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.

Get 51 issues of Country Life for £150 and save more than 40% with our best offer ever — exclusive to the Chelsea Flower Show.

Receive a bottle of The Grange Classic Sparkling NV (RRP £39) when you subscribe at the stand (PW215, until May 23, offer available to the first 200 UK subscribers).

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.

The Virgin Queen, the breaker of the Armada, the ruler with transatlantic ambitions: Elizabeth I knew how to project power through her portraits. Yet, before she became Gloriana, before she forged her own myth, she was a princess of uncertain standing — her place at her father’s Court dependent on his moods and whims — as well as a precocious scholar and gifted linguist who perhaps was even, to use a period-inappropriate word, a little nerdy.

Giving no sign of the forceful monarch she would become, she peers demurely, almost shyly, from a portrait made in about 1546, when she was 13, which will be on show in a Tudor portraiture exhibition at the Philip Mould Gallery, ‘Elizabeth I: Queen and Court’.

Mould has long been passionate about 16th-century English portraits and, after the success of a previous show on Tudor and Jacobean miniatures, he decided to return to the period this summer. Collectors responded enthusiastically to his trumpet call and he has managed to bring back under his gallery’s roof about 20 portraits from one of the greatest moments of Britain’s past. ‘It has felt like being the director of a play, with all these characters arriving through their agents — and now they’re all here to perform for three months in one great play.’ (Appropriately, the portrait of Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain who was Shakespeare’s patron — whence The Lord Chamberlain’s Men — will be on display).

At the heart of the exhibition lies a series of paintings that, as Mould puts it, ‘creates a chronology of Elizabeth I’s monarchical persona’, tracing the progression of how she presented herself. The 1546 portrait is only one of two recorded images of her as a princess — the other is in the Royal Collection — and was possibly painted for her father, Henry VIII. ‘Then,’ says Mould, ‘we were able to call back from a collector something really thrilling and extremely curious: the first image of Elizabeth as Queen, done in about 1558. It’s one of a group of portraits, but this is the most distinguished and arguably the primary work, so much so that it bears a name. It’s called the Clopton Elizabeth, after the Clopton family of Stratford-upon-Avon.’ (This picture, too, has a Shakespearean connection in that it hung in a house the Bard later bought, although whether the playwright ever saw it remains unknown).

Wrapped in an ermine collar — a symbol of both royalty and purity — with the Mirror of France, a large pendant that had belonged to her father, hanging from her neck, the Clopton Elizabeth has a hint of a smile on her face, but still looks almost tentative in her queenhood. ‘She is introspective, in contrast to the massively theatrical images of the later period. She’s got a prayer book in her hand and looks more like a virtuous academic than she does a reigning monarch.’

However, it didn’t take long for the Queen and her circle to realise that she should make art work to her advantage. ‘Much as her father, Henry VIII, had Holbein, she needed an image-maker who could bring some of the richness and tricks of the Renaissance in presenting her,’ notes Mould. In the early 1560s, this probably came in the form of George Gower, to whom is now attributed the first full-length picture of the Queen, the Hampden Portrait, previously thought to be the work of Steven van der Meulen.

It is a triumph of symbolism: Elizabeth I stands in a richly embroidered Lancastrian red dress — a (Yorkist) white chemisette peeking through the slits of her sleeves, an armillary sphere, emblem of wisdom, hanging from her waist and a carnation, representing love, in one hand — against a cloth-of-gold hanging, beyond which opens a forest of fruit. ‘This is a picture about nubility, about fertility,’ explains Mr Mould. ‘After she had had the smallpox, people thought she was infertile and she gave a speech to the House of Lords talking about being fertile and bountiful. We think this is what all that fruit refers to in the portrait: this is a proclamation of availability and suitability for marriage.’

Of course, Elizabeth I would then go on to disappoint both foreign and domestic suitors, never marrying nor bearing a child, and this led to a new phase in her iconography, which is encapsulated in the last portrait of the Queen presented in the exhibition, dating from the 1590s. ‘In it, she transcends the human form and becomes a virgin goddess. She takes the persona of Astraea, who’s a goddess of the Golden Age [an imagined time in the ancient Greek past, when there was no evil in the world], but is [also] partly evoking the cult of the Virgin Mary before the Reformation. Certainly, we now have, in a very broad sense, an almost mystical, spiritual figure, who is the Virgin Queen.’

