains. ‘They learned how to build a kiln and then how to keep the temperature high, but the stoneware they made was totally different [from China’s].

'In the Three Kingdoms period, they made tall, pedestal-looking burial objects. Why are they tall? Because they are for offering; they also put in lots of figurines, animals — companions for the afterlife.’

The same approach to borrowing and reinterpreting ideas continued during Unified Silla (676–935) — a period in which the kingdom once ruled by Beopheung expanded to control the entire peninsula and its capital, Gyeongju, became so dense with tiled roofs that people could walk down the street in the rain without getting wet — and the subsequent Goryeo era (918–1392), from which the name Korea derives.

Buddhism flourished, not least because Gen Wang Geon, Goryeo’s founder, credited divine assistance for his ascension, and so did religious art. The crown, the court and regional clans all built temples and commissioned paintings, sculptures and, most notably, stoneware. In the 10th century, Korea learned from China how to make celadon pottery. However, Goryeo craftsmen developed their own, distinctive ‘kingfisher’ hue and later adapted inlay techniques to ceramics.

‘On the unfired surface, they carved with sharp tools a decoration, then filled that with white and black slip and fired with glaze. There are lots of designs, such as cranes, clouds or chrysanthemums: they are not painted; they are carved.’

Soon afterwards, in 1011, King Hyeonjong, fleeing an approaching army, vowed to have the entire Buddhist canon carved into wood if his enemy was repelled. They were and the first Tripitaka, a woodblock printed edition of the three-part Buddhist scripture, came into being. This was burnt during the Mongol invasion of 1232 — incidentally, Kublai Khan, the first Mongol emperor of China, would later say that Goryeo, albeit small, had artisans and entertainers that surpassed the Han Chinese — but was then replaced between 1236 and 1251. The 80,000 or so woodblocks of the ‘new’ Tripitaka Koreana are still preserved today at the Haeinsa Temple in Hapcheon.

At about the same time, the country also invented a metal moveable type: ‘The Goryeo dynasty’s printing technology was really advanced, partly because they were Buddhists and in Buddhist countries sutra, the sacred text, is really important, it’s how you promote knowledge,’ explains Dr Kim. ‘They already had really high skills in woodblock printing, then, to make it more efficient, they used metal moveable type.’ It beat Gutenberg’s press by about two centuries and, although most of those early prints are lost, the 1377 Jikji, a collection of excerpts from Buddhist scripture, survives to this day.

Then came the moment that set the country on a new course: the Wihwado Retreat, which Dr Kim likens to the Battle of Hastings. In 1388, general Yi Sŏnggye had been dispatched to invade China’s Liaodong Peninsula. However, at Wihwa Island, he decided to turn back and topple the faltering Goryeo monarchy instead. After a few puppet kings, he himself ascended the throne in 1392 and founded a new dynasty, Joseon, which would remain in power for the next 500 years.

It wasn’t only the rulers that changed. The advent of Joseon ushered in a new religion: neo-Confucianism, a revival of the doctrines of Confucius that had taken root in China under the Song dynasty (960–1279). ‘Their aesthetic was quite different,’ notes Dr Kim. ‘They pursued austerity, simplicity and liked natural things, so they used completely different types of ceramics and painting also assumed a different role.’

Western views of Joseon were long shaped by American writer William Elliot Griffis’s description of it as a ‘hermit kingdom’. Instead, counters Dr Kim, this was a transforming country, at once engaged in cultural exchange and intellectual introspection. After the fall of China’s Ming dynasty in 1644 and the rise to power of the ‘barbarian’ Qing, some Joseon scholars saw Korea as the last bastion of civilisation based on neo-Confucian principles.

In the second half of the 17th century, the country’s social hierarchy also began loosening, with the jungin, the equivalent of the middle class, embracing a culture that was previously the preserve of the elite. Interest in practical studies rose and the economy picked up, with travel becoming increasingly popular. From an artistic perspective, all this opened the door, in the 18th century, for ‘true-view’ landscapes. Artists moved away from idealised Chinese scenery in favour of realistic depictions of Korean surroundings — often underpinned by European notions of perspective.

A pioneer of the genre was Jeong Seon, who in 1751, aged 75, painted Clearing After Rain on Mount Inwang. ‘That’s the mountain in Seoul and that’s where that painter lived for his entire life; so the place was quite familiar to him. It looks very realistic, but at the same time, it’s emotional and very atmospheric.’

Today, video may have replaced true landscapes and celadon vessels, but, says Dr Kim, contemporary Korean art is still very much a product of its past, with which it shares many similarities. ‘Today’s artists are open to new ideas, but they do not just copy or mimic them; they incorporate them into their past and their heritage and create something new.’ This has been spearheaded by luminaries such as Nam June Paik (1932–2006), the first contemporary Korean artist to gain international acclaim, and Kimsooja (b. 1957), who in the past few years has had exhibitions at the Barbican in London and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield, West Yorkshire.

That is why, Dr Kim believes, contemporary Korean culture is taking the world by storm: ‘Because in it there is familiarity and unfamiliarity at the same time.’

‘Korea’ is at the British Museum, London, from October 1–January 31, 2027

This feature originally appeared in the September 23, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

We might be mere mortals, but mischief is eternal. And so it is that when I ask Ralph Steadman, aged 90, how he’s keeping busy these days, he laments, without missing a beat, that he ‘can only run five acres a day’ and his face spreads into a devilish smile.

Ralph has made a life out of mischief. A career in cartoons began with training in technical drawing with the Royal Air Force, and a correspondence course at the Percy Bradshaw Press Art School. His first cartoon was published in the Manchester Evening Chronicle in 1956, followed by commissions for Private Eye and Punch.

The inflection point, however, occurred in Louisville in 1970. It was Ralph’s first visit to the USA, and he was to make drawings for a journalist by the name of Hunter S. Thompson. ‘Back at the motel we talked for a while about America, the South, England, just relaxing a bit before dinner,’ Thompson wrote of their first encounter. ‘There was no way either of us could have known, at the time, that it would be the last normal conversation we would have. From that point on, the weekend became a vicious, drunken nightmare. We both went completely to pieces.'

That vicious, drunken nightmare became history in the form of an article, titled The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, which was the birth of ‘Gonzo’ journalism, for which Ralph is so fondly remembered. Well maybe not fondly by those he drew. ‘I warned him several times about letting the subjects see his foul renderings, but for some perverse reason he kept doing it,’ Thompson wrote. ‘Consequently, he was regarded with fear and loathing by nearly everyone who’d seen or even heard about his work.’

‘Foul renderings’ they may be, but Ralph is among the most celebrated illustrators that this island has ever produced. They are also the subject of a new selling exhibition curated by Tin Man Art and Ralph’s daughter Sadie Williams at 31, St George Street, London, which opens tomorrow. It will feature 27 drawings spanning a 70-year career and is the first exhibition of this type in 30 years.

When I ask Ralph what he’d like people to take away from his drawings, his answer is simple: ‘That I noticed something, and recorded it in a certain way.’ He emphasises that the job of a cartoonist is to hold people to account for their actions. ‘It’s a pictorial way of showing up naughty people, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘It’s nice to be a critic. Although I could be a bit self-righteous. Once I was being a bit sour about people you know.’

‘Well only if they deserved it,’ Sadie adds. ‘I don’t think you’ve ever criticised or lambasted anybody who wasn’t behaving in a disreputable way. I don’t think you ever drew Mother Teresa. She was a bit too good for you.’

Choosing 27 images from a collection of thousands to explain an entire career was no easy feat. ‘We went through various drawers and pulled out ones that we thought had a sort of power,’ Sadie says. ‘We also wanted to span the collection a bit. It has some very early works, the pre-Gonzo stuff. And then post 1970, and that’s when you can see his work becomes bigger and a bit less constrained, and the splats come in, the lack of fear of making a mess.’

Making a mess became a signature style of Ralph’s work; ugly splats and ghoulish caricatures of ugly places and ghoulish people. His work would appear in The Times (until then editor William Rees-Mogg had him sacked), the New Statesman, Rolling Stone, Radio Times, The New York Times, The Guardian and The Observer. As well as his withering portraits of politicians, police and whatever else, he illustrated everything from album artwork to Animal Farm, and everything in between. On Sundays in the summer, when I play for a cricket team called Not The MCC, his work takes pride of place as the club badge.

But perhaps his best known drawings draw on that aforementioned ‘fear and loathing’ that his pen could produce. In 1971, Thompson’s iconic novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was brought to life by Ralph, and the pair collaborated further with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 and The Curse of Lono. ‘I went with [Ralph] and mum to Hawaii when dad and Hunter were asked to cover the marathon for Running magazine,’ Sadie remembers. ‘I was about seven or eight, and we had six weeks out there with Hunter, and, we witnessed his, should we just say, eccentricities. He nearly trod on my head at one point, trying to sneak the TV out of the lounge.’

‘I recently went to Gonzo Fest and I did a talk, and I used some excerpts from my mother’s diaries, and usually the excerpts end in Hunter pulling some sort of dynamite out of a bag and throwing it willy-nilly in some direction.’ ‘I’m actually quite impressed he didn’t kill you, to be honest,’ Ralph interjects.

When I ask if adventures with Thompson ever went too far, the answer is an unequivocal no. ‘When we were doing whatever we were doing, I think it was important that we did it to the best of our abilities, being as dangerous as possible. The best way to be.’

For a man who has seen and experienced so much, it felt foolish to ask if there’s anything left for him to be getting on with. ‘Climb Everest,’ was the instant response. ‘I’m off to Everest next week.’ I hope he’s joking. Not because a 90-year-old man shouldn’t be on top of the world. But because if Ralph is on top of the world, then he can see all of us, and God knows what he would draw.

'Ralph Steadman: Out of Line (Original Works 1961–2016)' runs from October 2–11 at Tin Man Art, 31, St George Street, London.

Earlier this month, the Government confirmed that: ‘Mayors and local leaders will be handed the power to introduce an Overnight Visitor Levy — a fee on overnight stays — to help maximise the benefits of tens of millions of people visiting England every year.’

According to the official announcement, it will be left to the local authorities concerned to decide the level at which they will set the levy and, indeed, whether they will charge one at all. Rather than being applied at a flat rate, it will be calculated as a percentage of the cost of an overnight stay. This, it is claimed, will have the effect of ‘shielding families from disproportionate costs for cheaper holidays’.

Food will not be included in the assessed cost and Labour local leaders collectively, including the Mayor of London, have announced a cap of 5% on what they will charge. It will be the responsibility of those providing accommodation both to calculate the cost of the levy and to apply it. Local leaders will be free to spend the money raised as they see fit, with their plans set out by March 2028. The Government expects to legislate for these changes during the current Parliamentary session.

Opponents of the proposals have immediately branded the scheme a ‘tourist tax’ and have argued that it will have a chilling effect on tourism, discouraging overnight stays and putting further financial pressure on the hospitality sector. At some level, it’s hard to disagree with this analysis. In absolute terms, the levy adds to the cost of a holiday and will increase the administrative burden faced by all accommodation providers. No doubt, it will be introduced with sufficient exemptions, local variety and complications to make it confusing.

Rather like the recent increases in National Insurance and minimum wage that have already squeezed the margins of so many businesses, therefore, it feels as if it is a gift by the Government of somebody else’s money and time. All that said, given the universality of tourist taxes, it’s hard to argue that the levy is likely to put many people off travelling.

Not only are such taxes applied successfully around the world, but a levy was introduced in Edinburgh this July and is planned at Cardiff from April 2027. In Athena’s view, therefore, although the tax is unwelcome and burdensome, it is unlikely to change much in terms of the numbers of tourists visiting major attractions. What most concerns her is what we can expect in return.

If none of the money is ring-fenced for investment in heritage or culture, how does it really serve those paying it? Will the local leaders really use the money to support the things and places used by tourists or will the levy merely turn into an additional source of income that will fill an awkward financial gap in budgets? That would be a tourist tax, pure and simple.

When is a pipe not a pipe? No, this is not a new take on the ‘When is a door not a door?’ joke (when it’s ajar —ha! — for those who haven’t heard it before). This is the question posed by a London gallery's new exhibition dedicated to the Belgian artist René Magritte (1898-1967).

‘Great paintings by Magritte grab you immediately,’ says Jasper Sharp, co-curator of This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte at the Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill gallery. ‘They have that fast burn, but they also have something that sits beneath that, which rattles around your head. You never forget some of his paintings. He has a tortoise and hare effect with his work — which I think is really fascinating — like all great art does.’

This duality is explored in full throughout the exhibition, which was organised in collaboration with the Fondation Magritte. It features paintings, drawings and sculptures both by Magritte and other artists, which include Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha and Yoko Ono. Some were made during Magritte’s lifetime, while others were created specifically for the exhibition.

Free to visit, This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte will run until December 12, 2026. The title comes from the well-known Magritte work La Trahison des images. Ceci continue de ne pas être une pipe (The Treachery of Images. This is still not a pipe, 1952). The ink on paper piece revisits Magritte’s earlier, very similar, 1929 work La Trahison des images. Ceci n'est pas une pipe (The Treachery of Images: This is not a pipe).

‘Suddenly you start thinking: “Which one is the pipe here? Is it the word, is it the image?" He’s brilliant, he’s a really great artist,' says Professor Patricia Allmer, a leading expert on Magritte at the University of Edinburgh, of the exhibition’s titular work. She fell in love with the artist’s work as a child after first seeing Le faux miroir (The False Mirror, 1929) and believes that Magritte’s genius lies in exploring the very nature of everyday objects in such a way that leaves the viewer asking questions.

‘It’s very interesting that he still speaks across different generations of artists and people, and I think one of the reasons is that his artworks managed to be, at the same time, simple enough for a child to understand but complex enough for a philosopher to puzzle over,’ Prof Allmer says. ‘There’s also a humour and a certain evocation of the sublime which keeps Magritte endlessly interesting.’

Born in 1898 in Lessines, Belgium, you might know Magritte best for his striking depictions of apples, clouds, men in bowler hats and, of course, pipes (if they are, indeed, really pipes after all), but the Gagosian’s exhibition intends to reveal more about the artist.

A large two-legged lamppost glowing red, that puts me in mind of Louise Bourgeois’s spiders, stands sentry at the door. The sculpture, Streetlamp for Drunk (2018) by Alex Da Corte, is the first of many examples of how Magritte’s uncanny style has lived on. When combined with Georges Thiry’s photograph Enterrement de René Magritte (The Funeral of Magritte, 1967) it plays a clever Magritte-esque mind game. We are at once having his death reinforced, while being reminded of all the ways his legacy is palpably alive.

The first room in the gallery has walls hung with curtains of scarlet and navy, making for a dramatic setting where a brilliant collection of oddities celebrating the artist’s influence take centre stage. Ed Ruscha’s Bird Drinks Creek Dry, Fish Escapes (1965) has all the whimsy and sardonic wit of Magritte’s signature style and Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree, a glass of water claiming stubbornly to be the former, is a direct homage.

I almost mistake George Condo’s The Apple Picker (2009), a painting which shows a man with an apple for a head, for a work by the artist too, while Allison Katz’s Brussels sprout (and Philip) No.4 and Brussels sprout (and Philip) No.7 (both 2025) captures the artist’s sense of humour almost exactly. Koons’s Snorkel Vest (1985) cast in bronze plays upon Magritte’s theme of something familiar having elements of the unfamiliar and Ono’s Sky TV (1966) shows his a-typical clouds in a whole new light.

The stars however are, of course, the artist's own work. In classic pieces Le Lieu commun (The Commonplace, 1964), Le Bouquet tout fait (The Readymade Bouquet, 1956) and Les Tambours de a mort (The Drums of Death, c.1965), Magritte's iconic man in bowler hat shines in his full glory. Le Chef d’orchestre (The Leader of the Band, 1955) which shows a squirrel isolated in a woodland scene and Le Voyageur (The Traveller, 1937) are particular favourites of mine, although each of Magritte's pieces is striking in its own way.

His distinctive style is best summarised by co-curator Sharp. ‘He had an incredibly deadpan way of painting. Many of his fellow surrealists said he must have just been so bored when painting… his surfaces are almost completely flat. He was quite methodical, almost painted like a surgeon.’ Magritte was formerly a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory, and a film poster and advertisement designer, which may have given rise to this meticulous style. Elements of collage too, Sharp points out, run throughout Magritte's work. ‘I think that playfulness and the deadpan style is something which a lot of painting today is being made like… That’s an aspect of his work which feels incredibly contemporary.

Paolo Vedovi, the co-founder of a gallery in Brussels specialising in works by Magritte, and a board member of Fondation Magritte, agrees. ‘It’s so relevant today in the world of images and Instagram and all that. All of Magritte’s images are very strong.'

‘Also, he is so relevant because he has been such a big influence on the contemporary, and his work is still very contemporary itself.’ Vedovi thinks Magritte’s magic lies in how ‘he shows you things that you think you know, but he shows it differently'.

Magritte put it best, although perhaps most elusively, himself: ‘My painting is visible images which conceal nothing… they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question: “What does that mean?” It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.’

‘This Is Still Not a Pipe: The Afterlife of Magritte’ runs until December 12, 2026, at Gagosian’s gallery, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London.

Of course David Shrigley lives in Brighton. Where else would you find a man who painted a bird with the words ‘I am flying to London to shit on the government’, and who created an uncannily proportioned thumbs up, which reads ‘I approve of your stupid ideas’?

Case in point: when I ask David about the last thing he bought for himself, he replies: ‘Vegan Doc Martens.’ So Brighton. He has lunch together with his small and very young team of staff most days, which I am invited to join when I visit. Also very Brighton.

David’s distinctive line drawings and paintings, often featuring sarcastic or absurd one liners, can now be found on everything from a keyring to the finest hotels, museums or restaurants. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2013 and appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2020. Quite the journey from Macclesfield, where he was born in 1968.

He looks much younger than his 58 years and has a boyish quality when I meet him at his Brighton studio (a sign reading ‘Nap in progress’ is stuck to the outside of his door). ‘I’ve had quite a lifestyle change in recent years where I don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t do drugs and don’t eat bread,’ he says.

And that’s not the only change. He has a book coming out, an anthology of writing of ‘flash fiction’ that’s been compiled over the course of 14 years. ‘I started writing on long-haul flights,’ David says. ‘I find it very hard to write and I don’t consider myself to be a literary person — I’m the person who makes the pictures — but increasingly, I guess I have realised that text is very important to my work.’

On average, David would write continuously for about 10 hours, until his laptop battery ran out. He has a sister who lives in New Zealand, so this method of working from aeroplanes ‘facilitated quite a lot of writing’. He also has a show coming up at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London next year that will be more in his comfort zone, where he will respond to some works of the Old Masters.

Of the book, David says: ‘It feels very different from everything else I’ve done. I don’t know how confident I am about it, but it’s exciting. When you feel you’re at the beginning of something, that is always the best way to feel.’

Your aesthetic hero

Off the top of my head it would be Philip Guston, the American painter who became very famous in the 1970s for painting cartoonish pictures of domestic scenes. There was a massive retrospective of his at The Tate two years or so ago. He has become incredibly influential for contemporary painters. Just very strange, figurative, slushy, squishy paintings. I love that aesthetic.

Your favourite painting

It has to be a Philip Guston one. One of those paintings of his that shows a figure in bed smoking, that would have to be it. He also made a lot of really beautiful charcoal drawings over the years.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I bought some vegan Doc Martens. I had a revelation when we got a dog 14 years ago. When she was a puppy we had a house in the country in Devon and out of the window there was a field of sheep and there was one little black lamb. Without my glasses on it could have been her, and I thought: ‘Why is one of those creatures my dearest companion and one of those creatures my dinner?’ I stopped eating meat at that moment, but I still sometimes eat fish.

A possession you would never sell

Probably one of my guitars. Probably all of my guitars, actually. I mean, the first guitar — those things are important, you know — was bought at a moment when music was really important to me and it’s something which I learned to do that I am still quite good at. It has no value but it opened a door for me at that time and it’s representative of a life experience, so for that reason it would be something I’d never touch.

A book you’ve found inspiring

I read a lot and I think that your literary tastes change a lot when you get older, because you always discover new writers. In any given year you discover a couple of writers that you’ve never read before. For example, a writer I started reading quite recently is Denis Johnson. He died in 2017. His first book is called Angels and it's about substance abuse problems, but it’s really beautiful. He himself suffered from addiction, and his prose is just the most beautiful you could read. His most famous work is a novel called Tree of Smoke, which is set in Vietnam. It’s amazing.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

There was an exhibition in 2009 called ‘Sensational Fix’, about the band Sonic Youth, one of my favourite bands. They had a history of collaborating with contemporary artists when it came to their album art. This exhibition pulled together all those collaborations that they did. It was really great, and really unexpected because it was part museum exhibit and also documented a period of time.