Orbiting around her like planets to the sun were her courtiers who, taking a cue from Elizabeth I, also fashioned their own identity through portraiture. Looking at the Queen from across the Mould gallery will be pictures of her favourites, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester — his eyes piercing above a glorious moustache in a portrait made in the 1560s — and the ill-fated Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, painted by the workshop of Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger in the late 1590s, only a few years before he would lose his head having rebelled in 1601 after his disastrous campaign to quell an Irish rebellion.

The Earl of Essex is a lesson in how ruthless the Queen could be if you fell foul of her — as is another, lesser-known man, John Stubbs, whose portrait is also included in the exhibition. ‘He was a Puritan who dared question Elizabeth I’s machinations,’ says Mould. In a pamphlet entitled The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf whereunto England is like to be swallowed by another French Marriage, if the Lord forbid not the banns by letting her Majesty see the sin and punishment thereof, Stubbs railed against the negotiations for the nuptials between the 46-year-old queen and the much younger, Catholic Francis, Duke of Anjou, brother of Henry III of France. Although Elizabeth I might only have been playing her usual engagement game, with no intention of marrying her ‘frog’, as she fondly called Francis, she didn’t take Stubbs’s words kindly and ordered his hand cut off for ‘seditious writing’. Yet, as the sentence was being carried out, notes Mould, ‘he said “God bless the Queen,” then fainted: there still was a strong element of connection and loyalty’.

It’s easy to see why Stubbs would remain devoted to the Queen — and why she still grips the collective imagination to this day: ‘She was a most remarkable woman,’ believes Mould. ‘She managed to weave her way to survive, by taking no husband or consort, by keeping everyone guessing. After a long period of great turmoil in England with the Wars of the Roses, she oversaw an era of affluence and development, both culturally and economically. She is a very compelling figure with a complex iconography, which makes her today still extraordinarily appealing and enigmatic.

You could be forgiven for thinking you are inside Cathy de Monchaux’s Hoxton studio as you see her ideas take flight. Walls are papered with intricate drawings, shelves clustered with maquettes, sketchbooks laid open and scraps of paper pinned up demanding ‘don’t apologise for the way you are’ and ‘trust your sanity to no one’. There are pieces of fur, gold leaf, twists of wire and velvet; there are casts of frogs and bats and a cat lazily observing you from behind a couple of early sculptures.

But you are not in London. Rather you are standing in the British artist’s survey exhibition ‘Studio, Wounds and Battles, Desire is the Reiteration of Hope’ in the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris.

De Monchaux is one of the most important British artists of the 1990s. She graduated from Goldsmiths in London in 1987, the year before its student cohort came of age as the YBAs (Young British Artists). Her erotic, dystopic, obsessive-compulsive sculptures lured collectors and critics alike, as she wrapped metal bolts in velvet-and-denim sheaths and pleated leather between tightly bound brass plates.

She exhibited at the Chisenhale Gallery in 1993 and the Whitechapel Art Gallery four years later. A nomination for the Turner Prize followed, as did exhibitions in Paris, New York and Washington DC. Virginia Button described her work as ranging from ‘the religious to the secular, the sexually explicit to the chaste, the industrial to the domestic’. Her sculptures were praised as voluptuous and ravishing as well as mysterious and lethal. As the millennium dawned, you felt the future was hers for the taking. And then — nothing.

This new survey show comes 26 years after her last major solo exhibition, at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, where she installed her sculptures with her four-month-old son in tow. Raising him largely on her own meant she prioritised making work for collectors rather than exploring new exhibiting possibilities. She installed a powerful public sculpture outside Newnham College in Cambridge in 2018, but that was the exception. But now, with this survey show in Paris, you can’t help feeling that she is making up for lost time.

‘I only had a year to prepare for the show so it’s been full on,’ she told me on opening night. ‘It has been quite emotional to see a range of work from the past forty years. We [curator Hugo Vitrani and herself] deliberately mixed the work up historically so that work across the decades could talk to each other.’ At the centre of the exhibition is the facsimile of her studio. ‘It was a bit of a risk to reveal so much private stuff, sketchbooks and writing,’ she confesses. ‘It felt quite unnerving as we were hanging the room, putting my heart and soul out there in a very raw way.’

De Monchaux has always had an affinity with France. She used to show at the Galerie Jennifer Flay in Paris, the fashion designer agnès B is a longstanding supporter of her work and even the essays in her Whitechapel catalogue were printed in both English and French. Although she was born and raised in Britain, her ancestors hailed from the small commune of Monchaux in northern France.