The music you work to

I do listen to music, but I don’t tend to put it on when I’m painting. Something I have been listening to a lot recently is Tom Ravenscroft on Rinse FM. It’s a really great mix of music that isn’t from Western Europe or North America, and very odd stuff, as well as lots of dance music. He is very enthusiastic about what he plays, which I really love.

The last podcast you listened to

The Rest is History.

Who would play you in a film of your life

Benedict Cumberbatch. I’m sort of a bit socially awkward, and I think he could do that quite well.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

A solar-panel powered rice cooker.

The items you collect

I make most of my guitars, so that's not really a collection. Whenever I go out for a fancy dinner I take the name card with my name on it. I’ve probably got hundreds of them now. They’re in an envelope in my filing cabinet, filed under my name. The thing is, also, I’m a little bit obsessive compulsive, so I worry that if I don’t take it, something bad will happen.

A hotel you could go back and back to

The Premier Inn by Dalston Junction, because it’s right by Cafe OTO, and I cannot be arsed to get the late train back if I’ve been to a show there.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Seagulls. They make such a racket.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

I have some great stories of fine dining, Michelin-starred restaurants, however I think when you have a lot of really fancy food you crave things that are much more simple. I think the best experience I have had is making sushi on a boat after having caught the fish myself. However, one of the nicest things I’ve done recently is in Devon, where our second house is. There were sprats washing up on the beach and you can just go along and pick them up and it's the most sustainable form of fishing you can do — either you eat them, or the seagulls do.

The best present you’ve ever received

My grandad used to be a joiner and when he moved out of his house he gave me all of his tools, which I’ve still got. One is a massive screwdriver. It’s the most useful thing ever. It’s way better than an actual electric screwdriver because you can get so much more torque on it.

‘Creative Writing’ by David Shrigley is out today, in all good bookshops.

The most surprising genre of painting to be attracting sustained interest from England’s contemporary artists today is still life. From the soft-focus mimosa of Paul Winstanley (b. 1954) to the strange objects that pepper the abstracted interiors of 2025 John Moores Painting Prize winner Ally Fallon (b. 1998), the genre is making a comeback.

Fallon lives and works in Manchester. He studied at the city’s School of Art and Apollo Painting School programme. One of Apollo’s co-founders is Louise Giovanelli (b. 1993). Her own paintings of shimmering satin shirts and soft drapes reflect her interest in depicting how light falls on surfaces and how this can be reproduced in painting.

Further west is the Hereford studio of Clare Woods (b. 1972), where still lifes form an increasing proportion of her work. She paints fast, in oil on aluminium, depicting everything from floral displays and fronds of blossom — a selection of which will be on display at a forthcoming exhibition, ‘Clare Woods: Garden Without Seasons’ at Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London (until November 8) — to glittering chandeliers and sherry trifles. Her rich colours wriggle and writhe across the surface, offering a painterly response to nature morte, but also — simultaneously — a transformation of the subject into a melange of abstract brushstrokes.

Perhaps the rise in popularity of still life is because it allows artists to question the relationship between the reproduced image and the real thing. In an uncanny parallel of our world of deep fakes and falsified truths, these simulacra of the things that surround us teeter on the edge of entropy. How fitting.

This is the final part of our five-part series on the new school of English painting. They will be published every Thursday afternoon throughout September.

Click here to read part one on the new abstract painters, part two on the new figurative painters, part three on historical painters and part four on landscape painters.

Last week, Athena was fortunate to attend one of the private views of the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum. She emerged exhilarated by the experience.

As she has observed before, the display of the celebrated embroidery has caught the public imagination and this occasion reflected that fact. For one thing, it was exceptionally well attended. No less remarkable was the fact that, on arrival, lots of the guests walked straight past the drinks and refreshments, determined to see the object itself. Athena was one of them.

It took her almost exactly 40 minutes to walk the full length of the Tapestry. Her expectation had been that it would be difficult to see when laid out flat, but in fact the arrangement works well. The object itself is displayed in a single, long case that allows the visitor a really close view. Added to which, although the lighting levels are low, it is not difficult to examine and — crucially — onlookers don’t cast shadows across it. Despite continuous polite requests from the museum staff to keep moving along, the visit didn’t feel hurried and there was time to examine details.

Projected onto the wall behind the case as a backdrop to the Tapestry is a series of interpretative animations. Athena noticed them as she waited her turn to see the Tapestry, but, at the end, she realised that she had paid absolutely no attention to them at all and can’t speak for their quality or interest. The same goes for the short display on the architectural legacy of the Normans that leads from the exhibition proper to the shop.

Setting aside the undoubted pleasure of seeing the Tapestry and the manner of its presentation, the experience did raise one concern about what lies ahead. Athena was warned to arrive early for the event and, consequently, the queue for the exhibition was relatively short when she joined it. It nevertheless took a full hour and 20 minutes of queuing to get to the start of the tapestry.

There was the offer to join a ‘fast lane’, but very few people took it and Athena suspects that the system will be abused as a means of jumping the queue. In short, there are clearly going to be real practical difficulties in getting large numbers of people through the exhibition. After all, the Tapestry presents a narrative that can only be read in one order — from the beginning to the end. Athena doesn’t envy the staff on the ground the challenge of managing the crowds in the months to come.

Finally, leaving the exhibition behind and passing through some of the British Museum’s familiar galleries, Athena was struck by how tired they looked. It was a sobering reminder of the massive challenges of repair and renovation that still face this great institution. In relation to those tasks, this memorable and magnificent display of the Bayeux Tapestry — a triumph for all involved — is a mere side show.

This feature originally appeared in the September 16, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

As the glitterati readies itself for Frieze London in October, a more discerning chorus of collectors will gather from 24–27 September at the Saatchi Gallery. The occasion? The 36th edition of the British Art Fair, which this year welcomes 72 dealers in total — 65 of whom are specialists in modern and contemporary art.

Works by two of the most covetable painters on the market — Bridget Riley and the late David Hockney — are on display and available to purchase. ‘His work feels all the more poignant now that he's gone,’ the fair's founder, Gay Hutson, tells me of the Bradford-born painter. Having hosted the fair's inaugural edition in 1988, she has presided over it for nearly 40 years. Somehow, it has never felt more relevant. As fatigue and oversaturation continue to befall the high-profile Frieze (held from 14–18 October), true connoisseurs are flocking to more discreet outlets such as hers in the hope of forging more personal relationships with dealers.

What should one look out for at this year's fair in particular? Sculpture, Hutson says, ‘is clearly having a moment’. Among the works available to purchase are several by Henry Moore (with Osborne Samuel) and Lynn Chadwick (with Pangolin London). ‘These shifts in the market seem to happen almost by osmosis,’ says Hutson, nodding to this year’s installation of Chadwick’s work at Houghton Hall and Moore’s at Kew Gardens. ‘When I started out, all anyone wanted to collect was Victorian watercolours. Art creates its own momentum.’

Besides these notable names are also those of living artists, whose works will be exhibited on the Saatchi Gallery’s second floor. ‘The British Art Fair has always been about having more established artists in dialogue with more nascent and emerging voices,’ Hutson notes. With prices ranging from £1,000 to the high-six figures, the show is open ‘to connoisseurs of all kinds’. Hutson stresses the word ‘connoisseurs’: ‘This show has always been for the insider,’ she concludes. Tickets are now on sale for general admission (£23), concessions (£20) and the collectors' preview (£70).

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Paintings wear their years as people do. Colours fade, surfaces craze with cracks and spot with age. Although it is natural to think of them as permanent, in truth they are constantly evolving, nursed along the way by teams of highly trained and dedicated conservators. ‘The longer I’ve worked in my profession, the more I have come to see that we are walking beside these great paintings through time,’ says Rebecca Hellen, head conservator of easel painting for the National Trust. ‘They are changing just as we are.’

How to deal with those marks of passing time is a question with which every picture restorer wrestles. ‘There are contrasting traditions in conservation in southern and northern Europe,’ explains Alisa Vincentelli, a freelance conservator who has worked at Tate Modern, The Bowes Museum and Auckland Castle, as well as for Christie’s. ‘My first experience as a picture restorer came as a volunteer in the conservation room at the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens. In northern Europe, we tend to try to make “invisible” repairs, whereas in Italy and Greece, damage is often integrated into the painting — it becomes a part of its story.’

Pinpointing exactly which moment in its life to which a picture should be taken back is a key part of the restorer’s role. ‘Leaving aside the repair of damage, for most private clients the judgement is aesthetic,’ says Marine Andrieux, who trained as conservator at the Sorbonne and, after spells at the V&A Museum and Tate, is now a painting restorer with the long-established family firm of Everett Fine Art in Somerset. ‘Paintings that have been in families for generations are often simply so dirty [people] can’t see them anymore. At the moment, I’m working on a Cedric Morris still life that’s been hanging in the owner’s sitting room more or less since it was completed. Morris used very thick impasto, which forms a surface that dust and dirt really cling to, so it requires very extensive and careful cleaning’.

Dust and dirt deposits are removed using a soft, wide goat-hair brush, together with specially adapted vacuum-cleaner nozzles, with specialist solvents that can remove yellowed varnish without damaging the paintwork beneath. In the past, treatment was not always so gentle. Before the 1950s, the everyday job of caring for pictures was generally entrusted to household cleaners and restoration was carried out by local artists.

‘They came in and removed layers of oxidised varnish, often using caustic substances such as lye, vinegar and even urine. It not only took off the varnish, but often some of the surface paint, too. Then, they’d retouch it with oil paints as they saw fit,’ Hellen explains. Today, Andrieux notes, restorers are trained to be more cautious and minimal. ‘We want to repair the damage, not add to it.’ The appalling vision of the notorious 2018 ‘Monkey Christ’ restoration of Ecce Homo in the Sanctuary of Mercy church in Borja, Spain, haunts the nightmares of conservators the world over.

‘We base restoration on historic facts and scientific analysis,’ Hellen explains. Her work on Thomas Moran’s Nearing Camp, Evening on the Upper Colorado River, 1882, for example, involved ‘X-rays, a chemical analysis of the paint and a cross section of the canvas that revealed red pigment bubbling up through the greens and browns like a miniature volcano.’ Alongside that came a two-week field trip to Washington DC to consult with American conservators who had worked on Moran’s epic landscapes. ‘The decisions you make as a conservator in caring for a painting are based on the time you meet the artwork in its life and the time that you are in your own life,’ Hellen says. ‘As much as we try to understand the painting, the judgements we make will always be subjective.’

For that reason, Vincentelli believes, when it comes to the modern art restorer: ‘The most important thing is that we never do any work on a painting that is not reversible — because, however much we try to avoid it, there will always be some input from the era we are working in, whether that’s in terms of the materials or the aesthetics.’

Picture conservation is a profession that straddles the past and the present and even (almost) the future, requiring as it does both a detailed knowledge of materials that have been in use for centuries and an understanding of the latest scientific developments, such as the use of nanomaterials and lasers. It is work that combines the theoretical with the practical, art with analysis. Today, a large conservation department may use infrared reflectography to see through the top layers of the paint and pick out changes made by the artist. For example, in the spring of 2026, National Trust conservators discovered a ‘horse-drawn carriage, a lady in a bonnet, a gentleman and carriage dog’ hidden beneath the surface of a painting, Stourhead in its Infancy, by this very method.

X-ray fluorescence examinations, meanwhile, map the chemical compositions of pigment and can reveal hidden under-drawings. Pest infestations — common in old paintings — can be killed off in nitrogen chambers without damaging the canvas.

However, not every conservator works in laboratory conditions. Living in rural Northumberland with three small children to raise, Vincentelli created a studio in her home and worked on private commissions. ‘I’m pretty sure we were the only family in the village with a Salvator Rosa painting sitting on an easel in the spare bedroom,’ she says.

The joys and challenges of the conservator’s job come from both expected and unexpected quarters. The National Trust collection of about 13,500 paintings contains many that have had ‘interesting’ lives. ‘Often they were commissioned to display in London townhouses, before being transferred, as their owners’ fortunes increased, to country houses,’ Hellen reveals. ‘There, they would be moved around, reframed to fit in with the décor or changing fashion; often, they were made smaller, too, to fit into a new space.’

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the latter is to be found at Petworth House in West Sussex, long a centre of artistic patronage. ‘The celebrated Petworth Beauties, seven full-length portraits of Society ladies by Michael Dahl from the late 17th century were almost literally cut down to size by the 3rd Earl of Egremont in the 1820s,’ Hellen explains. ‘The Earl had the portraits removed from their frames and their legs were folded up behind their backs before reframing. The Beauties were in this uncomfortable position for nearly two centuries. We were given the task of bringing their legs back down again.’

Andrieux took pleasure in restoring a Turner painting of Caernarvon Castle in Wales (‘A tiny canvas that, amazingly, had one of his palettes stuck on the back of it’), but also found herself drawn in by the task of reviving an old metal sign from a West Country inn. ‘It was a vivid-green coat of arms and had swung back and forth outside the pub in the wind and rain for more than a century. Working on that, and other pieces that form part of people’s lives, is fascinating. The clients are so attached to these pieces that the reaction when we return them in their revived state is often quite emotional.’

One of Hellen’s career highlights also involved Turner. ‘Mercury Sent to Admonish Aeneas was one of four paintings completed in 1850,’ she explains. ‘It was never sold and came to the National Gallery as part of the Turner Bequest. After that, it suffered some rather rough treatment. It [was] sent around the world on at least half a dozen occasions and for some years hung in the British Embassy in Athens. Turner used red and blue spermaceti wax in his paintings. It melts at 39˚C, so having it on the wall of an un-air-conditioned building in Greece in summer is clearly not what a conservator would recommend.’

This was not the only way the painting suffered: ‘At some point, it had been re-lined and the restorers had attached the failing canvas to a new canvas by pressing down on the surface with heavy, hot irons.’ Working next to Turner scholar Ian Warrell, Hellen set about tackling the picture’s restoration. ‘It gave me more sleepless nights than anything I have worked on,’ she recalls, ‘but also the greatest pleasure. The rollercoaster of trying to understand Turner’s process, rarely repeated from one canvas to the next, to unravel what he was doing with that incredible non-linear surface… it was totally beguiling.’

Not all conservation work ends so happily, alas. Vincentelli recalls restoring an abstract painted wooden relief by a leading British artist of the 1950s for a large institution (which shall remain anonymous). ‘Shortly after I returned the work, which was in muted shades of grey and brown, a firm of decorators came in to paint the room it was mounted in. They evidently thought it was some kind of fixture that was in need of brightening up and slapped emulsion paint all over it. They did quite a thorough job, apparently, but I’ve never had the heart to go and look at it.’

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

In Reynolds’s time, English landscape painting was thought of as less erudite and important than history painting, but the sheer power of J. M. W. Turner’s sublime views and John Constable’s Suffolk scenes enabled the genre to be taken seriously for the first time.

David Hockney (b. 1937-2026) continued to draw inspiration from the landscape that surrounded him up until his death earlier this year. Throughout his career, he painted the hot hillsides of California and Yorkshire’s cool leafy lanes. In 2020–21, during lockdown, he closely studied the seasons in Normandy. A giant digital frieze of the fields, trees and orchards surrounding his French farmhouse spent the summer on display at London’s Serpentine North.

He would've turned 90 next year, but worked every day up until his death, scrutinising nature with all his might, as well as pushing the boundaries of painting, utilising modern technology to animate his thinking.

The peripatetic Peter Doig (b. 1959) is also drawn to landscape. He was born in Edinburgh and raised in Trinidad and Canada before studying painting in England. Today, he is known for his 1990s Canadian cabins and lakes, as well as moonlit Caribbean beaches. However, he now lives and works in London again and his dreamlike paintings increasingly feature views of the capital.

Both Doig and Hockney have looked beyond our shores for inspiration, but George Shaw (b. 1966) prefers to take his cue from the Midlands, where he grew up. His meticulous paintings in enamel on board depict terraced streets, waste land, graffiti and fly tipping. Yet, through their glowing orange skies and reflective puddles, he manages to give these everyday scenes a quiet beauty of their own.

This is part four of our five-part series on the new school of English painting. They will be published every Thursday afternoon throughout September.

Click here to read part one on the new abstract painters, part two on the new figurative painters, and part three on historical painters.

Ten years ago, the author and critic Olivia Laing wondered whether 'an accelerated news cycle' may require 'accelerated art' in response. It was a question she raised in a review of Ali Smith’s 2016 novel, Autumn, that would later form part of an anthology of Laing's writing: Funny Weather: Art In An Emergency (2020). From said title came the name of Arina Izmestieva's gallery and outdoor exhibition programme. Herself a graduate of New York University and, now, a London-based collector and artist, Izmestieva opened Funny Weather's show in the forest in Hampshire last weekend.

Running until November 12, this year's theme is 'Strange Objects'. 'I wanted to place sculptures in a different context to the white-walled gallery we normally see them in,' Izmestieva explains. At the outset, the aim of Funny Weather is to reintroduce sculpture to the landscape that birthed the materials that created it — and to inspire the younger generation to start collecting. A collector herself, Izmestieva boasts a mature understanding of the dialogue between art itself, and the environment in which it is presented.

The current show involves 32 works by eight different artists, many of which were commissioned specifically for the setting. 'We want to invite visitors to rediscover a kind of childlike wonder,' says Izmestieva, 'and to move freely between works: some hidden among trees, revealed through light or discovered at the end of a path.'

Among the artists present are Jill Berelowitz (a South African sculptor who works with bronze and optical resin and has produced works for The Dorchester), Elium (a pseudonym for the multitalented Elise de Falletans, whose past clients include Hermès), Luke James (whose anthropomorphic sculptures are often made of wood, and who has contributed an impressive 12 works to the show) and Thibault Lucas (whom Izmestieva discovered at Poush, an artist incubator in Aubervilliers, just north of Paris, earlier this year).

The majority of works on display are made of bronze, wood or stone. 'These are all materials that can be found in the forest,' Izmestieva observes (wood is obvious, bronze less though — although it can be formed from the melding of copper and tin, found in weapons, jewels and other artefacts from past centuries, fallen prey to erosion and occasionally unearthed by archeologists). One of her favourites, she says, is Elium's Excalibur sword: a two-metre tall, sword-in-the-stone installation created from pink onyx, the material hailing from a foundry in Vicenza and later melded into shape by a stonemason in Britain. 'It took an entire week to install on site,' Izmestieva laughs.

Her own practice, she says, is 'all about texture'. 'With Funny Weather, I want to return materials to their origins, see how they interact with the landscape and what that dialogue sparks within the audience,' the ceramicist explains. That spark is catching on: young collectors, in particular, flooded the show during last weekend's launch, most of them descending from London. Laing's collection of essays, anticipating the dominant anxieties of our day (climate collapse and the threat to democratic institutions) offers not only a titular through-line but genuine clues regarding the ethos of Izmestieva's exhibition: concerned with repatriation, natural resources and continuity.

It seems only fitting that the generation most concerned with and affected by these issues should champion the art that addresses them.

'Strange Objects' is on until November 12 at Barley Mow Hill.

Mohammed Sami (b. 1984) is an Iraqi-born artist who now lives and works in London. He was shortlisted for the 2025 Turner Prize and has had solo exhibitions at Camden Arts Centre and Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. His work offers a new take on history painting, the category that originally occupied the highest tier of Reynolds’s hierarchy.

However, rather than presenting battle scenes as glorious feats of heroism, as 18th-century Academicians had done, Sami’s paintings employ memory and subjectivity to highlight the complexity of war and its deep psychological cost. His fragmentary approach leaves room for the viewer’s own interpretation of events.

Other artists also wrestle with recent history, from the ‘Pussy Riot’ paintings of Justin Mortimer (b. 1970) to the barber-shop interiors of Hurvin Anderson (b. 1965), who remembers these spaces as a focal point for the Birmingham black community of his youth.

Folklore artist Ben Edge (b. 1985) prefers to draw on ancient English myths and traditions that date back thousands of years. In his ambitious Children of Albion (2025), he brings together dozens of historic episodes, from Viking invaders and the Cerne Abbas giant to Margaret Thatcher and Royal Wedding teacups. William Blake’s naked male youth Albion Rose appears, arms extended, above the green and pleasant land, a nod to Edge’s personal admiration for his visionary predecessor.

This is part three of our five-part series on the new school of English painting. They will be published every Thursday afternoon throughout September.

Click here to read part one on the new abstract painters, and part two on the new figurative painters.

Rampant lions take artful poses, a wolf plays a trick on a crane, and excitable dogs chase their own tails: the Bayeux Tapestry, commissioned shortly after the Battle of Hastings to convey a Norman version of the conquest of England, depicts more animals than humans. Around 200 of them are horses — royal mounts, workhorses and cavalry — all stitched onto 70 metres of linen in wool dyed with woad, madder and weld. As they charge through the embroidery’s nine panels, they pass a barking, quacking, roaring menagerie of over 500 other creatures: from frogs, foxes and fire-breathing dragons to what one commentator describes as a pair of Monty Pythonesque dead parrots.

The Bayeux Tapestry and its extraordinary bestiary is currently on view at the British Museum until July 11 2027. This visit, the first in almost 1,000 years, is something of a homecoming. Though commissioned in Normandy in the 1070s, most likely for display in the Bayeux Cathedral, the tapestry was sewn on English soil. It was a decision intended, not to rub our noses in the victory of William, Duke of Normandy (William the Conqueror) over King Harold II, but to take advantage of Canterbury’s reputation for superior artisanship.

At first glance, the inclusion of this animal kingdom, much of it occupying the margins, appears to be decorative. ‘Pairs of animals in compartments were a traditional form of ornament on textiles,’ explains Gale Owen-Crocker, author of The Design of the Bayeux Tapestry (2026) and Professor Emerita of Anglo-Saxon Culture at the University of Manchester. Creatures of fur and feather, both real and fabulous, were a familiar feature of 11^th-century design. Even within the tapestry’s story, sculpted animals embellish architecture, form the figureheads of ships and are carved into the seats of claw-footed thrones.

Yet the animals frolicking in the borders offer function as well as form, appearing to comment on the central story. They are like a string of colourful emojis inserted beneath a status update, or — for those who remember them — a medieval version of the Muppets’ chattering critics Statler and Waldorf, appraising the action from their theatre balcony.

The marginalia help indicate ‘the emotions and characteristics of the persons’, says Prof Owen-Crocker. The howling dog or wolf beneath King Edward’s coffin conveys grief, she suggests, while the peacocks over William and Harold’s meeting in Rouen hint at the hubris that will contribute to Harold’s downfall. Sometimes the animals seem to play a more lighthearted role. When Harold feasts in Bosham, for example, jaws and beaks in the margins are also filled with food.

Even the smallest details were crucial to telling the story. ‘Most medieval men read pictures rather than words,’ points out Arthur C. Wright in Decoding the Bayeux Tapestry (2019): the tapestry’s Latin tituli would be lost on them. ‘The animals and birds provide the sound-track,’ he adds. ‘And they also seem at times to speak directly to the viewer, to us.’

Vignettes taken from Aesop’s fables, suggesting moral failings or foreshadowing future events, pepper the tapestry, providing a brief diversion from the main action while reinforcing its principal themes. According to R. Howard Bloch, author of Animal fables, the Bayeux Tapestry and the making of the Anglo-Norman world (2005), they reinforce this central tension between human and animalistic urges as the two claimants compete for the throne. ‘Almost all the fables stage some form of drama pitting bodily appetite against the logical faculties,’ he says.

So keen is the tapestry to moralise, Aesop’s fox and crow pop up three times — the foolish bird repeatedly dropping its prized food into the jaws of the fox as it falls for the animal’s flattery. ‘It is hard to believe that the fable of the fox and the crow was not deliberately included as an ironic commentary on the unfolding drama,’ argues Andrew Bridgeford in The Hidden History of the Bayeux Tapestry (2004). But was it Harold or William that was tricked by the cunning fox? That all depends which side you’re on, Bridgeford suggests.

A cast of obliging animals also help set the scene, offering insights into medieval rural life. Livestock and game prance in the margins and a horse churns the earth with a harrow. ‘I believe this is the earliest illustration of a horse collar that enables horses to be used for draught,’ points out Prof Owen-Crocker. There’s also seed-scattering and bird-scaring, copied from bible manuscripts. ‘Somebody is sowing the seeds of a dynasty for himself,’ she proposes, ‘and doesn’t want any interference.’

Elsewhere, the animals help immerse us in courtly life and the country pursuits of the nobility. Harold rides through the second scene bearing a falcon, with collared hounds bounding ahead, while hare and deer are chased in the margins. Such details also serve as a reminder that the Battle of Hastings took place in autumn, when hawking and hunting were in full swing, and they reinforce the central theme of pursuit and dominion. Some images are overtly violent. A bear tied to a tree and attacked with a sword may simply reference the popular pastime of bear baiting, but it’s also possible it functions much like the fables: emphasising the animal instincts of the combatants, where aggression has overtaken reason.

The unfortunate bear is one of several exotic animals lurking in the borders, sure to have delighted eagle-eyed viewers. Two Bactrian camels with dark coats hover over William in an early scene — symbols, perhaps, of international trade; while the numerous lions, tongues lolling in defence of their territory or adopting heraldic postures, are most likely emblems of royalty that interact with the central story by evoking courage and strength.

One thing that has not changed in 1,000 years is that ‘big’ denotes ‘better’. Stallions — especially the well-endowed — are used to confer status, and, as one would expect in an embroidery commissioned by the Normans, William gets the steed with the largest appendage. ‘Riding a stallion suggests masculine assertiveness, especially when accompanied by spurs and a bird of prey on the hand,’ explains Prof Owen-Crocker. When Harold’s ship is blown off course and he is captured by Guy of Ponthieu and held for ransom, his mount changes from a stallion to a gelding or mare, reflecting, she adds, his ‘temporary reduction in status and power’. Guy gets even rougher treatment for this diplomatic disaster and is mounted on a mare with ass’s ears and mane, chiming, she says, ‘with a prolonged portrayal of Guy as a fool’.

Comic interludes such as this are offset with moments when darker forces seem at play as mythical creatures descend on the tapestry, from part-human centaurs and sphinxes to two-headed dragons: figureheads for malevolent forces whose presence issues a warning. Such beasts may suggest the conflict between intellect and savagery or reflect the Norman view of Harold as a two-faced traitor who broke his oath to uphold William’s claim to the English throne; while fork-tongued wyverns spouting bile hint at the venomous rumours and lies undermining William’s authority.

But for all these formidable creatures, it’s the open-beaked birds who perhaps speak to us most directly. As they flap their striped wings between the wobbly-lined borders and crane their necks to view the action, we can almost hear their cacophony. Their reaction to the story, writes Prof Owen-Crocker in Squawk Talk (2006), is much like our own. The tapestry amuses, fascinates, delights and horrifies us ‘just like the feathered watchers in the border’, she says. ‘We are the birds; the birds are us.’

In spite of their propaganda effort with the Bayeux Tapestry, the Normans have generally had a bad press. Sweeping like mailed gauleiters across the face of Anglo-Saxon England after 1066, they were certainly violent and greedy — yet no one can deny that they had energy or that they transformed England in ways that have since rippled across the globe.

Across the country, they rapidly flung up mottes and baileys, those earthen hills topped by a wooden palisade and a rough, fortified dwelling. Rebellions were repressed with iron-fisted severity. By the time the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, swathes of Yorkshire and Durham were described as ‘wasta’, testament to the scorched-earth policies they adopted in the grim Harrying of the North. Those Anglo-Saxon nobles, the thegns (or thanes), who survived Hastings were dispossessed: in a generation, 95% of their lands had been turned over to Norman knights. Most of the people who lived on those lands became serfs, trapped in the intricate hierarchy of the new feudal system.

The English Church — the seat not only of faith, but of learning, gentility and art — was likewise purged. The last Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury, Stigand, was replaced by a French monk, Lanfranc, in 1070 and the whole church hierarchy was restaffed with Continental bishops and clergy, with papal blessing. Close on the heels of the clergy came the lawyers, as the old system of shire government met the strictures of Roman law, which favoured the Crown.

Small wonder, then, that, over time, the Norman settlement seemed to cast a baleful shadow across the sunlit uplands of Anglo-Saxon England. The country, people said, groaned under the Norman yoke. The Diggers and Levellers of the Civil War looked back to pre-Norman England as a golden age for the working man. Thomas Jefferson took the free, egalitarian Anglo-Saxons as his model for America and considered the Normans to be a bunch of carpetbagging foreign toffs. Victorian Protestants admired pre-Conquest England as a land beyond Romish influence; even Monty Python condemned the Normans as rude and snobbish. ‘Your mother,’ says a castle guard in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with a thick French accent, ‘was a hamster, and your father smells of elderberries.’

William of Malmesbury was a 12th-century historian with a Norman father and English mother and took quite a different line. The incomers, he wrote, ‘breathed new life into religious standards, which had been declining everywhere, so that now you may see churches and monasteries rising in a new style of architecture in all the towns, villages, and country places’.

A whitish freestone the Normans brought from Caen in France was the foundation of the new style. It takes carving easily and was used liberally. From an intricate chancel arch at St Peter’s in Tickencote, Rutland, to the rounded apse of London’s St Bartholomew the Great, Norman churches exude an air of confidence, as simple as they are sublime — soaring to the indescribable glories of Durham Cathedral, work on which was begun in 1093. Embellished, damaged and restored down the centuries, the stone churches the Normans built for their new estates remain today at the heart of the English parish system.

The Normans were especially keen on towers. They experimented at Caen in 1067 and swiftly brought the idea across the Channel. By the time of Henry I’s death in 1135, every Saxon cathedral in England, at Winchester and Rochester as at Worcester and Ely, had been torn down and rebuilt in a massive Romanesque style, with suitable towers (even before the Conquest, Edward the Confessor, brought up in Normandy, used Norman masons at Westminster Abbey and sent Norman knights to build castles along the Welsh border).

Then, the Normans gave us French. Nobody knows how these Norse men managed to learn French so quickly themselves, having arrived in Normandy as rude Vikings barely a century earlier, but they did. The English, typically, eventually managed to cram French vocab from the Normans, but utterly failed to master the grammar. By the time we gave up the effort and reverted to writing in English (Henry IV, who reigned from 1399, was the first king to speak English), we had absorbed thousands of words. In particular, French terms for government and law made their way into common English, words such as parliament, court, jury, justice, crown, tax, prison, judge and verdict.

The result of the collision of Norman French and Old English is a language truffled with French terms and equivalents, such as royal/kingly, enquire/ask, insane/mad. The French equivalent still implies status, so although you might live in a flat, you offer to sell an apartment. Curiously, scholars dismiss the widespread belief that as the lords ate beef and pork, the peasants looked after cows and pigs. The so-called Norman food myth ignores the fact that the way the words are used today only began 500 years after the Conquest and may simply reflect the later prestige of French cuisine.

Much of what the Normans introduced to England in brutal and simple form would mellow into something more suited to the English temperament. The free and easy Saxons never bothered much with castles, but the Normans were wild for them, creating architectural marvels such as the White Tower at the Tower of London or Rochester Castle in Kent, which thrill the visitor to this day. Castles were useful for subduing the locals and good insurance against being murdered in your bed by the disgruntled peasantry you had just reduced to serfdom.

The feudal system, which the Normans imposed on England, buttressed by those forbidding castles, tended to produce a highly tenacious landowning class with a firm grip on its acreage and a penchant for deer parks and productive farms. Soon, aristocrats were to be found adding creature comforts to their strongholds and hanging their halls with self-aggrandising mottos and escutcheons (it was the Normans who wore devices on their shields, to identify them in battle, which slowly morphed into the intricate glories of 13th-century heraldry).

Having established the pattern, the baronial landholding softened in style as the centuries rolled by. The grip, however, remained firm. Castles, chilly and cramped, gave way to manor houses and fine country houses, ‘amidst their tall ancestral trees’. English estates came complete with home farm, deer park and hunting rights and, sometimes, even a surname (Old French sur and nom) based on their location. The feudal idea of land as the basis of hereditary rank, held from the Crown, was buttressed by the idea of primogeniture, which saw estates pass down intact to a single heir, rather than being divided among children. Primogeniture wasn’t a direct Norman import, in the way of fallow deer or escutcheons, yet it was implicit in how the law developed after 1066, reinforced by strict laws of entail.

Under the Normans, the shift from Winchester to London accelerated, not least because English trade, in wool especially, now ran in a southerly direction. Wine came back together with the stone and so did the skills to maintain and expand the English wine industry. The conquerors also brought fallow deer for the hunt, as well as introducing dovecotes for pigeon flesh, eggs, manure and feathers. As to whether the Normans brought rabbits, the jury — something else they introduced — is out on that one.

Dovecotes and vineyards appear in the Domesday Book, commissioned two decades after the Conquest and completed in only two years. A unique investigation into rights, duties, landholdings and resources, nothing like it was to appear anywhere in Europe for another 800 years. The Anglo-Saxons had laid the administrative groundwork, but it was the Normans that made the system serve central government, so the Crown could tax, adjudicate and govern England with confident precision. Named for the chequered cloth that covered the counting-table and making twice-yearly audits at Easter and Michaelmas, the Exchequer grew directly out of this Norman appetite for prying and recording — as did the concept of juries, embodied in those sworn juries of local men (English and Norman) that gave evidence to Domesday’s royal commissioners.

The Anglo-Norman amalgam worked so well and was so sophisticated for its time that it also shielded England from later developments in Continental law. Magna Carta, which curbed the power of the monarch and established the early notion of English liberties, was the consequence.

Those more likely to commission a portrait than buy an abstract painting are probably already queuing outside the door of Jonathan Yeo (b. 1970). It was from his studio that The King’s huge red official portrait emerged in 2024.

However, many English artists painting today are not interested in producing a specific likeness. Rather, they are drawn to the possibilities of the figure itself.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977) paints swiftly and assertively. Her black bodies, on show until September 17 at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhillon-Sea, East Sussex, as part of the Hayward Gallery touring exhibition ‘To Improvise A Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates’, dance, leap, ponder, read or pose in socks and underpants.

All make their presence felt, despite being drawn from her own imagination, as do the figures of American-born Chantal Joffe (b. 1969), who has lived in England since the age of 13. She works from life (and from photographs of her own family), but her paintings of mothers and children are not intended solely to represent specific individuals — rather, they consider the complex states of motherhood and parenting.

English painting has had a long and fruitful relationship with artists born overseas — one-quarter of the founding members of the RA came from abroad, including the Swiss-born Angelica Kauffman and American Benjamin West. They brought with them new ideas and styles and joined forces with English-born artists to debate and exhibit great art.

Today, England is an important world centre for figurative painters who were born overseas — the late Paula Rego (1935–2022) moved here from Portugal in 1976 and stayed until her death more than 45 years later. London is also home for Celia Paul (b. 1959) and Kudzanai-Violet Hwami (b. 1993), born in India and Zimbabwe respectively. Paul’s solitary self-portraits speak of an introspective life; Hwani’s explosive colours fuse family snapshots with accumulated images from a digital life.

This is part one of our five-part series on the new school of English painting. They will be published every Thursday afternoon throughout September.

Click here to read part one, on the new abstract painters.

Almost exactly 960 years ago, on October 14, 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, emerged victorious from the hard-fought Battle of Hastings. It was a confrontation he regarded as a trial by ordeal for the throne of England, bloodily fought out as part of a wider three-way struggle — don’t forget the formidable Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, whose brief invasion underlines England’s ties with Scandinavia — in the neat span of a single year.

In 2026, the anniversary of the battle coincides with the much-publicised display of the 11th-century embroidery familiarly known as the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum. The Tapestry is a compelling work of art with a distinctive visual language that makes it instantaneously and universally recognisable. It is a foundational document of our history.

The narrative of the Tapestry now concludes with the flight of the English from the battlefield, a section of unknown length having been torn off at some point. In some ways, that lost ending is appropriate because the legacy of the battle itself — and the Norman conquest that it secured — remains open to widely contrasting interpretation.

One view has been that the Norman Conquest is something to celebrate. By some in the 19th century, it was even characterised as a crucial step in the nation’s march towards global dominance. In reaction to this positive assessment, there has been a romantic characterisation of the Anglo-Saxons as an honest population cheated of their rightful inheritance by brutal and corrupt foreigners.

Alternatively, there have even been attempts to try and write the Conquest out of history. By this analysis, one social elite was replaced by another leaving society at large unchanged. A simple characterisation of the Norman Conquest, however, is impossible. Not least because it entirely overlooks the longstanding role of the Battle of Hastings as a national foundation myth.

Never has there been conflict in which so many people wished to claim an ancestral presence, but only on the winning side. It became, indeed, to popular late-medieval English sensibility what the Tudors have become to us; a historical horizon beyond which everything was obscure.

This week’s issue of Country Life takes advantage of the popular interest catalysed by the display of the Bayeux Tapestry to revisit the legacy of the Normans. At this distance of time, we are not obliged to take sides. Nor should we allow the pain and destruction their conquest of England undoubtedly caused to blind us to their achievement. In terms of the castles and churches that stud our landscape, and even some of the language we use, 1066 still casts a shadow. We would all do well to know more about this fascinating and tumultuous period.

This feature originally appeared in the September 2, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

I'm standing in front of the exuberant, comedic and muscular paintings of nonagenarian Rose Wylie (b. 1934) at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA), thinking about what makes an artist and their work quintessentially English. Is it humour, scale, technique or none of these things?

The RA first opened its doors in 1768 and its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, spent the next 21 years orating what English art could and should be in his annual Discourses.

As at all European academies, history painting was held in the highest regard, with portraiture, landscape and still life fighting for the lower rungs of art’s hierarchical ladder. Reynolds talked at length of a national school, at the same time as urging English artists to emulate their European neighbours. Yet, today, in our global society, should we still attempt to define art by geographical borders?

Many artists now often study, work and live in different countries to where they were born. To consider ‘English’ artists, we must first define them as those who live and work in England for sustained periods (rather than necessarily being born here). That said, how do we begin to corral all the disparate work these artists produce? Is there any coherence at all?

Despite ongoing financial difficulties for England’s museums and galleries, the recent closure of several major commercial galleries and continued cuts to art-school funding, the country has managed to maintain a thriving art community.

Many overseas artists choose England as their base and English-born artists successfully run studios in metropolitan centres and rural locations. Even if their work often sells in international auctions and art fairs and they exhibit all over the world, it is England that all these artists call home.

Here, too, there are a number of areas of particular interest to contemporary painters right now.

If we follow the lead of auction houses, some of the most sought-after paintings by English artists working today are those that verge on abstraction. Many are being produced by women artists born in the 1990s — Rachel Jones (b. 1991), Jadé Fadojutimi (b. 1993) and Flora Yukhnovich (b. 1990).

Jones only graduated from the RA Schools in 2019, but two years later she was included in the landmark contemporary painting exhibition ‘Mixing it Up: Painting Today’ at the Hayward Gallery, London. Her vivid oil-pastel painting, lick your teeth, they so clutch (2021), is some 23-feet (more than seven yards) long. Viewing it is an immersive experience, as the chewy colours sizzle, pop and shimmer, turning the giant teeth into cosmic landscapes and saturated skies.

Yukhnovich has gone one step further. Her canvases have been exhibited at the Wallace Collection, London, but, in 2025, she created a giant wrap-around mural for the newly restored Frick Collection in New York.

Her exuberant, abstracted florals often take inspiration from Rococo artists, such as François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and they now command seven-figure sums at auction.

Her latest work, conceived in dialogue with site-specific wall paintings and exploring how myths and stories change over time, was on show at the Victoria Miro gallery in Venice this summer.

Collectors similarly scrabble to acquire the latest paintings by Fadojutimi. Her sweeping abstracts come from deep within. They are vast meditations on life, exploring the characters, spaces and personas we create for ourselves.

Today’s abstract artists are ambitious and emotive and their work offers viewers glimpses of imagined spaces and psychic states. They all build on a long tradition of abstract painting in England, by the likes of Bridget Riley (b. 1931), Ian McKeever (b. 1946) and Fiona Rae (b. 1963).

This is part one of our five-part series on the new school of English painting. They will be published every Thursday afternoon throughout September.

'Old old England, lands of golden peace,/Thy fields are spun with gossameres of gold,/And golden garners gather thy increase.’ Thus wrote poet and Nobel prize-winner Sir Ronald Ross in 1914, as war cast a shadow over the British countryside.

The ‘golden peace’ of our cereal fields remains central to our national identity today, spanning three million hectares of land, from the rolling chalk hills of the South Downs to the flat Fenlands of East Anglia, known as the bread basket of Britain. Swathes of sun-coloured crops brighten many of our most beloved artworks, too.

At first glance, Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, of about 1750, appears to focus on the couple taking repose at their Suffolk farm after a shooting expedition. Then, however, the eye journeys across the fields, following rows of stubble to the fruits of their land: plump sheaves of corn — emblems of productivity, property and pride.

In Reapers (1785), George Stubbs, too, shows the landowner taking in the bounty of his estate. Seated on horseback, the master towers over the workers as they slice into the wheat with their sickles. The reassuringly familiar sight of this honey-coloured landscape lingered in the consciousness of John Constable, the son of a corn merchant.

‘I live almost wholly in the fields and see nobody but the harvest men,’ he wrote in August 1815, as he worked on The Wheat Field, a subject that his son, Lionel, resumed in his own work. Framed by poppies and featuring children in bonnets gathering discarded crops as if they were bouquets of flowers, the elder Constable scene offers up an idyllic image of the harvest, where even the accoutrements of a picnic appear to loll in the sun.