As a child she used to fantasise that she lived in Monchaux as a princess, tending her unicorn in her castle. This fictional world helped her cope with crippling anxiety.

Now aged 65, this childhood method of coping has been subconsciously feeding her work for the last decade, as the sado-masochistic ribbons and tethers of her 1990s sculptures gave way to a body of work that places women at the centre of time. Deep-rooted trees meticulously wound from wire stand alongside pregnant soothsayers and savants, whose hair stretches in tendrils into the treetops. At times unicorns weave in and out of the trees. She was horse-mad as a child but the unicorn satisfies her need for complexity. ‘We all know what a unicorn looks like,’ she says, ‘but it’s not real, it's 100% invented in our minds.’ One of her earliest sculptures is a ‘life-size’ skeleton of a unicorn, made from cane poles wrapped in paper. Another early work is Dreamboat (1986), completed while she was a student. She made it ‘quickly, instinctively’ and it wasn’t until she unpacked it prior to this exhibition and saw the pregnant woman recumbent on the deck that she realised the connection to her most recent work.

Her own pregnancy inspired two sculptures in 1999, Sovereign and Mauds Pink. Both stem from the fear that many artist-mothers have — a loss of freedom and creativity after the birth. ‘I was very fearful of the whole birth process,’ she says. ‘I was very anxious about how having a child would affect my freedom as a creative person, and about looking after somebody.’ Both sculptures feature fur-rimmed fissures and protrusions. While Mauds Pink rests in coils like a sated snake, Sovereign repeats its central motif obsessively, all lolling tongues and brass spikes. It brings to mind Game of Thrones and Alien, as well as Fifty Shades of Grey. ‘I haven’t seen these works since before my son was born,’ she says. ‘It was such a pleasure to rediscover them this week and realise that they were very strong and emotionally incisive, in a way that I don’t necessarily see when I first make my work.’

She regularly sits up all night sewing her sculptures or weaving figures and trees from slender copper wire. You feel that the process of making each one is what keeps the studio demons at bay. She struggles to accept work is finished, always wanting to add an extra flourish or complication. She didn’t finish Supplication of the Innocents until the day before this exhibition opened. Now this impossibly intricate sculpture floats in front of a wall, its long roots stretching into shadow as the pregnant women with their hair drawn up into antlers — into branches, into future possibilities — stand in a pale pink mist, like the first breath of dawn. Could this otherworldly sunrise herald the rebirth of De Monchaux’s public career? It augurs well.

Cathy de Monchaux, ‘Studio, Wounds and Battles, Desire is the Reiteration of Hope’, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, until September 13, 2026.

‘Sculpture is an art of the open air,’ said Henry Moore. ‘Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me its best setting and complement is Nature.’ He would have approved, then, of the backdrop for the latest exhibition of his work: Kew Gardens.

Run in partnership with the Henry Moore Foundation, this is the largest Moore show ever held outdoors and, as the curators note in the accompanying catalogue, it reflects the essence of his practice, which embraced both open landscape and studio experimentation. ‘Many of his bronzes were conceived specifically for outdoor settings, where changing light, seasons and the elements transform our experience and affirm sculpture’s organic unity with its surroundings,’ writes Sebastiano Barassi, the Foundation’s head of Henry Moore collections & programme, who, together with Laura Bruni, curated the Kew exhibition.

Of the more than 100 sculptures on display, 30 are monumental works, which are scattered among the trees and bushes of the UNESCO World Heritage Site and inside the Temperate glasshouse. With their organic forms, they echo their botanical setting. As Moore said in 1986: ‘Not to look at and use nature in one’s own work is unnatural to me. It’s been enough inspiration for two million years — how could it ever be exhausted?’ Yet, he didn’t slavishly imitate it. Instead, as Barassi highlights in the catalogue, ‘he set out to capture and distil its essence: strength, fragility and continuous cycles of growth and decay.’

As well as the massive sculptures that pepper the 326-acre grounds, smaller bronzes, carvings, prints and drawings, including some that have rarely been seen before, are on show in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art. This display examines Moore’s process of ‘thinking through Nature’, but also considers his work in the light of current environmental concerns, the fragility of our ecosystems and the role Mankind plays in it. ‘Although rooted in the mid 20th century, Moore’s work speaks powerfully to the present, under- scoring cycles of renewal that bind human and ecological existence,’ write Barassi and Bruni.

From June, Wakehurst, Kew’s botanical garden in West Sussex, will echo the London exhibition with four sculptures by Moore and a selection of newly commissioned pieces by contemporary artists — such as Rana Begum’s No. 1604 Mesh — which are rooted in Nature and create a conversation with his work.

Also in June, more Moore will be on view, this time at the Richard Green gallery, London W1. Exploring the female form — which is the focus of much of his figurative work — the exhibition will encompass 14 maquettes he made primarily between the 1940s and the 1980s, on recurring themes, such as the Madonna and Child, family groups and reclining figures.

‘Henry Moore: Monumental Nature’ is at Kew Gardens, Kew, Greater London TW9, from May 9–January 31, 2027

‘Henry Moore: The Female Form’ is at the Richard Green Gallery, London W1, from June 3–August 28

‘Henry Moore and more’ is at Wakehurst, Ardingly, West Sussex, from June 5–May 23, 2027

In November 2023, shortly after taking up the position of Heritage Lead at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, Claire McDade, a woman who positively thrums with all the compact energy and bright-eyed good cheer of a goldfinch on a sunny spring morning, removed the dust sheet that for the previous 30-odd years had covered a waist-high cabinet, about the size of a foosball table or perhaps a little larger, in a corner of the college’s upstairs library.

What lay beneath left her speechless.

A first edition of the first volume of John James Audubon’s Birds of America. ‘I hate to use the word, but, honestly, I was,’ she told me, ‘gobsmacked. I thought, “We’ve got to do something more with this.” I made it my mission.’

By May 2026, with necessary funding secured and conservation work done, her mission was accomplished. As of this week, the college’s Audubon is, for a few precious hours every Monday, available for public inspection.

The Birds of America was published in instalments between 1827 and 1838, and comprises 435 hand-coloured etched plates with line-engraving and aquatint of 1,065 birds of some 489 North American species. Audubon’s crisp, hallucinogenically vivid images are presented on ‘double-elephant folio’ pages, measuring approximately 40in by 30in, the largest sheets then commercially available.

The format allowed Audubon to represent gangly or ‘spready’ birds such as eagles, owls, herons and cranes (in contorted though never entirely unnatural poses), as well as their smaller cousins, at life size, together with something of their natural habitat and prey or predators.

Occasionally he would expand the perspective further still, as with his astonishing plate of the golden eagle, which also includes, in the mountainous, snow-capped background, a self-portrait of the artist, inching across a fallen tree that bridges a precipitous ravine, with a specimen of another such eagle slung across his back.

Of the 200 or so original sets of The Birds of America, 120 are thought to survive, three and a half of them in Glasgow. The Royal College of Surgeons and Physicians, which holds just two of four volumes’ worth, accounts for the ‘and a half’. Which, by the way, is nothing to sniff at. In 2010, a complete set was sold by Sotheby’s for £7.3 million, making it, at that time, the most expensive book ever sold.

What strikes you, up close, is the astonishing directness of the image-making. The classical clarity of line, enhanced by the free use of vibrant colour and carefully managed shadow, generally reduced to a bare minimum; the oddly dynamic contrast between busy positive space and blank white negative space; above all the compelling impression of authentic, painstakingly observed life, of animated being, of action, appetite, character and temperament.

These are birds that hop and squawk and peck and bite; birds that quiver anxiously or cavort carelessly; sterner birds that meet your gaze and stare back evenly, that warn you to move on if you know what’s good for you.

Audubon’s observation of birds’ appearance and behaviour was meticulous, the result of countless thousands of hours in the field. His love of birds was profound, obsessive. It’s also true that he lived at a time when none of the birds he represented were endangered.

On the contrary, they existed in almost unimaginable profusion. (At least five of the species included in The Birds of America are now extinct.) And we must accept, however uneasily, that his ability to represent those same species depended on his willingness — indeed, his enthusiasm — not only to hunt and kill them, but also to bend and break and otherwise manipulate their fine-boned bodies after death, with the icy-calm discrimination of a Vogue art director, for maximum aesthetic effect as models for his paintings.

Look into Audubon’s use of wire in taxidermy at your leisure, if you dare. He referred to it as ‘skewering’. In this respect, too, he was a great innovator. Shrike a pose.

The texts that accompany the exhibition address these and other similarly awkward points briefly, but directly.