Fifty years later, with agriculture radically reshaped by industrialisation, John Linnell’s nostalgic Reapers, Noonday Rest is even more storybook, depicting labourers sleeping beneath a shelter made of hay sheaves as their obedient dog watches over the harvest.

By the time Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles came out in 1891, the cereal field had become the site of a battle between tradition and technology. Although his heroine clings to the past, ‘holding the corn in an embrace like that of a lover’, the sheaves she gathers are now ‘gulped down’ by a ‘buzzing red glutton’ in the form of a steam-powered threshing machine.

Later, artists made technology part of the tableau. The bold geometric forms of modern intrusions such as telegraph poles or a wind engine add drama to Eric Ravilious’s ash-blond fields. A cherry-red tractor contrasted against a backdrop of yellow wheat is a recurrent motif in the naive art of Gary Bunt. We experience these scenes through the eyes of a farmer in cap and braces who populates many of his paintings, gazing out at a sea of corn or napping in a squashy haystack.

Cereal fields, so crucial to our survival, have long been associated with reproduction. Romans worshipped Ceres, the goddess of agriculture and fertility (from whom the word ‘cereal’ is derived), and sprinkled grains on the animals sacrificed to her. In Britain and elsewhere, it was believed that the grain spirit dwelled in the fields and so corn dollies were woven from the last sheaf, to preserve its life force throughout winter.

Writers have drawn on this rich mythology, making the grain field a potent symbol of fecundity and passion. For 18th-century poet James Thomson, author of the extended meditation The Seasons, it is the stage for a burgeoning romance. When ‘Autumn nod- ding o’er the yellow plain/Comes jovial on’ and the harvesting season begins, landowner Palemon is drawn to the unassuming Lavinia, a gleaner who is gathering leftover crops in ‘soft-inclining fields of corn’.

In L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between of 1953, there is intrigue at play as the thickly growing crop fields help conceal an illicit exchange of letters between tenant farmer Ted Burgess and his social superior Marian Maudsley, facilitated by the young Leo Colston, a guest at her Norfolk home, Brandham Hall. The cornfield echoes Burgess’s virility and fluctuating power. At first, he is as ‘ripe for reaping’ as the corn he cultivates, we read; but, when he learns of Maudsley’s engagement to Lord Trimingham, he becomes ‘like corn that had been cut and left in the sun… the husk of the man he had been’.

Far away, in the sun-baked Tuscan hills, it was reportedly the lack of a suitable filming location that led Merchant Ivory to reimagine the famous kiss scene in the 1985 adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908). However, perhaps it was also the fitting symbolism of a ripening cereal field interspersed with flushes of red that saw a bank ‘carpeted with violets’ replaced by a ‘wavering golden sea of barley touched with crimson stains of poppies’.

In 1832, in Lord Tennyson’s lyrical ballad The Lady of Shalott, the humble cereal was already playing cupid, with the ‘long fields of barley and of rye,/That clothe the wold and meet the sky’ suggesting the sensuous natural world that the Lady of Shalott, imprisoned in a tower, is forbidden to look at directly.

Riding ‘between the barley-sheaves’ as he canters into Camelot comes the handsome Sir Lancelot — an image that is enough to make one blush and does not escape the attention of the Lady of Shalott, who, spying him in her mirror, casts her weaving aside and cranes her neck out the window. Curse or no curse, his ‘coal-black curls’ and ‘mighty silver bugle’ are more than she can resist.

Grain fields acquired a new poignancy in the early 20th century as Britain emerged from the First World War, the calm order of their long, neat lines offering something soothing after years of chaos. In peacetime’s early years, painter John Nash returned to the cereal field time and time again, creating preparatory sketches amid the Chiltern Hills of his beloved Buckinghamshire.

The most famous of these would become The Cornfield (1918): a striped landscape foregrounded by corn sheaves cinched at the waist that bend and tilt like a procession of ballerinas. It was painted, he once remarked, ‘in sheer relief at being still alive and back in the English countryside’. The visual spectacle of our golden crops, stretching as far as the eye can see, still speaks to the most creative spirits.

Often overlooked in the oeuvre of David Hockney, who died in June, are his vibrant wheatfield paintings. Most were made en plein air in the mid 2000s when he returned to East Yorkshire, where, as a schoolboy, he worked in the fields stooking corn. In Wheat Field Near Fridaythorpe, a crisp, uncut crop looms like a giant piece of toast and the energetic strokes of Wheat Field off Woldgate convey the ceaseless movement of the wheat in the wind.

‘The camera can’t get the beauty of this,’ he stated at the time. ‘It just can’t get the space, the thrilling space.’

This feature originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

It's most unusual for a piece of art to be name-checked, never mind be regularly on display in a sitcom, yet Dale Chihuly’s blown-glass sculpture Macchia, worth some $30,000, had pride of place in Frasier, from season six onwards. In one scene, the titular character’s father emptied his pockets into it, causing Frasier to protest: ‘My Chihuly is not a trash can!’

Indeed not: Chihuly was one of the founders of the contemporary studio glass movement in the US and his influence has been profound in the UK. He has helped define the concept that studio glass is the use of the material to make art, rather than vessels produced in factories, and, with teams of blowers creating his designs in his huge hotshop (a series of furnaces), he has shifted the practice from solitary craftsmanship to a collaborative team-based model.

With his pieces featured in more than 200 museums, including the massive installation suspended in the entrance of the V&A Museum, Chihuly transformed traditional craft into a recognised medium of monumental fine art.

Although some artists originally created ‘art vessels’ with a practical function, such as vases or dishes, glass has increasingly been employed to make sculptural objects, the function of which is to be beautiful or thought-provoking, rather than utilitarian.

‘Sometimes, a piece has an opening you could put a handful of flowers or twigs in, but no, studio art glass is not primarily a vase,’ explains Angel Monzon, owner and founder of the Vessel Gallery.

‘It’s the expression. It’s the form, it’s sometimes the storytelling, or the sheer beauty of it, or the skilled craft that goes into it. That can be a challenge for our market here… when it comes to glass, it’s still associated with a vase. Glass art is for an audience that appreciates sculpture.’

Until the 1950s, artists had little hands-on experience of glass. Then, art schools — led by Helen Monro Turner at Edinburgh College of Art and Ronald Stennett-Wilson at the Royal College of Art — began to install their own furnaces and offer their students the opportunity to blow their own glass. Students no longer created designs from a distance, but began to manipulate it to express their ideas.

‘To understand glass fundamentally, you have to engage in it,’ explains Sarah Rothwell, senior curator of Modern and Contemporary Design and glass specialist at the National Museum of Scotland. ‘You have to allow a student to work with it, to understand its possibilities and potential. That’s what was happening during the 1950s and early 1960s. It was the breaking down of those static barriers and allowing students to engage with material.’

Glass-blowing gathered pace with the arrival in the UK of Sam Herman, a Fulbright scholar and formidable self-publicist, who had trained with two pioneers of the art in the US, Harvey Littleton (who, in turn, helped train Chihuly) and Dominick Labino.

Blowing is a very physical activity and involves gathering a blob of molten glass on a blow pipe, shaping it and laying it in frit (coloured crushed glass) to colour it, before gathering more clear glass and heating in the kiln.

Although Herman was not the originator of British studio glass, he promoted it, going on to found The Glassworks, a studio and then gallery in Covent Garden that became extremely influential. A number of ceramicists also began experimenting with glass, the foremost being Peter Layton, whose London Glassblowing studio and gallery is celebrating 50 years this summer.

Layton, 90 next year, is still practising, creating organic works that swirl with colour and pattern. When teaching in the US, he built his own kiln. ‘I burnt myself very badly experimenting, so I was almost out of it as soon as I began,’ he recalls. ‘But glass gets you hooked. It’s addictive.’

Returning to the UK, he set up his own hot-shop in 1976 and, exhilarated by the Working with Hot Glass symposium at the Royal College of Art, commenced his extremely influential career. He worked mostly with colour, including iridescent glass.

‘The lovely thing about iridising was that it gave the glass a wonderfully silky surface. I wanted people to be able to handle glass. It was very tactile and didn’t finger-mark.’

Layton is known for his painterly marks on organic-shaped glass vessels, often inspired by projects with the Royal Academy and National Gallery. His workshop with a ‘nice little gallery attached’ has expanded, providing not only him with a place to develop his own pieces, but also a host of glass-makers, who, in return for working part time for him, use the facilities for their own projects.

Until the 1980s, ‘there was,’ according to Rothwell, ‘a rather macho culture of the glass blower with a very performative hotshop culture, with a focus on process and virtuosity and how bright and vivid the colour.’ At the time, men got all the action, but by the late 1970s and through the next decade, glass artists explored new directions, taking on board the influence of cast glass from the then Czecho-slovakia.

Rather than amorphous, coloured blown vessels, they created sculptural, architectural, often monolithic forms. Some, such as Harry Seager and Danny Lane, worked with cut and glued float glass to create architectural glass, with artists Keith Cummings and Colin Reid developing kiln casting.

Reid takes moulds from books, string instruments and plants to cast in glass to create his sculptures, but today concentrates more on casting from rocks. ‘Glass has qualities that other materials don’t have. You’ve got the outer form of it, but also the inner space, which gives you another whole dimension.

'Casting is an incredibly powerful technique. It gives the possibility to incorporate found objects, found forms and textures into a completely new piece.’ Today, he is also starting to work with a robotic arm to create his sculptures.

By the late 1980s, glass began to be used by artists, especially women, to tell stories and make social commentary, particularly about gender. At the time, collectors and critics were more interested in technique and bravura than ideas, so female makers often lacked galleries, advocates or institutional support. That began to change in the following decade, with artists becoming much more conceptually ambitious, exploring storytelling and issues of identity and ecology, as well as pushing for glass art to be recognised as fine art.

Cast-glass artist Anna Dickinson was a pioneer, as was Emma Woffenden, who creates blown and slumped sculptural works, incorporating other media, to explore the psychological, the human form and social narratives in large-scale body-like sculptures.

‘I was always looking for a language, because I wasn’t very good at expressing myself, so I put it all into the work. It was that thing of finding this language of form,’ she explains.

Glass has also given artist Chris Day his own voice, providing a language to express his personal history. Originally a plumber, he blows the material into copper cages. His work now explores themes of identity, social justice, historical narratives and the impact of colonialism.

‘My new pieces of work are definitely talking about me, finding out about my Jamaican background, my Nigerian heritage. It’s a way of telling people about my identity and being proud for once. For years, I’ve been ashamed of who I am. My work, although about my own identity, ties into historical facts as well.’

Day, as have many others, has been helped by Monzon and his Vessel Gallery, which has cultivated collectors of British glass and has been enormously successful in attracting foreign buyers.

‘We have a great, great movement in cast glass at the moment in this country — for example, Monette Larsen and Nina Casson McGarva are doing some exceptional cast work. Nina uses the approach of blown glass, where you manipulate with your hands and you shape it. She casts glass and then goes in kitted out like an astronaut, with heat-resistant gear and dives into the kiln and manipulates it. She has a minute and a half to form her pieces.’

Other glass artists such as Elliot Walker create sculpture of furniture and objects, not by casting, but by modelling cooling liquid glass. ‘The process of coaxing a complex form out of the liquid glass is unlike working with any other material. Until the very last second, the sculpture is a moving living entity, frozen in time as the glass sets.’

Rather more minimalist is the work of Karlyn Sutherland, who explores place, light and shadow in her architectural glass. Yet glass is expensive to make, especially as the UK has such high energy prices. Today, courses are proving too costly to run and galleries and museums are cautious about showing glass. Britain is such a leader in studio glass: it would be tragic if it was squeezed out of the market.

The International Festival of Glass, including The British Glass Biennale, takes place at The World of Glass, St Helens, Merseyside, from August 27–31.

Last month, Athena visited Claydon House, Buckinghamshire, which this year is the setting for a new venture organised by the National Trust with the contemporary art gallery White Cube.

For the remainder of the season — until September 14 — visitors are asked to book an arrival slot to see an exhibition of 47 works by a diverse group of artists, including Cai Guo-Qiang, Sir Antony Gormley and Dame Tracey Emin, that extends through the main rooms of the house and into the garden. It’s well worth a visit and offers a bit of welcome publicity for a property that, but for the overshadowing local presence of the landscape park at Stowe and Waddesdon, would surely enjoy much greater celebrity within the Trust’s portfolio.

Indeed, its fantastical 18th-century Gothic, Chinese and Rococo interiors by the carver Luke Lightfoot and the stuccadore Joseph Rose are outstanding by any measure. The display of contemporary art in historic houses has been enjoying something of a vogue in recent years and this particular collaboration has raised the bar for the Trust.

In the past, too many exhibitions of this kind have fallen far short of the ambition exemplified in both permanent and temporary shows by privately run estates, such as Boughton, Northamptonshire; Goodwood, West Sussex; Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute; Wolterton and Houghton in Norfolk; or Jupiter Artlands, Edinburgh (to name a few).

Despite being so well established, this genre of exhibition is sometimes presented by contemporary art critics in slightly patronising terms. One resilient fiction —contradicted by their popularity — is that visitors will be offended by the juxtaposition of old and new. Casting contemporary art as something shocking serves artificially to exaggerate its novelty, radicalism and capacity to transform its audience. It also denigrates the historic context, which by implication is possessed of none of those qualities.

Another wishful and self-flattering platitude is that the new ‘breathes life’ into the old or even, in extreme cases of self-delusion, makes it ‘relevant’ (although quite how is never clear). What actually strikes Athena as notable about the collaboration at Claydon, and which generally makes exhibitions of this kind interesting, is that it stands accepted norms of contemporary-art display on their head.

The name White Cube evokes the soulless interiors in which contemporary art is usually displayed; featureless rooms with white walls and an even fall of light. This ideal, seen in museum galleries around the world, aims to focus attention exclusively on the object displayed. At Claydon, by contrast, the interiors have a strong character. That, in turn, creates a dialogue between the rooms and the art displayed in them.

This is not, however, an asymmetric conversation. Certainly, the work of Lightfoot and Rose is never eclipsed by this juxtaposition. It remains a matter of personal taste as to which we might prefer to look at, but — regardless — it is the fact that each helps us see the other differently that matters.

This feature originally appeared in the July 29, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

For more information on the exhibition and how to book, see here.

When Francis Bacon’s grand retrospective opened at the Grand Palais, in Paris, France, on October 26, 1971, his lover George Dyer had been dead two days, lost to a lethal cocktail of drinks and pills. The artist attended the inauguration anyway, a decision that many viewed as callous and which cemented his reputation, at least among Dyer’s friends, as the blackguard in the couple’s tempestuous relationship.

‘I don’t believe he was a villain,’ counters Alistair Hall, who has written a play on Bacon and Dyer. Buggers will portray the troubled artist on stage when it premieres at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this month. ‘I think he made some bad choices. George was also very temperamental and violent. You know, he is often painted as the victim, which he was in many ways, but George was also a perpetrator a lot of the time... I would never say that either of them was a villain.’

Noting that the artist looked awful in the footage from the Grand Palais opening — ‘his lip is cut; he looks like he had been crying’ — Alistair can’t quite fathom why Bacon decided to attend, but then Buggers isn’t a play that passes judgement: ‘I wanted to present these men and their very essence.’

The project is grounded in his long-standing passion for the artist’s work — ‘I feel seen by it, and I see something in it’ — but the final push came from seeing ‘Francis Bacon: Human Presence’ at the National Portrait Gallery: ‘I was so struck by the melancholy and the beautiful way in which that exhibition was curated and the power of his portraits [that] I thought, “I really need to make something about Dyer and Bacon.” They were together for almost a decade, so, yes, it was awful, but there was also so much love and I felt like I wanted to get into the nuance of all of that.’

Writing about Bacon, let alone playing him on stage, is a tall order: ‘He's a real contradiction of a man. I mean, we all are, as human beings — we say one thing, we mean another; we feel one thing the next minute, and we feel something else the next day — but Bacon, I feel like he's that, amplified.’

In a brave, inspired move, Alistair — who jokes that the artist, were he alive today, would find him ‘unbearable’ because he leads a quiet, wholesome life — decided to get in touch with the artist’s estate. ‘I thought I'd be in and out within 20 minutes and they'd laugh at me.’ Instead, they opened the archive to him, so he could research all the material from the Dyer years. ‘I had my last visit there two weeks ago. They've been incredible and I'm so so grateful. They've never asked to see the scripts. They've never tried to approve anything and they've been really supportive.’ Yet, the play, he is keen to add, is as much about Dyer as it is about Bacon: ‘One thing that was so important to me was to really give George a voice and some authorship of his life.’

‘In the beginning, we explore the electricity and the excitement. I imagine their first morning together after the night they met. Then, we are transported to years later, when things aren't working. We all know what that feels like to fall in love, to think that this is it, to think that you found everything…To know that it starts as that, then it becomes something very toxic and very violent and very unpredictable, and then it becomes this tragedy — yes, it's been really hard [to write] and weirdly, it's taken me back to some emotional parts. I've been thinking about when I was a teenager and I'd just moved to London, and I had all these hopes and dreams, and I got waylaid with addiction, and I had all this deep sense of belonging all the time for someone to rescue me.’

He believes that something similar contributed to the implosion of the couple. ‘With Bacon and Dyer, there's so much longing in that relationship, they both expect something from each other, but the other person cannot give it and they are muddled up in addiction. Both men are alcoholics; they really enable each other, and both are screaming at each other for help or for something else. But neither is listening.’

Although legend has it that the two men met when Dyer broke into the artist’s apartment, they had, far more mundanely, chanced upon each other at a pub in Soho in 1963. Art historian Michael Peppiatt reports the artist’s recollection of that first encounter in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma: ‘George was down the far end of the bar and he came over and said “You all seem to be having a good time, can I buy you a drink?”’

They could hardly have come from more different worlds. ‘Bacon, when they met, had just had the Tate retrospective. He had paintings on display in New York, his profile was growing and growing,’ explains Alistair. He had also come from an affluent, prominent family in the first place. ‘He left home very young, he knew trouble, but he had safety in a way that George [didn’t]. George was from a working-class background. He was in and out of prison. He struggled with his identity, so privilege separates these two.’

Yet, they fell for each other and were much in love, at least initially, with Dyer becoming a muse to Bacon, as much as a lover — the first portraits of him date from very early in their relationship. Alistair was especially moved by their photos together: ‘Pictures of them on the Orient Express; pictures of them on holiday. That's when you think, “they were happy at times”... You really see domestic moments between these men and what I couldn't get my head round is the relaxation in each other, which is easy to forget when you know what's coming, when you know the ending.’

Rather than chronicling the unravelling of their lives, however, he imagines three moments at the outset, halfway and end of their relationship, a tripartition recalling Bacon’s triptychs (the title of the play — Buggers — is also a nod to the artist’s work: it’s the nickname by which one of his paintings, the 1953 Two Figures, became known).

Yet, Buggers is not — or not only — a play about the artist and his lover (Alistair says you don’t need to be familiar with Bacon and his work to enjoy it).

He, director Alice Wordsworth and Peter Clements, who plays George, worked to strip Bacon and Dyer of their art-historical significance and present them instead as a ‘very human’ couple: ‘They could be my mum, they could be my brother, because the themes are the same in this relationship. It's the human condition of belonging, feeling misunderstood, identity, class, sexuality, desire — it’s things that aren't just exclusive to Bacon and Dyer.’

A story he shares from the earliest days of the play drives his point home: ‘Something that really struck me before I started writing [is that] I went to visit Dyer's grave. It was in the same cemetery where a dear friend of mine died by suicide 10 years ago and I thought, “These are two men, decades apart, but the struggles are the same.” The struggles are the same and I think that was my impetus.’

‘Buggers’ is at Pleasance’s Upstairs at Pleasance Courtyard, in Edinburgh, from August 5–30 (except 17 and 24)

No show compares to the Royal Academy’s (RA) Summer Exhibition. Its uniqueness derives from history and format: select public submissions are displayed together with works by invited artists, Royal and Honorary Academicians, in the world’s largest survey of contemporary art and architecture.

Perhaps because of this, it has been a lightning rod for artistic rows almost continuously since it began and many of its biggest controversies have centred on who gets in and where they are hung.

It all started in 1768, when 34 artists and architects, including Reynolds, Gainsborough and Angelica Kauffman, obtained George III’s permission to establish the RA and hold an annual exhibition. The first show took place a year later, featuring 136 works (today, there are about 1,200).

Artists used to apply the final touches to their paintings on Varnishing Day. In 1832, Constable was busy perfecting The Opening of Waterloo Bridge when Turner came in and realised that his seascape, Helvoetsluys, didn’t stand out compared with his rival’s work — so he added a bright red buoy to it. When he saw it, a dejected Constable said: 'He has been here and fired a gun.'

Today, members of the public can submit up to two works for consideration. The final selection is made in the gallery in an ‘eight-day hang’, during which committee members are fortified by swigs of a legendary ‘beef’ tea, the recipe for which is secret.

For a picture that sent shockwaves through late-18th-century Britain, The Conjuror, by Nathaniel Hone the Elder (1718–84), looks innocuous enough.

Clad in rich red robes, an ancient wizard, luxuriant beard streaming past his neck to skim the top of his chest, summons with his wand a collection of Old Master prints to make new paintings.

The artist’s contemporaries, however, recognised in the figure the president of the RA, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and in the scene a satire of the great artist’s tendency to ‘borrow’ extensively from Renaissance works.

Nonetheless, The Conjuror, now at the National Gallery of Ireland, was accepted for the RA exhibition — until Angelica Kauffman saw herself in the woman dancing naked in the background, since removed, but still visible in a sketch belonging to Tate.

Hone wrote to her to rebut the accusation: ‘To convince you, madam, that your figure in that composition was the farthest from my thoughts, I now declare I never at any time saw your works but with the greatest pleasure, and that respect due to a lady whom I esteem as the first of her sex in painting, and amongst the loveliest of women in person’ — and offered to paint over the figure.

Kauffman remained unappeased and threatened to pull out all her pictures if Hone’s painting was shown, which in turn led the RA Council to turn it down. This, however, incensed the artist, who decided to stage a solo exhibition of his works in another gallery, giving The Conjuror pride of place and complaining in an affidavit that neither RA treasurer Sir William Chambers nor three other grandees had taken into account his ‘most explicit declaration’ that he had ‘never introduced, or intended to introduce, any figure reflecting on Mrs. Angelica Kaufmann’.

Despite all this, a year later the furore had already died down: Hone returned to exhibit at the RA in the summer of 1776 and continued to do so until his death.

What to look out for at this year's Summer Exhibition

1. Sir Grayson Perry was elected a Royal Academician in 2011. This year he's exhibiting Behold Humanity!, a large-scale tapestry that reveals what the artist thinks about AI (spoiler alert: it's not particularly positive)
2. Honorary Royal Academician Marina Abramović's The Kitchen VIII from her photographic series 'The Kitchen, Homage to Saint Therese' is also on display. The photographs — which were staged in an abandoned kitchen space in Spain — pay tribute to Saint Therese of Ávila, a mystic renowned for her intense spiritual experiences and levitation episodes often associated with domestic and kitchen spaces
3. When Country Life put a cat on its front cover for only the second time in its 130-year-long history, we didn't think the RA would follow suit with a dedicated feline display, but here we all are. The standout is Jill Feld’s frantic black cat painting

The RA's Summer Exhibition is open until August 23. Visit their website for more information and to book.

ES Devlin creates temporary societies. A multi-talented artist, she develops environments for theatre, opera, rock concerts and dance, as well as immersive installations, performances and artworks, where the audience, through the combined magic of sound, light, movement and text, briefly becomes a community, sharing attention rather than passively viewing.

She is an ‘Everythingist’, someone who encompasses the vastness of human knowledge, combining diverse skills, passions and possibilities. The term was originally coined for Natalia Goncharova — another multi-talented woman, who painted, wrote, made illustrations and designed sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes — and is also the name of the installation that Devlin devised in response to Goncharova’s Firebird backcloth at V&A East.

Devlin cannot be pigeonholed as merely a set designer, although her creations cover a roll call of events — from operas such as Philip Glass’s Orphée at the Royal Opera House (2005), to plays such as The Lehman Trilogy (2018) and dance Connectome for the Royal Ballet (2014). She’s also worked on immersive structural environments for Kanye West and Jay-Z’s Watch the Throne arena tour (2011), fashion installations for the 100th anniversary of Chanel No. 5 (2021) and the transformation of public and commercial spaces, including the closing and opening ceremonies of the Olympics in London (2012) and Rio (2016), respectively.

The wide-ranging nature of her practice — which is also evident in the variety of accolades she has received, from a Tony and multiple Oliviers to The Critics’ Circle Award for Contribution to the Arts (as well as an OBE and CBE) — is partly rooted in what she calls her ‘feral’ childhood.

She was born in 1971, the second of four children, to educationalist parents. ‘We weren’t allowed to watch much television; our constant refrain was: “We’re bored.” Mum used to say: “Only boring people are bored, here’s a Rice Krispie packet and a pair of scissors, go and make something.”

'We were endlessly cutting up yoghurt pots and cardboard boxes. We would make games and toy theatres, performing plays in them. We had a small space under the stairs, which was dark, where we could control the light, where we would experiment with our little projector.’ It was the precursor to her sophisticated use of light today.

A gifted musician, she played three instruments: each Saturday, from the age of 11, she took the train — unaccompanied — from Rye in East Sussex to the Royal Academy of Music, tacking on visits to galleries and jumble sales.

Intending to do printmaking and photography at Central St Martins, she was introduced to set design at the Motley Theatre Group. ‘I knew nothing about set design, but there was a dark red room full of people making model theatres, listening to opera, reading books, covered with reference images on the wall, in dialogue with each other.’

Enticingly, there was 24-hour access to the studio. ‘I knew that I had so much work to do that I thought: “Well, even if this theatre thing is of no use, I’ll have this studio and I’ll just stay up all night making the stuff I want to make.”’ It was, in fact, of ‘use’. In 1995, she won the Linbury Prize and designed Marlowe’s Edward II for the Octagon Theatre, Bolton, Greater Manchester, and, in 1998, was invited to design the first ballet to be performed by the Rambert dance company at the newly refurbished Sadler’s Wells, followed closely by Pinter’s Betrayal for Trevor Nunn at the National Theatre.

Her career continued with increasingly spectacular projects worldwide. For any of her projects, Devlin watches rehearsals intensively and, during the ones for Wagner’s six-hour long Parsifal (2012), having to read the translations in subtitles, she became aware that she was doing more concentrated, uninterrupted reading in those 10 days than she had done for some time. ‘That was a source of interest to me, and also slight grief; it reminded me that I used to be much more absorbed in reading than I am now — I wondered whether a lot of people felt like me.’

Her response was to develop a collective reading event with Hannah Barry for Bold Tendencies (2018), in which Benedict Cumberbatch with 2,000 participants read The Order of Time by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli.

Her most recent projects are also related to books and libraries, perhaps harking back to the days when she read English at Bristol and fell in love with the etymology of words. Both from last year are The Library of Light at the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy — a 59ft-diameter revolving cylinder of 3,200 books — and The Library of Us, a triangular 20ft-tall, illuminated rotation of 2,500 books with a circular reflective pool in Miami, Florida, US.

Following on from those two, Devlin has just made her first indoor library, The Library of the Four Winds, a sculpture of hundreds of books inside Sir John Vanbrugh’s temple of the same name at Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, in commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the architect’s death.

‘He has many parallels for me. The fascination he had with literature, with architecture, with geometry, with systems — he cared about systems, systems in power, systems in architecture, so there’s so much for me to respond to. I’ve made a revolving (illuminated) library.

'Everything I do is personal to me, as well as responding to situation and report, and it’s a library of all the books that made me who I am.’ She reads out selected passages and the books encircling the Temple, as well as those in the library, are her own, complete with her copious underlinings: ‘2026 is the National Year of Reading so we really hope this is going to encourage people to come to sit, to meet each other through text, and we’ll be doing some drawing classes, too.’

With such an all-encompassing career, her brain never seems inactive. ‘I draw to translate something that’s inside me to the outside. Drawing is me thinking and that’s how I figure stuff out. There are neurons in the end of my fingers, and [with] the friction, the meeting of the pencil to the paper with my hand and my eye, thoughts will happen in that process, which if I just lie in bed thinking about it, imagining, won’t be the same.

'You have to make the mark. The idea will take a different form if I pick up a pen or a piece of charcoal or a pencil.’ Her drawings are often in response to an invitation. However, projects commence with a feeling, based on a hinterland of past sensa-tions, experiences and responses.

‘How do I feel? What’s the experience? The process starts by going to a place. Having recorded experience, bodily apprehension of situation, the next is association: “What do I want to bring to bear here, of my batch of poems, of all the things that I’ve picked up along the way…”

'They’re visual and tactile, but they’re also mental, bringing in, always, a lot of reading and philosophical discussion. I use a lot of my instinct (that) is often to quite simple forms.’

Yet, her projects are always collaborative. She is not a fan of the ‘artist as genius’ approach. She collaborates with many different people, directors, gallerists, technical experts and skilled artisans — not least as the artistic director of Homo Faber 2026’s ‘Island Of Light’ in Venice, Italy, a festival of craftsmanship comprising 15 installations and 500 makers — as well as audiences.

This collaboration is not episodic, it’s a continuous chain of influences and shared thinking. ‘We always say that each project we come to, we come through the lens of the thing we just did and the people we just worked with, so we’re always… one step removed from a conversation we just had with someone else. With the artworks, I’m often building on a line of enquiry.’

She has an ongoing project ‘A National Portrait for the National Portrait Gallery’, a digital artwork developed in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture Lab, where everyone is invited to ‘co-author an evolving portrait of the nation’.

An individual’s photograph is transformed into an animated digital portrait based aesthetically on Ms Devlin’s previously executed charcoal and chalk drawings. The moving digital sketch marks resemble a portrait constantly redrawing itself, repeatedly resolving one likeness, followed by another and another, in an expanding sequence of the faces of all who participate.

She employs new technologies with skill, conscious of their transitory nature. ‘You have to flow with the moment where technology still feels like magic, because magic allows us to, for a moment, see through the lens of our actual senses rather than through our preconceived expectancy of what we’re going to see. When you destabilise someone’s perceptions about how coins and cards behave in a magic trick, then you destabilise their perceptions about how blue the sky is and they might look with their eyes, instead of simply assuming they know.’ Devlin never fails to supply the magic that changes those perspectives.

Es Devlin’s 'The Library of the Four Winds' is at Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, until September 27. ‘The Everythingist’ is at the V&A East, London, until October 18. ‘Es Devlin: Other Worlds’ will be at the Design Museum, London, from October 2–April 4, 2027

This feature originally appeared in the July 29, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Who would have thought the victim of a murder could make a piece of good dining-room art? Yet, for those sitting around the table at Ston Easton Park, Somerset, it proved an ideal conversation starter. It brought out the Agatha Christie in everyone and, in its own dark way, did exactly what dining-room art is meant to do: give people something to talk about.

The story of the painting made a particular impression on author Emma Craigie, not least because the murder was meant to have taken place at Ston Easton itself, where she spent an influential part of her childhood. ‘The painting was called Four Servants of Ston Easton Estate. It was by Thomas Beach, a pupil of Reynolds,’ she explains. ‘It featured, as its name suggests, four servants (unusual in itself), one of whom, a maid, was said to have been murdered. In an attic room of the house, there was a dark stain on the floor. My dad always said it was the blood of the maid who had been killed. The painting was like having a thriller on the wall.’

Not every house can count on an artistic murder mystery to entertain guests, however, and the question of what makes good dining-room art is an issue that new country-house owners also appear to be facing: Charlie Thomas of Bonhams has noticed that, post-covid, ‘many people who had lived in major cities moved into much larger houses and suddenly found themselves with extra rooms to fill — including the dining room. They started with the table, chairs and sideboard and then realised they needed the art on the walls, too’. What, indeed, were they to put?

The answer, it seems, is that almost anything can work, as long as it fulfils certain criteria. ‘Bear in mind,’ says art dealer, writer and broadcaster Philip Mould, ‘that a dining room is a place where people are often seated in the same spot for two or three hours — without escape. Its walls, therefore, offer a unique opportunity for contemplation.’ Historically, Mould points out, the trend was for still lifes of animals, fowl, fruit, game and flowers, ‘the work of painters such as Melchior d’Hondecoeter and Jan Weenix, no doubt intended in part to aid digestion’. However, his own preference is for modern British portraits, ‘works that bring recognisable humanity to the gathering, spark conversation and offer someone else to commune with once you have exhausted those on your left and right’.

Like Mould, interior designer Jane Churchill believes that, ‘if you’ve got anything that’s going to be a talking point, into the dining room it goes’. She also stresses that, ‘when it comes to dining art, things are a lot less formal’ than in the past — the kitchen has increasingly become a favoured eating area. ‘Where once the old family portraits dominated rather dark dining rooms, we now see clients being a lot more creative and colourful. We had a client who had some wonderful Picasso prints that needed a good audience. Her solution was to display them on the far wall and create an open bookcase alongside, with pots, books and china. Her own favourite is a modern ink-on-paper piece featuring a bright pink butterfly by Sarah Graham.’

Don’t ‘put people off their food’ is the golden rule of natural-pigment paint evangelist and country-house interior designer Edward Bulmer. ‘Not long ago, I had dinner in a large Victorian dining room. Across the wide mahogany table was a full-length St Sebastian commanding the height of the wall and the centre of the room. The flesh oozing blood from the arrows of his martyrdom was hardly a conducive sight.’

Another tip is to choose pictures that appeal to the entire family, if the dining room is one that you use informally at home. In his Herefordshire home, Bulmer once hung The Flagellation of Christ at the Column by Jean Baptiste van Loo. ‘I saw it as a beautifully rendered figure. However, this is not what my daughters felt and one day they asked if we really had to have all the “old pictures” in that room.’ The new works he’s placed on the walls are now ‘a mixture of commissions and acquisitions, all from friends, and so have become a much more meaningful talking point for all generations’.

Statistically, says Thomas, reflecting on content sales handled by Bonhams, ‘if you are going to work out a percentage of what we see in country-house dining rooms, portraits win’. When it comes to what is actually bought, portraits by recognised artists are consistent successes. He calls ‘orphans’ the pictures where the identity of the sitters is unknown and suggests that one solution to the dining-room art conundrum could be to buy these orphans and cover the walls with them en masse. He has seen this done to striking effect in a French château.

The late Martin Miller, antiquarian and co-founder of the Miller’s Antiques Handbook & Price Guide, also used to do this incredibly well in his own houses, buying up quantities of similar prints or paintings to cover the walls with them. When it comes to portraits, however, interior designer Lucy Manners, who lives, with her husband, James Hervey-Bathurst, in the historic setting of Eastnor Castle, cautions that some country-house dining rooms can be very similar, ‘with walls hung exclusively with ancestors, many of whom are not particularly handsome or beautiful. It works better when there are some paintings by good artists and if those paintings are well lit, which is what we have done at Eastnor’.

In such cases, she recommends introducing variety into the hang: a strong modern work, for example, can reset the entire room. ‘I saw a Lucian Freud in one dining room recently, which worked very well because it was so strong.’ A particularly celebrated example of a dining room peppered with portraits is the State Dining Room at Knowsley Hall, Merseyside, home to the Earl and Countess of Derby. When Lady Derby, an art historian by training, arrived, she found that ‘all the portraits were jumbled up in no particular order’. She promptly took them down, unframed them for surface cleaning and frame conservation and rehung them in pairs, arranged in chronological order of succession. ‘I find them very useful for explaining the 600-year history of the Stanley family.’

Her personal favourite is a portrait with a distinctly pioneering backstory: Lady Margaret Beaufort, painted by the English School as a femme seule, a rare position that allowed her to administer her own estate rather than cede control to her husband, Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby. As Lady Derby notes, ‘Beaufort was both the first Countess of Derby and the King’s mother to Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty’.

In the family’s private dining room, where storytelling remains just as important, but the mood is more relaxed, the emphasis shifts from dynastic history to personal narrative. ‘We have a charming Romney of the children of the 12th Earl of Derby, Edward, later the 13th Earl, and his sister Charlotte, both looking rather wistful and sad. Their mother ran off when they were little and their father was pursuing a famous actress in London, so the siblings became very close.’

Perhaps one of the most extraordinary dining rooms in the country is at Trafalgar Park in Wiltshire. When political adviser Michael Wade bought the house (which he has since sold) in 1995, much of it had fallen into ruin. The first thing he did was to restore the old Music Room — featuring a mural painted by Giovanni Battista Cipriani in 1766 — and turn it into a dining room. ‘It depicted romantic paintings of Aphrodite, the Three Graces and Shakespeare. The ceiling and wall areas below the dado rail were decorated so as to frame the mural. The result was to provide a sumptuous immersion when dining at night by candlelight.’

It is a reminder that a mural is not merely decorative, but one of the most powerful ways of transforming a dining room into a complete visual experience — and one that certainly provides a talking point. Whether you opt for mythological murals or Picasso prints, the best dining-room pictures perform their oldest duty: they break the ice, warm up the conversation and occasionally steal the show.

Long before the pudding arrives, someone, somewhere, will always lean forward and ask: ‘So, what’s that one about?’ — especially if it happens to depict the victim of a murder.

You might find it odd to think that the pinnacle of cinematic tension, excitement and action is a train chase featuring a dog and a gun-wielding penguin, but I would challenge anyone who has watched The Wrong Trousers to disagree. The Oscar-winning short film is not only a masterclass in British humour and my favourite film, but also the most famous and beloved example of the talents of Bristol’s Aardman Animations.

The villain of the piece, Feathers McGraw — a penguin lodger hiding a double life as a cunning diamond thief — was such a fan favourite that he returned in Vengeance Most Fowl 31 years later. When this latest installment aired on Christmas Day in 2024, 9.4 million of us watched along. Such is the magic of Britain’s most beloved man and dog.

Wallace & Gromit, and their penguin nemesis, are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the success of the Bristol-born animation studio, which celebrates its 50th birthday this year.

The four-time Oscar winning outfit was founded by Sir Peter Lord and Sir David Sproxton. The pair were not sirs when they met, because they were 12-years-old. As schoolboys in Woking, Surrey, they created ‘Aardman’, a short animated sketch featuring a superhero character, which the BBC later bought. The name is a portmanteau of aardvark (because it sounded funny) and superman. In 1972, they received their first cheque from the BBC, but didn’t yet have a name for their bank account; They decided on ‘Aardman Animations’. It was in 1976 that the studio set up its headquarters in Bristol.

Perhaps it was fate that led them to meet Nick Park at the National Film and Television School. He was working on a student film based on his dad, who loved ‘tinkering about in the shed’. It followed a man who built a rocket in his basement in order to fly to the moon, because of his love of cheese. You’ll know it as A Grand Day Out — the first Wallace & Gromit offering, which was seven years in the making.

The name Gromit was inspired by Park’s electrician brother (a grommet is a ring that protects wires). ‘I liked it, so adopted it,’ he told The Guardian in 2024. Curiously, in Park’s very early sketches for the series, Gromit was a cat. I wonder whether the duo would have experienced the same level of unadulterated adoration. Park joined Aardman in 1985, bringing Wallace & Gromit along for the ride, and the production company went from strength to strength.

Considering the long hours and painstaking work it takes for most films to be made (Aardman have, in later years, experimented with CGI), the studio has had an impressively large output. In addition to the Wallace & Gromit franchise, they are responsible for the Chicken Run films, the various adventures of Shaun the Sheep (who originated as a Wallace & Gromit character in A Close Shave, 1995), Early Man, Flushed Away and Morph. They are also known for Creature Comforts, one of their earlier works voiced by real people, not actors.

They are less well known for the music video to Peter Gabriel’s 1986 track Sledgehammer — an injustice. A random collaboration, but perhaps the lyrics ‘you could have a steam train, if you just laid down your tracks’ put Gabriel in mind of the infamous penguin chase described above.

With the dawn of the noughties, Aardman’s influence grew. Chicken Run (2000) became the studio’s first full-length feature film to be funded by the American powerhouse DreamWorks (perhaps the reasons for the film’s American male lead) and the French company Pathé. This began a significant collaboration between the English and American studios, which expanded Aardman’s audience to the USA.

The next film to benefit from this partnership came in 2005. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit saw our dynamic man-and-dog duo fight to protect the local village vegetable competition from a ravenous, carrot-gobbling beast. They had planned to call the film ‘The Great Vegetable Plot’, but research showed that Americans might not get the gag, because of the language difference, and children would be put off by ‘vegetables’.

Despite not being hungry for their five-a-day, the film was a massive hit. This was the first feature-length Wallace & Gromit offering and topped box office charts in the USA and at home, as well as winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film and a BAFTA for Best British Film.

Its success was followed in 2007 by Shaun the Sheep, which ran for seven series and also spanned several feature films. It is, apparently, a very big hit in New Zealand after the government pushed for greater awareness around their sheep tourism industry. The more you know.

Some of the biggest names in acting, such as Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham-Carter, Eddie Redmayne and Tom Hiddleston, have lent their voices to Aardman productions. Large orchestral tributes, theme park rides, numerous sculptures, a Coldplay music video and a garden in Japan, of all places, have become de rigueur for the once tiny studio, which is, at its core, committed to training the next generation of animators at Aardman Academy. How do they make magic?