Attentive visitors will also notice the little display by the entrance to the upstairs library that serves as a kind of prelude, pointing out, among other things, that Audubon was the only ornithologist mentioned by name in Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, and drawing attention to the connection — fraught, to say the least — between Audubon and Alexander Wilson, a Scottish ornithologist who had, a decade or so earlier, embarked on a project similar to Audubon’s.

Audubon was a difficult, troubled character. Shunned in America, where he’d alienated those best placed to assist him, he was obliged to look to Europe and Britain for support for the Birds of America project. He also needed printers who were up to the task. His extended visit to Scotland, England and France in 1826-9 yielded the results he hoped for.

Both Charles X and George IV were transfixed by the samples he presented and, crucially, became advance subscribers. Although Audubon came to regret his choice of an Edinburgh publisher, William H Lizars, he quickly identified another one in London, Robert Havell and Robert Havell Jr, to complete the project.

That a set, or even half a set, of The Birds of America should wind up in the collection of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow is less surprising than it might seem in our highly specialised times.

As McDade explained: ‘Glasgow played a significant role in the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th and early 19th centuries, a period when medicine, science and the study of the natural world were closely connected. Audubon’s work is a perfect bridge between science and the Arts.’

Though a modest financial success, The Birds of America didn’t make Audubon rich. Nor is it, from a scientific perspective, without flaws. But nothing quite like it had been attempted before or has been attempted since. An opportunity to inspect even a single one of its gargantuan pages shouldn’t be missed. Afterwards, go outside, listen for birdsong, look to the skies, and give thanks.

Audubon’s Birds of America is available to view on Mondays from 2pm to 5pm at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, 232-42 St Vincent Street, Glasgow G2 5RJ . Entry is free, but visitors are advised to email library@rcpsg.ac.uk in advance.

Let the elitist art pearl-clutching or eye-rolling commence, because the dress code for this evening’s Met Gala fundraiser (formally called the Costume Institute Benefit) is ‘Fashion is Art’.

While I brace myself for how this is an invitation for attendees to subject us to their most deranged Hunger Games: Picasso Painting Cosplay, the theme itself is a welcome comment from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute on the recurring question of whether fashion is, in fact, art.

Regularly overlooked as an art form in its own right, fashion is often told to stay in its ephemeral runway lane and not entertain illusions of art grandeur. We hail its encounters with fine art — Elsa Schiaparelli’s Surrealist collaboration with Salvador Dalí or the era-defining meetings between Louis Vuitton and artists such as Jeff Koons, Richard Prince and Takashi Murakami during Marc Jacobs’ tenure at the brand — but hesitate to call fashion actual art.

Because fashion occupies itself with how we look in this world, it is inevitably thought of as frivolous and undeserving of sharing in art’s divine light. Decorative arts are increasingly acknowledged and revered for producing spectacular objects of art, but fashion isn’t taken quite as seriously. Since fashion has historically been framed as a female subject, do we perhaps also detect an air of sexism here?

What further complicates the matter is that fashion is — gasp — a patently commercial enterprise. Pack your bejewelled Chanel celestial globe minaudière and be gone, you immoral creature.

It is frankly silly to be so miserly with the art label, especially when the late Alexander McQueen’s cabinet of deliciously unnerving curiosities exists, or Iris Van Herpen’s visionary haute couture that floats in a realm of alien biology and tech sculpture. It’s probably not the done fashion thing to disagree with Rei Kawakubo, high priestess of the avant garde Comme des Garçons, but I must insist her work is also art, even if she herself says it isn’t. Her ‘not quite clothes’ and strange shapes continue to tickle fashion brains in a way that is distinctly art gallery-coded.

As someone who has been writing about fashion for 25 years, this is essentially what my wholly subjective and completely unquantifiable litmus test for whether fashion is art boils down to: does it engage something in my mind or offer interesting cultural commentary? Does it make me feel something or ask questions? Like The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, does it draw me in with some inexplicable power and intrigue?

While I adore Yves Saint Laurent (tortured artist personified, with stupendously good taste) and will never say a bad word about his famous 1965 Mondrian dresses, I think fashion as an art form fares best when it isn’t a literal canvas for fine art. (Another exception here being Alexander McQueen’s live robot spray-painting of a dress for Spring/Summer 1999).