‘It is about that craft, the level of detail and the “thumb-printiness” that you see in our productions. That is really authentic, and audiences recognise that,’ says Ngaio Harding-Hill, who started working for Aardman in 1999, and is now their director of attractions, live experiences and archive. ‘We always talk about the second- and third-look details that you see in our productions,’ she adds. ‘If you watch one of our films two, three, or even four times, every time you'll see a different detail in the background that speaks to the Easter eggs and gags that are integral to Aardman.’

You can indulge in these details at leisure at MShed, in Bristol, where Cracking Exhibition, Gromit!, is running until September 13 — just one in a long line of tributes to the creative company’s success as it turns 50. This year will also see the opening of an immersive show at the London Lightroom and Aardman’s 11th feature film — Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom.

Aardman is Bristol and Bristol is Aardman. At the gift shop in M Shed, a museum all about the city, you can buy everything from a Feathers McGraw water bottle (the lid is his rubber-glove hat — £29.95) to a silver pair of Wallace & Gromit cufflinks (£135). The demand for Aardman’s creations, it seems, is never ending, much like the train tracks in The Wrong Trousers.

Inside the exhibition, which has taken about two weeks to install, a gigantic birthday cake topped with 18 different Aardman puppets welcomes me. Displayed around the room are original concept illustrations for various characters, story boards and real sets from Aardman productions. Sadly the collection is limited to mostly pieces from the studio’s past 20 years, due to a fire in 2005 that destroyed much of Aardman’s archive.

‘I think, locally, people feel really fond of Aardman,’ says Helen McConnell Simpson, the senior curator at Bristol Museums. ‘The spirit of creativity and the homemade quality really speaks to Bristol's DIY art scene, our street art and our spirit.’ Many of the films pay homage to the city in various ways, she explains. For example, the museum where the diamond heist takes place in The Wrong Trousers is based on Bristol Museum. The bus used in Shaun the Sheep: The Movie is green, a tribute to the 1950s models that were once used to get around Bristol.

‘The message [of the exhibition] is really around creativity, celebration and joy. It’s a tough old world at the moment, and having something that people can come to and really lose themselves in is really lovely,’ says McConnell Simpson.

Exhibitions curator Steven Bradley thinks the intergenerational appeal of the work is its biggest strength. ‘It's become this staple, often of Christmases, when your family comes together, you sit down and you watch something,’ he says. ‘You're not necessarily on your phones or tablets and you're watching something that's reflecting everyday life. That’s quite an impressive legacy, I think.’

At the Young V&A in east London, where Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends is running until November 15, children press their faces against the glass, getting as close as they can to Aardman’s creations. The hot weather hasn’t put them off in the slightest. They tinker with lighting rigs, learning how stop-motion sets are set up for films and dream up their own characters on scraps of paper.

Tanaya Basu De Sarkar, V&A assistant curator, is chuffed about how much of a hit it has been. ‘Stop motion is a really accessible craft — that’s something we wanted to talk about throughout the exhibition. It's something children can go home and have a go at themselves,’ she explains.

‘Peter Lord and David Sproxton met when they were children, which is something we wanted to run through the exhibition as well. The response has been great. I know people who have said their kids have gone home and said that they want to be a stop-motion animator.’

A short tube journey away, at the Barbican Centre, I attended a Family Film Club screening of The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I had been worried that the old-fashioned world of odd contraptions, copious gorgonzola and ‘ooh aye lad’ regional accents wouldn’t be as popular with today’s children as it had been with me as a child, and indeed as an adult. I needn’t have. The cinema is packed. When Susie Evans, a film curator, asks the crowd what we are watching today, dozens of tiny fists shoot into the air. ‘Wallace & Gromit!’ a chorus of little voices shout.

When Julian Nott, who has scored the Wallace & Gromit franchise, comes on stage to introduce the works, the crowd falls into a hushed silence. As he talks about his years-long involvement with the films, his passion echoes the sentiments of everyone who I have spoken to about Aardman’s work. ‘Everybody loves the characters, don't they? I mean, Gromit is perfect.’ The children listen in awe.

Since being a student with Park, Nott has been involved with Aardman’s journey. In the process, he has created a soundtrack so distinctive and cheerful, people could bring to mind the beloved man and dog pairing that it signifies blindfolded. ‘When I first encountered Aardman it was a completely different company,’ he recalls. ‘It was a tiny little animation company, if I remember rightly, in a roof space — an attic, virtually — in a rundown building in Bristol somewhere, with just two guys: David and Peter.’

Back then ‘it wasn’t famous,’ Nott says, ‘but it was unique’. ‘They had a real original personality to the work they were doing.’ Wallace & Gromit, he thinks, has had the biggest success because it is ‘the product of one man’s imagination’.

‘Nick Park made Wallace & Gromit because he loved it. He believed in it. He loved those characters — and that's quite different from most animation, which is made for business purposes.’ Here is the real reason that Aardman is so beloved. It is not a money making machine. It hasn’t been caught up in the idea of what film studios are ‘supposed’ to be doing.

While other companies rehash the same old stories, pumping out live action versions that have already been told quicker than you can say ‘tale as old as time’, Aardman lives life in the slow lane, hand-making sets and manually manipulating their beloved clay characters frame by frame.

Sure, they’ve dabbled in CGI, but at their core is this age-old craft. They remain in Bristol, shunning the ‘big city’ appeal of London, and continue to make most of their films ‘the old-fashioned way’, with the characteristic British wit that made them world famous — isn’t that just cracking?

'Cracking Exhibition, Gromit!', runs until September 13 at M Shed, Bristol. Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends runs until November 15 at the Young V&A, London.

‘The palm of the exhibition belongs to a large landscape by Constable, with which the ancient or modern masters have very few masterpieces that could be put in opposition.’ Visiting the Royal Academy show in 1821, French novelist Charles Nodier was mesmerised by The Hay Wain.

The picture, which usually hangs at the National Gallery, is now returning to the county that inspired it, where it will star in the eponymous exhibition at the Colchester + Ipswich Museum’s Christchurch Mansion, Suffolk: ‘The Hay Wain: Walking Constable’s Landscape’.

1. Despite Nodier’s enthusiasm, the picture struggled to sell. Constable’s friend John Fisher expressed interest. However, he told the painter: ‘I cannot now reach what it is worth, and what you must have.’ Dealer John Arrowsmith had fewer quibbles and offered a meagre £70 for it, which Constable refused
2. When Arrowsmith came back with £250, the artist relented and sold it, albeit reluctantly: ‘It might promote my fame and procure me commissions, but it is property to my family; though I want money dreadfully’
3. Arrowsmith took the painting to France, where it went on to become a sensation at the Paris Salon in 1824. It earned Constable a gold medal — and made his name, as the painter wrote to his friend Fisher: ‘Collins called. He says I am a great man at Paris, that it is curious they speak there of only three English artists, namely Wilkie, Lawrence, and Constable’
4. The Hay Wain returned to Britain in 1838, eventually entering the collection of Henry Vaughan in 1866. Legend has it he was later offered an astounding £10,000 for it, at which he replied: ‘If this picture is worth the sum you name, I cannot longer afford to keep it; and when it leaves my possession, it shall go into the custody of the Nation.’ This it did, as Vaughan bequeathed it to the National Gallery in 1886
5. The Hay Wain will now be on display alongside paintings from the museum’s own collection, including two of the painter’s childhood home, Golding Constable’s Flower Garden and Golding Constable’s Kitchen Garden

‘The Hay Wain: Walking Constable’s Landscape’ at Colchester + Ipswich Museum is on until October 4. Visit the museum's website for more information.

It was the shortest reign in the history of England. On July 10, 1553, Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen of England and Ireland, only for the Privy Council to depose her nine days later and place her cousin Mary on the throne. Lady Jane first lost the crown, then her head and, ultimately, thanks to French painter Paul Delaroche, even her dignity.

‘The art around Jane Grey is absolutely dominated by the 1833 portrait of her, kneeling with the executioner on one side,’ says historian Philippa Gregory, the author of The Last Tudor, a novel on the Grey sisters, who finds the painting ‘an absolute classic image of female weakness painted onto a woman who was not weak.

'It’s the most irritating portrait there is: Jane is on her knees. She’s blindfolded. She’s dressed in a white nightgown. It’s silk. It’s off the shoulder. It’s absurd. Her hair is all a mess and all down and, behind her, there’s a woman who ought to be supporting her, but is actually fainting for grief.’

As for the executioner on the right, clad in red tights, says Dr Gregory: ‘He’s literally saying: “I am the patriarchy.”’ Much truer to the life of the nine-day queen, in her view, is another, far less known painting from about the 1590s, the so-called Streatham portrait, now at the National Portrait Gallery (despite historian David Starkey disputing the sitter’s identification as Grey).

In it, explains Dr Gregory, ‘she’s wearing Tudor clothes. Her hair is under a cap, as it would have been, and under her hand is a book of theology. She was an absolutely outstanding scholar, extraordinary, a child savant. She taught herself Greek and Latin and I think was learning Egyptian writing.

'She had a tremendous interest in theology and was a convinced Protestant, a reformer of the church. She knew that the consequence of not changing her faith would be death — and she took that decision in a very conscious and deliberate, and you may say, saintly way’.

Dr Gregory stops for a moment, then almost explodes with rage: ‘She was a very young woman of extraordinary scholarship and extraordinary courage, and to see her turned into this image of failure and victim-hood is a disgrace.’

Time, then, to set aside 19th-century notions of feminine frailty and romantic death and restore the history of one of Britain’s most brilliant minds.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on July 8, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City, there is a small plaster cast, made for a woman’s torso. Kahlo wore it to protect her crumbling spine — one of the many indignities she was forced to endure during a lifetime of infirmity that led to her premature death at the age of 47.

On its surface, she painted a hammer, a sickle and a foetus: revolutionary zeal and motherhood firmly entwined in the body politic. Kahlo lived the intense and prolific life of a semi-invalid. As it did the writer Marcel Proust, illness shaped her personality. She endured polio as a child, which left her with a pronounced limp, but it was a bus crash at the age of 18 that did the real damage, driving a metal handrail through her womb and spinal column.

Most people, at some point in their lives, have experienced overwhelming, engulfing pain, but it is a solitary experience. For nearly three decades, through multiple operations and miscarriages, Kahlo painted that experience, depicting herself as a shipwrecked survivor, isolated and wounded in an exotic fantasy, but still defiantly living. To watch oneself from the outside is a text-book sign of post-traumatic stress.

Kahlo returned obsessively to her own image and at times her paintings look hallucinogenic — a reminder perhaps of the ready availability of drugs she took to numb the pain. The batwing eyebrows, the faint moustache, the hair tightly knotted into elaborate styles are, without a doubt, gloriously confrontational and she certainly deserves her reputation as a proto-feminist, but a darkness and a paranoia have settled in.

Her self-portraits reverberate with the sound of being stared at. Now, a new exhibition at Tate Modern, ‘Frida: The Making of an Icon’, assesses the legacy of the artist, one of the most important of the 20th century. Across some 30 self-portraits, it explores ‘Fridamania’: how Kahlo’s life and image have been read, appropriated and commodified into a global brand.

No fact is entirely secure and nothing is certain, but at the heart of it all is the face of an artist who understood her destiny. Born in 1907, Kahlo grew up in Coyoacán, a wealthy suburb of Mexico City. It was, by her own account, ‘a marvellous childhood’.

Her father, a German immigrant, ran a photography studio and her mother, a devout Catholic, was of Mexican-Spanish and Oaxaca heritage. From this dual inheritance of European intelligentsia and indigenous ancestry came a productive tension that would shape Kahlo’s art and her personality. The painting My Grandparents, My Parents and I (1936) considered this duality by painting her maternal Mexican grandparents as the land and her German grandparents as the sea.

A bright, accomplished child, she had planned to study medicine, but, after the bus accident, she started painting, turning her forensic gaze onto herself and unpicking the wounds of her broken body. Artworks such as The Henry Ford Hospital (1932) recall the anatomical drawings of a medical textbook. ‘I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best,’ she once said.

As a card-carrying member of the Mexican Communist Party, she held to the belief that the struggle for her homeland’s emergence in the modern age would be through collective action. Surrealist André Breton once described her as a bomb wrapped in a ribbon and the paintings of her disfigured body are sometimes read as an allegory for the shattered dreams of Mexican liberation.

In Self-portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States (1932), she straddles two worlds, embodying the predicament of a country caught between a pre-industrial past and the economic might of its bullying neighbour. In 1928, Kahlo fell in love with the famous muralist Diego Rivera, more than 20 years her senior. He was the great explainer of the Mexican Revolution (although he had, in fact, been in Paris with Pablo Picasso at the time of the outbreak).

She became his beautiful wife, photographed in Vogue in traditional Tehuana dress and street jewellery, with her hair decorated with roses. It would take time for her art to emerge from his colossal shadow. Their relationship was intense and melodramatic.

With his vast frame, bullfrog eyes and animal energy, Rivera had a prodigious appetite for sex and even seduced Kahlo’s sister Cristina. Between bouts of illness, Kahlo, too, had affairs — most famously with Leon Trotsky who, having escaped Stalin’s Russia, briefly lived with the Riveras in their home, Casa Azul.

After their relationship came to an end, she gave him the painting Self-portrait dedicated to Leon Trotsky (1937). Breton described it as having ‘all the gifts of seduction’. Kahlo and Rivera eventually divorced in 1939, but remarried the following year. During that brief, brittle separation, Kahlo cut off her hair and painted a self-portrait dressed in a man’s suit, her black tresses strewn over a barren landscape like writhing snakes.

Rivera worried anxiously about her finances (she sold little) and persuaded his patrons to buy her work, something Kahlo was furious to discover, writing to him of the determination to be a success on her own terms. As the years progressed, however, her health continued to deteriorate and fantasy became a way to survive and explore a reality that was, at times, too grotesque to bear. She sometimes painted herself with a monkey and, although she was never specific about its symbolism, the ancient Mayans believed that monkeys were humans transformed.

Over the course of her life, she underwent 32 operations and had some toes amputated and eventually her right leg. Her response was unequivocal: ‘Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?’

At her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, she was too ill to stand, so her four-poster bed was placed in the gallery in which she held court — a spectacle that had all the drama of a Catholic Mass. Soon afterwards, she retreated to her bed, where the porous line between dream and reality gradually washed away; she died the following year.

If there is one anecdote from her extraordinary life that might give some indication as to the strange, semi-delirious nature of her art, it is one the novelist Angela Carter picked up on. At the moment of the bus crash, as the rod pierced her spine, her clothes were wrenched off and a bag of gold powder, held by a fellow passenger, exploded all over her.

A shattered, gilded body, it is almost as fantastic as any painting she created. Life is often stranger than fiction — Viva La Vida, as she wrote on one of her last paintings.

The life and times of Frida Kahlo

1907, July 6 — Born in Coyoacán, Mexico. She later claims 1910 (the start of the Mexican Revolution) as her birth year to align herself symbolically with the new Mexico

1913 — Contracts polio at the age of six, which left one leg thinner than the other. This early experience with illness begins her lifelong exploration of the body and pain

1925 — A devastating accident shatters her spine, pelvis and other bones. She undergoes numerous surgeries and begins painting when bedridden, using a mirror to create self-portraits

1928 — Becomes politically active and joins the Communist Party, shaping her identity as both an artist and a revolutionary

1929 — Marries the famous mural painter Diego Rivera. Their relationship is passionate, turbulent and deeply influential on her work. They divorce in 1939, but re-marry the following year.

1931 — The couple visit the US. Despite his communist beliefs, Rivera falls in love with America, seduced by its fast cars and industrial might. Kahlo is less impressed, angered by the country’s obsession with money and the extreme poverty she encounters. She describes American high society as boring

1937 — Leon Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, arrive in Mexico after Rivera invites them to stay at Casa Azul. Kahlo has a brief affair with Trotsky, but later distances herself from him. He is assassinated in 1940 by Ramón Mercader with an ice axe. Kahlo is briefly suspected of the murder and is arrested and held for two days

1938 — André Breton visits Mexico. He declares Kahlo a natural Surrealist and helps organise an exhibition of her work in Paris. She rejects the label, saying: ‘I never paint my dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality’

1944 — Paints The Broken Column, depicting her body split open with a fractured spine — one of her most powerful expressions of physical suffering

1954, July 13 — Dies aged 47 at her home, La Casa Azul.

‘Frida: The Making of an Icon’ is at Tate Modern until January 3, 2027

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on June 24, 2026. The box out originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on July 8, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Sir Anish Kapoor must be the most beloved artist among London children. His ArcelorMittal Orbit, soaring 375ft above Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Park, is not only the UK’s tallest public sculpture, but doubles up as a thrilling tunnel slide.

Not quite as high, but still monumental are many of the installations on show at a newly opened exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (until October 18) which features new and previously shown pieces, including these:

Descent into limbo (1992–2016)

Tsunami (2018)

Non-Object Black (2018–2021)

Mount Moriah at the gate of the ghetto (2022)

Blinded by eyes, butchered by birth (2024)

For more information on how to visit the exhibition see here

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

What a plant the iris is.

It is hugely adaptable and widespread, with some 300 species living in woodlands and marshes, meadows and arid near-deserts. There are bearded and beardless types, dwarf and standard sizes, hardy and delicate varieties and they sport an infinite palette of colours — iris in Latin means rainbow and is the root of ‘iridescent’. Virgil described this effect when he wrote in the Aeneid about the goddess Iris, the personified deity of the plants: ‘So Iris, glistening dew, comes skimming down from the sky on gilded wings, trailing showers of iridescence shimmering into the sun.’

As befits such a flower, irises have a rich symbolic heritage, too. All of human life is represented in those petals: purple irises have long been associated with wisdom, royalty and friendship; blue with hope and faith; white with purity; and yellow with passion. In 1469BC, the green-fingered King Thutmose III of Egypt cultivated them in his garden, and blue-gold flowers are shown in murals in the temples at Karnak, representing the life-giving flooding of the Nile; in Edo Japan (1603–1868), Samurai warriors drank sake flavoured with iris to ward off evil spirits; and, in 1933, the iris was adopted as the state flower of Tennessee in the USA.

The Greeks, of course, cherished the flowers, too, weaving them into wreaths for orators to ensure their silver-tongued words were polished. Roman legions preferred to persuade via the sword and draped their standards with irises to guarantee them safe passage through hostile lands. However, it was Christian usage that made irises a favourite motif for painters. Even in a religion rich in floral imagery, the flowers were special, their three petals invoking the Trinity, and their old, pagan role as symbols of Iris, a messenger of the gods, made them emblems of the Divine word — especially the Annunciation — brought to mankind, thus associating them with the Virgin Mary.

In about 1480–89, when the great Flemish artist Hans Memling painted the Annunciation, he showed a single blue iris in a jug next to a white lily (symbolising the Virgin’s purity) as an angel arrives in a room very similar to that in Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait and announces that she is to give birth to the son of God. Such is the enormity of the news that she has to be supported by two further attendant angels, but, although she wilts, the flowers stand tall.

Leonardo da Vinci also included irises in his Madonna of the Rocks (about 1483–86) in the Louvre, Paris, although in his later version, now in the National Gallery in London, he replaced the flowers with a Star of Bethlehem plant — a member of the lily family. Leonardo being Leonardo, a standard white lily would not do.

Albrecht Dürer revealed his own fascination with irises when, in about 1503, he painted a botanical watercolour of a blue specimen and about the same time a purple flower. These images fit with Dürer’s intense interest in Nature as an integral part of God’s creation. The flowers sit against plain backgrounds, shorn of associations, and transmit the sense of the artist’s wonder at their perfection. In the same year, he stared just as hard at a clump of turf (and the previous year at a young hare), picking out each blade of grass or strand of fur with exceptional precision. If God could fabricate organisms so small, little wonder he made Man such a complicated creature.

These drawings found further use when his workshop came to paint The Virgin and Child (‘The Madonna with the Iris’), in the first decade of the century, now in the National Gallery. The picture was made by various hands over a number of years and whoever painted it clearly knew the Master’s studio watercolours, as an almost identical plant is shown growing just behind the Virgin and her suckling child.

Some four and a half centuries later, those same images were an inspiration to Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021), the Scottish watercolourist who specialised in softly lyrical and unadorned paintings of flowers. Irises dot her work, sometimes singly, sometimes in wind-blown clusters, the painter’s interest clearly in the ombré shading of the petals and pops of colour. Like Dürer, she painted them on a plain white background, happy to let the flowers take centre stage. There is no subliminal message to Blackadder’s blooms other than a simple — or perhaps not so simple — appreciation of beauty.

This spirit was alive in earlier painters, too. Claude Monet, although primarily thought of as the painter of waterlilies, was an iris lover, too. Indeed, at his garden at Giverny in France they were to the solid ground what the lilies were to his ponds. He was obsessive about his plants and at one point employed six gardeners (one whose job was simply to dust and wash his waterlilies). The flowers, with their long stems and burst of colour, were ideally suited to the fluid and loose handling of his later pictures and in some pictures he combined both plants, such as Irises and Waterlilies, one of some 20 paintings of the flowers he made from 1914–17. In others, he showed them in overstuffed beds, a mass of purple blooms contrasting with the green of the trees. When painting flowers, Monet rarely included a horizon — all his focus, and that of the viewer, being taken up by the plants, a trait even more pronounced when he painted them from above, such as the National Gallery’s Irises (1914–17).

The East Anglian painter Sir Cedric Morris was even more devoted to irises than Monet. He painted them numerous times in his many still lifes and fresh-air floral pictures. Like Monet, he used them in his own garden in Suffolk exactly as he used the paints on his palette — and for Morris, no painting of a bouquet or flowerbed was complete without an iris. He put them front and centre: any background, whether picturesque buildings or distant hills, was something for the eye to register after the flowers and not before.

Morris was also an accomplished plantsman, holding ‘Iris Days’ at which he would unveil the results of his propagation programme. Vita Sackville-West was a regular visitor and took plants back to her home at Sissinghurst in Kent to grow there. Many of the iris cultivars Morris developed at Benton End, the house in which he lived, ran a private art school (Lucian Freud was a pupil) and where he built a horticultural playground, have been propagated at the Beth Chatto Garden a few miles away near Colchester, Essex.

For Vincent van Gogh, by contrast, the allure of irises lay not in their botany, but in their ability to express emotion. Although sunflowers were the plant he chose as a personal motif (‘The sunflowers are mine’, he wrote), the irises that grew in the gardens of the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in France, where he was a patient from 1889–90, had as deep a meaning. He knew the plants from life, but also from the prints he collected, made by Japanese ukiyo-e artists who flourished between the 17th and 19th centuries. Both Hokusai and Hiroshige, the two leading artists of the school, created pictures of individual blooms that had a profound effect on van Gogh.

Shortly before his death, in a letter to his sister Wilhelmina, he recalled his last days at the asylum when, he said, he ‘worked with rage’. One of those late pictures, now in the Getty Museum in California, showed a stand of violet irises (now more blue than purple, because the red pigment he used in his mixture has faded) with a single white bloom among them. It is hard not to interpret that lone flower as a form of self-portrait — an outsider in the midst of a throng. The painting hid a secret, too, discovered by conservators: in the bottom left corner, they found pollen from an umbrella pine stuck in the paint, which conjures a poignant image of the artist at work in the asylum garden as his end approached.

The Japanese prints that enthused van Gogh helped spread a craze for irises as a decorative motif in late-19th- and early-20th-century art and interiors — a fad further encouraged by the pioneering Japanese colour photographer Kazumasa Ogawa, whose Some Japanese Flowers (1896), showing 38 varieties, including irises, was a revelation. Walter Crane, a significant figure in the Arts-and-Crafts Movement, included irises in his wallpaper designs, as did William Morris. American art glass designer Louis Comfort Tiffany used them in his table lamps, stained glass and vases — and in his own paintings, too. They were also a staple in the work of that other great name of Art Nouveau, Alphonse Mucha, whose posters did much to spread European high style to aspiring aesthetes around the globe.

Irises in art, as in botany, thrive in every climate and habitat

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In 1987, Prince Rainier III, widower of Princess Grace and father of the current monarch Prince Albert II, launched a biennial open-air sculpture fair in the streets, parks and public spaces of Monaco. It included specially commissioned pieces, as well as others from his personal collection — and it was a smash.

Indeed, it was so successful that he decided to leave all of the sculptures in situ and to continue adding new ones with each subsequent edition of the fair. Eventually, more than 200 pieces were on permanent display across the principality.

In 2023, they became collectively known as the Chemin des Sculptures Rainier III. As with the NC500 in Scotland, something that was already there — in the case of the NC500, a network of public roads — was given a catchy name and thus made freshly exciting to visitors.

A website offers maps and information on every piece and you can scan QR codes on or near each sculpture, which will open the relevant page. Organising a visit to Monaco around the Chemin des Sculptures — or simply taking an hour or two to take a quick look at it if you’re there for other reasons — almost guarantees you’ll see things you either haven’t seen before or wouldn’t see otherwise.

The trail can be undertaken casually, partially and with no regard for sequence. Hop on, hop off. It does make a certain sense, however, to start with Kees Verkaade’s 1997 sculpture of François Grimaldi, the founder of the Grimaldi dynasty, who in 1257 seized Le Rocher, the Rock of Monaco, disguised as a monk.

More than 700 years later, a Grimaldi is still calling the shots from the ancient palace in front of which stands this sculpture of a frankly rather slippery-looking, if not downright Machiavellian, François.

Most surprising of the numerous sculptures commemorating royalty along the trail is Manolo Valdès’s Reina Mariana, commissioned for the 2003 fair and occupying a prime position on the terrace behind the casino.

It’s a monumental interpretation in bronze of Diego Velázquez’s 1652–53 portrait of Mariana of Austria, who, a few years earlier, at the age of 14, had become Queen of Spain as the bride of Philip IV, her uncle. Manolo's chunky, body-positive sculpture makes for a striking contrast with Velázquez’s achingly delicate and melancholy portrait.

Monaco is not only steep, but also, these days, as densely stacked up as a Momofuku Milk Bar cake. If you take a few steps away from Manolo's sculpture across the terrace and look directly down, you’ll have a fine view not of the sea, as you might expect, but of the vast, flat roof of the Auditorium Rainier III.

What could otherwise have remained an unremarkable 16,000sq ft expanse of nothing in particular was transformed, in 1979, into a beguiling geometric rainbow by Victor Vasarely, a founding figure, together with Bridget Riley, of the Op Art (optical art) movement. Titled Hexa Grace, it comprises some 24,000 lozenge-shaped enamelled tiles fashioned from volcanic lava, each one rippling and radiant with elemental energy.

Perhaps the biggest crowd-pleaser of the Chemin des Sculptures is just around the corner, in the middle of the Place du Casino. This is Sir Anish Kapoor’s 1999 Sky Mirror. Sir Anish has created half a dozen or so of these large concave dishes in polished steel for different sites around the world, each tilted towards and reflecting a distorted, upside-down view of the sky and immediate surroundings.

Here, the immediate surroundings include the stupendous Casino de Monte-Carlo, the comparably magnificent Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo, the recently expanded Café de Paris and a stand of tall, gracious, immaculately tended Mexican fan palms. Quite the urban panorama, as glossy, ornate, moneyed and quintessentially Monte-Carlo as can be.

If all that’s a bit rich for your taste, simply spin on your heel and walk uphill for two minutes, into the gorgeous oasis that is the Jardins de la Petite Afrique. Although less well known than the Jardin Exotique, home to 1,000 cacti ranged across a sheer hillside, or the two gardens dedicated to Princess Grace, the Roseraie and the Jardin Japonais, it has a charm that’s entirely its own.

There you’ll find Andy Goldsworthy’s Slate Cone for Little Africa from 1991, a lopsided, cairn-like object positioned within a semicircle of trees, together creating a faintly ritualistic, stone-circle-ish and agreeably meditative vibe. The hypercars and selfie sticks suddenly seem light years away.

If the Chemin des Sculptures failed to satisfy your appetite for art, there’s plenty more on which to feast your eyes. The Nouveau Musée National de Monaco is housed in two splendid old buildings, Villa Paloma and Villa Sauber, which are marvellous inside and out.

A lively contemporary gallery scene has emerged — Almine Rech, Opera Gallery, Hauser & Wirth — in tandem with a flourishing Monaco Art Week, now in its eighth edition.

However, if pounding the sculpture trail has given you blisters, swap your pinchy shoes for squishy slippers and check in to the Prince Rainier III Suite at the Hôtel de Paris, which is stuffed with impeccably displayed, museum-quality art. That said, the suite is enormous, so you’ll still have to hobble around to see it all.

Click here for more information on the Chemin des Sculptures Rainier III.

This feature originally appeared in the June 3, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The colourful paintings and familiar bespectacled face of David Hockney have figured largely in the news over the past weeks following the announcement of the artist’s death at the age of 88.

Born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, he moved to London and then Los Angeles, California, in 1964, where his paintings captured a sense of the West Coast American idyll. His rediscovery of his native Yorkshire landscape towards the end of his life helped earn him popular recognition in Britain. His longevity was one foundation of his success.

Another was the remarkable number of times he was able to reinvent himself, repeatedly producing fresh art at every stage in his long career. Bound up with that freshness was an enthusiasm for looking at and exploring colour, shadow (or the lack of it) and perspective.

His fascination with technology was important, too. Most famously perhaps, it was expressed in his use of iPads to produce vibrant images. One such was the design he produced for the Queen Elizabeth II stained-glass window at Westminster Abbey, unveiled in 2018. It has helped further that his work was free from the didacticism that characterises so much contemporary art.

His art was celebratory, rather than politically or socially charged. Hockney was, in addition, a supremely good and highly articulate self-publicist. Some obituaries imply that he was a figure whom we should recall, but it is surely closer to the truth to say that he never went away. Whether through interviews, documentaries or lecturing, he was a continuous public presence over the past half century or more talking about Art.

At the root of Hockney’s success, however, was a real and particular skill: he could draw. His facility in this regard was what allowed him to turn his hand successfully to so many things. No less importantly, his own draughtsmanship gave him an appreciation for Old Masters and their technical achievement. It is surprisingly rare to find contemporary artists who genuinely admire such work. Some, indeed, struggle to conceal their patronising disdain for it. By contrast, Hockney studied it and formulated his own opinions about it.

A case in point — and one that chimed with his own wider interests in technology—was his assertion that Vermeer used a camera obscura to paint. He also drew inspiration from other traditions of art to enrich his own, exploring the use, for example, of multiple points of perspective. Perhaps as important as the work he produced, however, are two ideas that he repeatedly expounded.

The first is that looking encourages us to see things in different ways. It’s one of those observations that is at once blindingly obvious, yet merits repetition because it remains so easy to forget as we race around and see only what we already recognise. The other is that it is enough for art merely to be beautiful. How refreshing that is to hear. Athena wholeheartedly agrees.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

We still do some things well in this country and teaching History of Art is one of them. The subject is offered at more than 100 British universities and, according to the latest independent QS World University Rankings, which compares and rates universities around the world by subject, four of those sit in the global top 10.

In the top spot is the Courtauld Institute of Art, an independent college within the University of London, which boasts the largest faculty of art historians and conservators in the UK and has long been the de rigueur institution for professional art historians. Then come University College London (at three), the Royal College of Art (four) and Cambridge (eight), with Oxford at number 11.

Alas, according to the Courtauld’s own research, this picture is less glowing in British schools, where the story is one of decline. Over the past decade, the number of schools offering History of Art at A level has fallen by 34% — from 122 in 2016 to a meagre 80 today — and of those only 19 are state or non-fee-paying schools.

Depressingly, the subject is offered only in England, with participating schools concentrated in London and the South-East, which means great swathes of British schoolchildren are excluded. This should come as no surprise; the humanities are under pressure in today’s narrowly focused, STEM-oriented education system.

Nevertheless, young people live in a predominantly visual culture, saturated with images on mobile-phone screens, and social-media apps such as Instagram prove that aesthetics — or at least personal aesthetics — matter to them. What art history can teach them is how to decode images, how to understand them and how today’s visual culture, and their response to it, came about. That might not seem sufficient on its own, but art history is not simply about art. Any half-diligent student will do more than look at paintings, sculpture and their makers.

The works of Leonardo and Peter Paul Rubens, Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Henry Moore, Cézanne and David Hockney, who sadly died this month, are the products of particular moments in time and to understand them fully — or as fully as is possible — knowledge of their cultural and historical context is as vital as the niceties of brushstrokes and themes. To study art history is to study history, literature, music, biography, philosophy... an all-round education, illustrated by great paintings.

Art history has economic benefits, too. As a House of Lords report said recently, the music, performing and visual-arts sector is worth £11.2 billion a year to the UK economy. Our museums, galleries and libraries employ 91,000 people and our commercial art market is the second largest in the world. There is more to Botticelli and his ilk than beauty — here’s hoping the Government takes notice.

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

The office of Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen, head of the Courtauld Gallery, London WC2, is a scholarly oasis of books, papers and windows perched high in Somerset House’s northern wing above the central courtyard. Soon, the thuds and beeps of heavy machinery, the screeching of saws and the rattling of jackhammers will shatter that peace — and Dr Vegelin can’t wait.

‘We will be going through a big campus building project. It is about bringing the students and faculty back from their temporary home near King’s Cross. I think for us it is a really historic moment ahead of our centenary in 2032.’ Having its teaching arm relegated to Vernon Square, London WC1 — ‘not the easiest place to reach from the Strand’ — must have been hard for The Courtauld, which is at once a museum and a university.

Ever since Samuel Courtauld founded it in 1932, it has brought together the art of the past with the future of art history, an approach Dr Vegelin credits for the institution’s enduring appeal with philanthropists: the project for the new campus, slated to open in 2029, received a generous donation of £30 million from the Reuben Foundation. ‘People are funding us partly because they believe our students are going to go out and be the critics, run the art galleries, run the museums or be curators, not only for that purpose, but in order to be able to continue to open up the Arts to the widest population. That was exactly Samuel Courtauld’s idea. It’s not language you would use now, necessarily, but he said that The Courtauld had to be a missionary centre, where people could be trained who would go out into the world. It is what I think this institution has done and can feel quite proud of — and needs to continue to do into the future.’

Hence the building work, but how does this quest to spread artistic knowledge square up with The Courtauld’s policy of charging for admission? ‘We do it because we haven’t got a choice,’ admits Dr Vegelin. ‘If a wonderful philanthropist walked in next week and said, “Look, I want to solve that problem for you and endow free admission for everyone”, we’d embrace it, no question.’ Indeed, he passionately advocates against national museums charging for admission. ‘Personally, I believe you can’t send a more powerful message about the importance of art than throwing open the doors and inviting people to walk in freely and with no barriers.’

Nothing matters more to him than this connection between museums and the public, but he believes the question of admission fees and Government funding — or lack thereof — is broader than that. In his view, it can help define British identity. ‘Creating an environment in which culture is seen as something at the heart of the nation is so important: it says it isn’t merely a decorative adornment, but fundamental to how we think of ourselves as people and how we think of the UK in the future. The country of Shakespeare and the country house and parish churches, great museums, contemporary design—that is so much more resonant for me than thinking about, say, AI or productivity. That very materialistic way of defining who we are or what we do is a road to perdition, there is a real impoverishment of the public realm.’

He returns to why Courtauld founded the Institute. He derived great joy from his collection — so much so that the mere thought of loaning a Renoir reduced him to tears — and intended to share that with the nation through his bequest, but he was also a man who had endured the tragedy of two World Wars and that experience shaped his vision: ‘He and many other people were thinking: “What type of society do we want to create when we come out of this crisis?” For him, the answer was a deeply humanistic one, a world filled with art and poetry, a meritocratic society with free education, healthcare and opportunity. He was one of the great captains of industry, but, in many ways, very anti-materialistic. He felt that that spirit and those humanistic values should be at the heart of the world that they were reimagining for the future. I think some of the philanthropists we are speaking to or who are funding the National Gallery’s great programme are thinking about these things.’

Public policy hasn’t (yet?) reached the same conclusions, however, and Dr Vegelin acknowledges the past few years have been rather challenging for the country in general and the Arts in particular. Yet, he firmly believes Britain’s cultural ecosystem remains strong. ‘There’s perhaps nothing that compares, in terms of the quality of the museums, the great collections, the variety and the density of what there is in London; it’s absolutely extraordinary. The fantastic exhibitions, the auctions, the fairs, the galleries, all the creativity in the young people, in universities — that mix is something very remarkable. I’m still convinced that, really, there isn’t any city that does it quite like London and that combination is full of promise for the future.’

If anything, he would like to see the many strands of London’s artistic community working together more closely: ‘There was a wonderful moment some time ago where you had the Monet exhibition at the Courtauld, the van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery’ — the way he says van Gogh in that hissing, guttural way only the Dutch can pull off is one clue that Dr Vegelin originally hails from the Netherlands—‘and Bacon at the National Portrait Gallery, the Frieze art fair was on and I had people say to me: “This is what you should be doing to put London on the front foot. It’s brilliant that you guys have all planned this together.” But we hadn’t. It was good luck and I have often thought that actually, perhaps we’re at a moment where national institutions and others should coordinate more fully, as they do in some other countries.’

The new museum openings of the past year have added to the vibrancy. He mentions the V&A Storehouse in Stratford, E20, as an especially inspiring place: ‘I went again last weekend and I was so moved by this great hymn to the museum enterprise, to preserve and study the past and learn from it. This sort of temple to curiosity is simply wonderful.’

Nor is this cultural energy only a London affair. The urgency to share collections between town and the regions is as strong as ever, but where in the past it might have been perhaps a touch condescending — ‘we will send our masterpieces, so that they can be enjoyed by people outside the capital’ — things have changed for the better: ‘There are great institutions outside London, in cities that have come through some tough times, but are doing brilliant things, and there’s more of a sense that they are equals and peers.’ He mentions as examples the highlights from the collection of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, on show at The Courtauld until the end of August as the Birmingham museum undergoes renovation, and The Courtauld’s own closure between 2018 and 2021: ‘We had a programme of lending to museums in towns and cities where Courtauld’s business used to be and then some things were lent to The Courtauld from these institutions. I think it’s much more a conversation between partners than simply distributing things from London to the provinces — and that’s critical, because there shouldn’t be a situation where it’s all about London. The UK has so much to offer.’

All this — coupled with an underlying faith in British ingenuity — fills him with hope: ‘I think, in the UK, there are still huge ambitions to do fantastic projects in the Arts and culture more widely, not only museums, but design and theatre and music and opera and ballet. I feel very optimistic about what this country can achieve.’ First, however, he can enjoy the chaos of construction.

1. The Uffington White Horse, late Bronze or early Iron Age

For 3,000 years, the Uffington White Horse has galloped across Oxfordshire, maintained by 150 generations who have added fresh white chalk to its streamlined body. Was it a tribute to a sun god, whose chariot was pulled by horses? It is best seen from the air.

2. The Bayeux Tapestry, 11th century

Although probably commissioned for Bayeux Cathedral in northern France, this embroidery, nearly 230ft long, was made in Kent following the Battle of Hastings in 1066 — and it’s coming this autumn to the British Museum.

3. Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery…, 1766

Wright spent much of his working life in Derby, where he was friends with leading scientists. In this painting, a travelling lecturer demonstrates an orrery, a machine showing the movement of the planets around the Sun. When it was first exhibited, it was praised as being ‘exceeding fine’.

4. Turner vs Constable, Summer Exhibition, 1832

Before the Summer Exhibition opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, artists were given time to retouch and varnish their paintings. When J. M. W. Turner saw his breezy seascape Helvoetsluys hung next to John Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, he was worried: his pale boats leaving the harbour did not have the punch of Constable’s river scene, full of red flags and pageantry. He took out his paintbrush and added a vibrant red buoy to the foreground. Constable’s reaction? ‘He has been here and fired a gun,’ he fumed.

5. Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993

In the year Rachel Whiteread won the Turner Prize, she cast an entire terraced house. The bricks were peeled away to reveal an uncanny concrete interior, a mausoleum to all the families who had lived there. It made headline news and was variously described as a ‘bunker’, an ‘eyesore’ and ‘an exceptional work of art’. It stood for about three months.

We all know the shape of Antony Gormley. Life-size iron sculptures based on casts of his own body navigate the quicksand on Merseyside’s Crosby Beach and wade through the Water of Leith in Edinburgh. Solitary sentinels from his 100-strong series Another Time stand around the world, from the hillsides of the Kunisaki peninsula in Japan to the subaqueous loading bay of Folkestone Harbour.

Now, in Antwerp, Belgium, another three figures based on the sculptor’s own body look out over the city. But these are nebulous as clouds, mere whispers of bodies. As they stand overlooking Antwerp’s River Scheldt and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts (KMSKA) the city and sky permeate them, connecting the figures directly to the fragile world they inhabit.

These three Domain sculptures are part of Gormley’s wide-ranging exhibition at KMSKA, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. While they were made specifically for Antwerp, the show also features some of his earliest works from his student days at the Slade School of Art in London. Christov-Bakargiev is an expert on Italian Arte Povera and she teases out Gormley’s early interest in materiality; land art and ecology emerge as early progenitors too.

Gormley’s first works used materials to explore his relationship to the natural world. In Flat Tree (1978), a slender larch has been sliced thinly into a carpet of concentric wood circles, while in Exercise Between Blood and Earth (1979/2026) the outline of a running man in red chalk expands like tree rings across the gallery wall. Gormley soon began to use his own body as a mould, creating a snug tomb out of sliced bread. He took plaster-casts of himself in order to make lead and iron sculptures that asked us to consider our own place in the world.

Since the 1970s Gormley has listed air as one of the materials he works with. It fills the interior of his lead body-cast Tree (1984) and was one of the three components in Land Sea and Air I (1979). These stone-shaped lead sculptures are variously filled with rock, water and air. Gormley asks us to contemplate volume and mass in this impossible game of three-card monte, and to think about what is known and what can only be imagined. Which holds the rock? Which is filled with air?

It is Gormley’s early interest in air, our invisible life force, that occupies him again today. His sculptural casts have morphed from solid bodies, such as the Angel of the North (1998), to those constructed from slender steel spars. The Domain sculptures that stand under Antwerp’s wide skies are barely there. They are lit only by the sun and so as dusk approaches — what Gormley calls the ‘magic hour’ — the figures dissolve into the cityscape. Weather and air currents pass right through them as they observe the Scheldt, Antwerp’s wide, deep river on which the city’s 16th-century fortune was built.

These sculptures are based on Gormley’s own body, but it is your body as a viewer that is activated in this exhibition. The first work you encounter is Orbit Field III (2026), a room-sized mass of looping aluminium tubes. Gormley’s lifelong fascination with what it means to be a body in space is passed on to the viewer as you physically climb through it. The activation of your body culminates in the last room, where you are confronted by the 42-ton Cave. First created for his 2019 exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, this monumental sculpture is a supine body made of interlocking geometric forms. It is architectural in scale, a breathtaking mass of weathering steel. And you are invited to venture inside it.

Bent double you enter through the ‘foot’. It is dark — solidly so — and you have to grope your way along until you reach a small chamber with a slender shaft of light. It is like entering a prehistoric passage tomb, where light only reaches inside on the solstice. You bend lower, walking further into the body. You are deeply aware of your own heartbeat, your lungs breathing in and out. Suddenly the walls dip away and you are standing in a lofty void, looking up through the bent ‘knee’ towards the light. You can see the exit; your breath settles.

As you leave you have to pass again through Orbit Field. The air now seems charged somehow. You become aware of it passing through the sculptures outside, passing over you. The exhibition reminds you in a very physical way that everything in this world is connected, although sometimes the bonds are invisible.

'Antony Gormley: Geestgrond', is on until September 20, 2026. Visit the KMSKA website for more information and to book tickets.

Mark Rothko was too busy gazing into the abyss to engage in small talk and throwaway lines. Yet every now and then he came up with a zinger. ‘A painting is not an image of an experience,’ he once declared. ‘It is an experience.’ Well said, sir. Though I suppose, if you were to split hairs, you might reasonably counter that there’s no reason why a painting can’t be both an experience and an image of an experience.

The perception is particularly pertinent to the magnificent new retrospective of the artist’s work, Rothko in Florence, on display at three venues in the city until August 23. The show raises all manner of interesting questions, one or two of which follow directly from that rare zinger of his. Does it matter where the art experience is experienced? And if so, why?

Most of the 70 or so paintings included in Rothko in Florence are on display at Palazzo Strozzi. They span the artist’s entire career and are presented chronologically: the figurative works of the 1930s; the ‘mythomorphic’ and ‘multiform’ works of the 1940s; the signature-style colour-field works of the 1950s and 60s.

The vast, grand and gloomy palazzo makes for a splendid showcase for Rothko’s vast, grand and gloomy paintings — though one of the most striking features of the exhibition is the manner in which it reveals the variation in Rothko’s emotional and chromatic palette.

The strange radiance of the late black-and-grey paintings, for example, is as irresistible as it is unlikely — trumped only, perhaps, by the final works, created shortly before the artist took his own life in 1970, in pale blue, tan and terracotta. These are beautifully hung in a smaller room that has been configured to recall the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Hats off to the curators — the artist’s son Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna — for orchestrating this ravishing, uplifting finale to the exhibition.

Even if that were — so to speak — all, Rothko in Florence would be a remarkable exhibition, one that allows you to see the work of a familiar master in the round and from a fresh perspective. An experience, certainly — and one that is further enriched by the smaller displays at the two other satellite locations.

Rothko himself had little interest in travel. ‘His paintings travel much better than he ever did,’ as his son put it to me. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to overstate the importance to the artist of his three visits to Italy, in 1950, 1959 and 1966, or, having seen the new exhibition, to deny the bearing they had on his work.

The vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, or Laurentian Library, was conceived by Michelangelo in the decade or so before he quit Florence for Rome in 1534. It was, and remains, a uniquely disconcerting space: claustrophobic, despite its high ceilings; locked-in and seemingly without issue, despite its fine staircase; disorienting, despite its simplicity. There’s something almost occult about its oddity. Rothko loved it. ‘He achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after. He makes viewers feel they’re trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the walls.’

For Rothko in Florence, two preliminary studies for the Seagram Murals project have been hung at the foot of the library stairs. Though relatively small by Rothko’s standards, they reverberate in this setting with the force of a double thunderclap.

I happened to be standing alongside Christopher when I stepped into the vestibule and, after casting my eyes about for a minute or two, caught sight and took stock of the paintings. Like finding a loose pair of eyeballs on the back seat of a taxi. I turned to him and remarked on their disproportionate impact in this setting. Did he, I asked, have a Plan B, in case for any reason these particular paintings didn’t quite work in situ? ‘This is Plan B,’ he laughed. ‘Plan A was to use different paintings in different positions. But when I got here to hang them yesterday, I realised that wasn’t going to work, because of the angle of the light from the windows in the west wall. Luckily I’d packed some spares, and it turns out they work pretty well here.’

A gentler, but no less arresting, effect is achieved in what is now the Museo Nazionale di San Marco, formerly the monastery where, roughly 100 years before Michelangelo, the Renaissance master and Dominican friar Fra Angelico worked (though didn’t, as is often supposed, live full-time; he bunked down at San Domenico, in the nearby hill town of Fiesole).

Rothko came to San Marco twice in two days in 1950 and once again in 1966. Five of his works have been installed alongside Angelico’s frescoes in five of the now vacated monks’ cells — tiny, with irregularly shaped whitewashed stone walls, some with small windows, others illuminated only by Angelico’s exquisitely rendered scenes from the gospels.

‘Think of it as if you were overhearing a respectful conversation between two masters,’ Elena Guena suggested. Simply to set the Rothkos alongside them in this fashion invites the viewer to look for similarities between the two artists, not only in terms of colour and tone, though these can be readily observed, but also in terms of attitude and intention.

The differences between the two artists surely outnumber their similarities by a gigantic margin. Yet the comparative exercise is not without value. Later I spoke to Carl Streckhle, an art historian, curator and authority on Fra Angelico, who agreed with Elena's notion of dialogue, only adding — with a poetic flourish — that this is a dialogue which occurs ‘not so much across time but in a world without time’.

I was in Florence as a guest of the Hotel Savoy — a marvellous hotel in hotel terms and an active participant in the city’s cultural conversation. I’ve stayed at the Savoy often over the years and can attest to the seriousness of its commitment to the Arts — a commitment expressed not only in its partnerships with high-profile institutions such as the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, but also through its own programme of talks, workshops and events.

Thanks to the relationships the hotel has fostered in the artistic community, the access it can provide to guests is fantastic (you have only to ask and arrangements will be made and doors will creak open on their ancient hinges).

Moreover, its Artists’ Suites are among the finest hotel rooms in Florence (my own favourite is number 403, from one of the several balconies of which you can see Palazzo Strozzi across the Piazza della Repubblica) — and its impeccable, whimsical little Bar Artemisia (named and decorated in honour of the immortal Artemisia Gentileschi) is likewise one of the city’s best.

After a full day’s worth of Rothko in Florence, it was to Bar Artemisia that I repaired for a glass of something chilled and interesting. ‘What have you got for a weary art-pilgrim with sore feet and a head full of Abstract Expressionism?’ I asked the genial head barman, Federico Galli. ‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘perhaps I could interest you in one of the cocktails on our new Maestro of Colours menu…’ Of course — I should’ve known they’d come up with a special menu of half a dozen cocktails ingeniously mixed to mimic paintings in the Rothko show.

I went for the Nocturne Vermillion, a blackberry-enhanced variation on the classic Negroni, which, in its meticulously suspended blocks of moody colour, did indeed bear an uncanny resemblance to Rothko’s Untitled: Red and Black 1953.

At dinner in the Savoy that evening I sat next to Arturo Galansino, director general of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi. This was a couple of days ahead of the opening of Rothko in Florence, but already the talk of the town was of little else and it was perfectly clear that the show would be a smash hit. I congratulated Arturo on his string of successes at Palazzo Strozzi over the past few years — Tracey Emin, Angelico, now Rothko. The sequence, he insisted, was important: something challenging, something safe, something challenging. He said his intention was to ‘wake Florence up gently, one jolt at a time’.

After dinner, despite the lateness of the hour and the soreness of my feet, I took a long stroll. For me, there are few cities more agreeable by night than Florence. Emptied of tour groups, its stony streets throng instead with friendly ghosts. In Florence, you don’t have to be a Rothko-sized genius to commune with the shades of Michelangelo and Angelico — whether you like it or not, there’s simply no avoiding them. Was there ever a city so densely populated by brilliant minds, so tightly packed with bright ideas as quattrocento Florence? Or one where the gap between present and past is so narrow and so apt to vanish altogether?

I can think of one, though only one: Cambridge, another small, beautiful, compressed city on a river that flourished spectacularly in the 14th century as both a transmitter, incubator and a repository of art and ideas.

Vladimir Nabokov devotes a few droll chapters of his memoir Speak, Memory to his time at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the early 1920s. Though distracted by girls and football and his own sense of émigré dislocation, he was far from oblivious to his surroundings. ‘I thought of Milton, and Marvell, and Marlowe, with more than a tourist’s thrill as I passed beside the revered walls,’ he writes. ‘Nothing one looked at was shut off in terms of time, everything was a natural opening into it, so that one’s mind grew accustomed to work in a particularly pure and ample environment, and because, in terms of space, the narrow lane, the cloistered lawn, the dark archway hampered one physically, that yielding diaphanous texture of time was, by contrast, especially welcome to the mind, just as a sea view from a window exhilarates one hugely, even though one does not care for sailing.’

Sail on to Florence, then, and take in the stupendous sea view of Rothko’s work that is presently on offer there, in the company of Michelangelo, Angelico and that astonishing city’s whole heavenly host.

'Rothko in Florence' is at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Museo di San Marco and Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana until August 23, 2026.

Rooms at at the Hotel Savoy Florence start from about £600.

Landscape has been triumphant for the past few months. With Turner’s 250th anniversary just past, Constable’s fast approaching on June 11 and Gainsborough’s 300th coming up next year, the genre that scholar Bendor Grosvenor considers the pinnacle of British art has been on show everywhere from Tate, with its recently ended ‘Turner and Constable: Rivals & Originals’ behemoth, to Gainsborough’s House in Suffolk, with ‘Gainsborough, Turner & Constable: Inventing Landscape’.

Now, Pallant House in Chichester, West Sussex has embarked on an especially ambitious exhibition that traces not only landscape’s rise in the 18th century, but its evolution over the following 200 years, examining how artists captured coast, countryside — and the emotional connection with the people who live in them. Among the highlights are works by some of the greatest British painters of the 20th century, including these:

Ivon Hitchens, 'Curved Barn', 1922

Hitchens subtitled this picture, which has echoes of Futurism, ‘an essay in essential form and the dynamic relation of one plane to another’, a reference to Clive Bell’s question: ‘Who has not, at least once in his life had a sudden vision of a landscape as pure form?’

Donated by the artist to Pallant House, was one of the first pictures acquired by the museum.

Paul Nash, 'Wittenham', 1935

When, in the early years of the 20th century, Nash saw the Wittenham Clumps — twin Oxfordshire hills topped by ancient beeches — he thought of them as ‘a beautiful legendary country haunted by old gods long forgotten’.

He returned to them time and again, calling them ‘the Pyramids of my small world’ and always capturing the genius loci, the spirit of the place. In this watercolour, dark clouds and a leaden sky suggest the gloom of the interwar years.

Eric Ravilious’s 'Country Life calendar', 1939

On September 17, 1938, Country Life carried an advert for its Beautiful Britain calendar for 1939, which, ‘as usual’ would feature 52 of the magazine’s finest photographs. The cover, however, was a colour lithograph by the master of the South Downs — all available for 2s 6d.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, 'Snow at Wharfedale II', 1957

Yorkshire’s wintry landscape takes a geometric form in this picture, influenced by American Abstract Expressionism, which Barns-Graham made in the one year in which she taught at the Leeds College of Art.

Prunella Clough, 'Disused Land', 1999

‘A gasometer is as good as a garden, probably better,’ said Clough, who had long been fascinated by industrial debris and wasteland. Over the years, her depiction of overlooked industrial and urban areas became increasingly abstracted. This is one of her very last paintings, made in the year she died.

'British Landscapes: A Sense of Place' is on until November 1, 2026. Visit the Pallant House Gallery for more information and to book tickets.

Summer has arrived on the French Mediterranean, where the magical light, emerald waters and idyllic landscapes have always attracted countless artists, and an increasing number of private art foundations. One recent addition to the scene is Villa Carmignac, on l'île de Porquerolles, which recently welcomed the season with an exhibition titled ‘Sea, Pop & Sun’, celebrating Pop Art from the 1960s to today.

A short ferry ride from the mainland, Porquerolles is a world away from the glitz of the Riviera. Seven kilometres wide by three kilometres long, it's a bubble of sun and serenity, though forts scattered around the island attest to historic invasions by everyone from pirates, to the British navy. In 1912, the Belgian entrepreneur François-Joseph Fournier, who made a fortune mining gold and silver in Mexico, bought the island as a wedding gift for his wife. He turned it into an agricultural community, building a church and school, planting fruit trees and vineyards.

The French State purchased most of the island from Fournier's descendants in 1971, and since 1985 it has had protected status as part of the Port-Cros National Park. A few hundred residents live full-time in the port village, and only 6,000 visitors a day are permitted on island in the high season. Most of the terrain is wild, home to an amazing diversity of flora and fauna. Car-free aside from service vehicles, it is a paradise for hikers and cyclists, with 54 kilometers of marked dirt-and-gravel trails. The air is scented with pine and eucalyptus, and punctuated by the sounds of birds, from the coo of mourning doves to the squawk of wild pheasants. (When the temperatures rise, these will be joined by the constant buzz of cicadas.) Rugged cliffs offer jaw-dropping views in all directions. Many people come just for the beaches, including one, Plage Notre Dame, named the most beautiful in Europe, its limpid waters sparkling like a jewel.

In the 1980s, the architect Henri Vidal transformed a Porquerolles farmhouse into a family villa with vineyards. The following decade, Edouard Carmignac, a French investment banker, attended Vidal's daughter's wedding and was smitten by the site. In 2013, he bought it as a place to share his impressive art collection.

‘People thought he was crazy,’ says Edouard's son Charles, who now runs the Carmignac Foundation. Since the Villa was in a national park, its exterior could not be touched. Transporting artworks across the water was sure to be a headache. The locals were afraid a museum would change the nature of their beloved island. Undeterred, Carmignac built an exhibition space underground, with large white rooms and natural light through a transparent, water-filled ceiling. He involved the locals from the start, granting them free entrance and invitations to exhibition openings.

The Villa Carmignac is not just a museum, it's an experience. Only 50 visitors are permitted every half-hour, to ensure intimacy with the artworks, and they walk the cool stone floors barefoot. Outside, contemporary sculptures are scattered throughout a 15-hectare garden with Italian stone pines, olive trees, shrubland, prairie and forest.

‘The interactions with art here are different than in a city,’ says Charles. ‘You don't come between two business meetings — you have to spend a day, take a boat, it's a whole thing. The fact that it's a voyage allows you to mentally prepare. Taking the boat cleanses your spirit in a way.’

Curated by Anna Karina Hofbauer and Dieter Buchhart, ‘Sea, Pop & Sun’ features more than 80 artworks from a number of different collections, including that of Edouard. The financier was highly influenced by his time in New York in the 1980s; he was a frequent visitor to Warhol's Factory and had his portrait painted by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Along with important pieces by Basquiat, Warhol and Haring, he owns the largest private collection of Roy Lichtenstein in France.

The exhibition's name references a song, Sea, Sex & Sun, by the ultimate French libertine, Serge Gainsbourg. Dieter Buchhart says the show's underlying theme is freedom in all its forms. ‘In Pop Art, this means individual freedom, but also self-experimentation. Whether in the US, the counterculture Summer of Love, or the European movement of 1968, it points to a fundamental shift in the concept of freedom.’ Though Pop Art was dominated by men, the curators took care to highlight female artists, such as Evelyne Axell and Marjorie Strider, whose racy works proclaimed their sexual independence.

Summer motifs run throughout the show: beaches and swimming pools, surfboards and sailboats, palm trees and kissing couples. The colours are vibrant, the vibe joyous — though if you scratch beneath the shiny surface, Pop Art can also be dark.

Songs from the era are piped in to match each room's contents. The Kinks' Waterloo Sunset accompanies four Warhol prints of the setting sun in different pastel shades. The Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds accompanies a cluster of Niki de Saint Phalle's dancing Nana balloons, hanging from the ceiling. They exemplify the democratisation of consumer culture, and are also conveniently for sale in the museum shop.

The California Dreamin’ room evokes the allure of the American West. One painting, Lost in Hollywood, is a depiction of two lonely palm trees by the contemporary Danish artist Kasper Sonne, who created it as a comment on displacement after learning that palms are not native to California — just one more myth in the land of make-believe.

Dwayne Hanson's hyperrealistic surfer boy is freedom incarnate, shown in a room with Lichtenstein's reclining Mermaid and a 2020 painting by Derrick Adams of three black people relaxing in a swimming pool — a pointed reference to the history of segregation in America, where not everyone is afforded the same access to leisure.

French contemporary artist Théo Mercier created a sand sculpture in situ, a mutant assemblage of shells, sea creatures and industrial waste. It occupies the Villa's centre space, under the water ceiling, sunlight pouring through and shimmering against the artwork. This sculpture will last only as long as the exhibition, then the sand will be carted off to one of Porquerolles’ beaches.

The visit winds up in the garden, in the sun. A strong and very personal painting by the young British artist Marcus Cope contrasts the innocence of childhood with the shadowy menace of the adult world. Nearby, Tracey Emin's plaintive yellow neon sign reads ‘I Followed You To The Sun’.

A reflective bronze ball by Sherrie Levine, Beach Ball after Lichtenstein, sits on a pedestal surrounded by windows, literally drawing us in, says curator Anna Karina Hofbauer. ‘You, the visitor, become part of the work and part of the surroundings of the exhibition, then suddenly you see the reflection of nature outside’ — the myriad greens, the dazzling blue sky, the turquoise sea. If the experience of seeing art changes with the context, this one is difficult to beat.

‘Sea, Pop & Sun’ runs until November 1, 2026. Visit the Fondation Carmignac and official Provence Mediterranée tourist office websites for more information.

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No one had the appropriate respect for the 19th-century cat artist extraordinaire Louis Wain during his lifetime. He was maligned by art critics as ‘not a real artist’ due to his vast commercial output, and it seems that this sickening slander didn’t end with his death. Two paintings by the artist, worth £11,000 combined, were discovered in a skip by an unsuspecting couple in their sixties in South Wales.

‘We always joked they might be worth something one day, but never truly believed it,’ said one of the pair from Pembrokeshire, who chose to remain anonymous. ‘When we initially saw them in the tip, they grabbed our attention as we thought it could be a lovely gift for our daughter-in-law, who loves cats,’ they added.

The paintings, which are now up for auction with Rogers Jones Auctioneers & Co, are Blue Cat Among the Flowers (estimate: £5,000) and Psychedelic Cats — which is a double-sided piece, featuring a painting on the reverse, Deer in an Idyllic Landscape. This has been valued at £6,000. The pieces are characteristic of Wain’s whimsical anthropomorphic felines.

Ironically they were discovered by the couple while on a dog walk. The paintings will be part of the upcoming British and European Fine Art Sale in Cardiff, alongside more than 80 pieces of art, including five pieces from British artist Mary Feddan.

Charles Hampshire of Rogers Jones said: ‘It’s always wonderful to hear stories of people uncovering extraordinary treasures in their homes.’

If your love of Louis Wain doesn’t stretch to £11,000, then ‘Louis Wain and the Cat Show’ is a highly anticipated annual exhibition held at the Chris Beetles Gallery in St James's, London. This year’s exhibition will take place at some point this summer, so keep your eyes peeled.

The British and European Fine Art auction is taking place on Thursday, May 21. To find out more, visit their website.