It doesn’t necessarily mean something as conceptual as Hussein Chalayan’s famous wooden coffee table dress. It can be a sculptural Balenciaga or Dior dress. Or Martin Margiela’s incognito sunglasses from Spring/Summer 2008 that wrap around the face like a blacked-out censorship bar in a comment on anonymity and identity. Or hats-as- modern-art by clever milliners such as Stephen Jones and Noel Stewart.

To me, fashion easily slots into visual arts and, when done well with fashion shows, performing arts as well. I am still unbearably envious of those who attended John Galliano’s final Artisanal Spring/Summer 2024 show for Maison Margiela in Paris, where glass-skinned models including actor Gwendoline Christie were cinched in skin-like corsetry and prostheses under layers of Belle Époque romance. Truly a show that transcended fashion and placed it firmly in art and theatre, like a Toulouse Lautrec painting come to life in its own otherworldly form.

With this year’s Costume Institute exhibition at the Met titled Costume Art, the museum cements fashion’s value and meaning as an art form. Artworks of dressed bodies from the museum’s collections have been paired with clothing pieces, conversing across mediums with a shared language. And isn’t that what both art and fashion are: an inherently social and communal experience that helps us relate to one another, in the vein of what Leo Tolstoy called a 'means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings' in his 1897 book What is Art?.

Both reflect our world and also shape it. And because fashion moves so fast, it can sometimes verbalise cultural shifts long before other disciplines.

The Met’s stance on fashion as art is also quite literally represented in how the Costume Institute has moved up in the world, from its former basement location to a 12,000 square foot gallery space adjacent to the Great Hall. My art professor from my time at university would surely approve. He would tell us that art and fashion are fundamentally bound to one another, and if we were ever unsure about the era of an artwork, we should simply look at what the people depicted in it were wearing. Carbon dating by garment, basically.

We are well into the age of the blockbuster fashion retrospective, where an exhibition like the Met’s Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination drew more than 1.65 million visitors in 2018. This year, I would highlight the MoMu fashion museum in Antwerp’s new show on the Antwerp Six, which takes an academic-leaning look at the mythical Belgian group of avant garde designers who have shaped fashion with their intellectual, poetic and artistic sensibilities.

Labels and clear definitions are convenient. They help us to quickly make sense of things and understand where they sit in a wider context. But insisting on a clear divide between fashion and art seems somewhat uptight and outdated when they clearly overlap in so many ways. We can probably agree that cinema is an art form, but not all cinema is art. How is fashion any different? The distaste for calling fashion art becomes even more absurd when we are being bombarded with the glaring oxymoron that is ‘AI art’.

If you feel you can’t possibly commit to the art tag for fashion, may I simply propose ‘fashion art’ for any pieces that feel like that? German artist Joseph Beuys, who was known for his ‘extended definition of art’, once noted in an interview: 'Even the act of peeling a potato can be a work of art if it is a conscious act.' Here’s to the fashion artists who can really peel the clothing version of a potato.

The artist Jack Milroy’s new exhibition sees book characters flee the confines of their pages — literally. ‘Bilbiophilia’, which opened at the Shapero Modern in London yesterday and runs for a month, features illustrated birds flying, fish swimming, and flowers blooming from their pages in pieces of 3D cut-out art.

The 87-year-old artist, who is based in Sussex, began his creative education at Scarborough School of Art in North Yorkshire, before going on to study at London University. His work has been acquired by the V&A Museum, the British Library, the Imperial War Museum and the UK Government Art Collection. His fascination with 3D cut-outs began almost 60 years ago, and has been heavily inspired by Picasso and Max Ernst.

‘I am very excited about the show, actually, because it’s taking place in a gallery attached to an antiquarian bookshop, and quite a bit of my work involves working with books. It seems a very neat connection,’ Jack says. It is his first exhibition with Shapero Modern, the gallery that sits just below Shapero Rare Books in central London. He says that while the books upstairs are ‘carefully presented in pristine condition’, his books below have been ‘vandalised, disembowelled and dismembered,’ for his art.

His pieces feature books that are ‘not meant to be read’ but are for reflecting ‘perhaps on the demise of the book as a purveyor of information and knowledge’. Jack previously explored book-related art in his exhibition 'Post Card-Post Book' at Benjamin Rhodes Gallery, also in London. ‘It was an accident,’ says Jack, on how books came to be such a major theme in his work. ‘I was given a book when I was at art school by a friend. It was a manual of operative surgery and one day… I thought maybe I should just operate on this book.’

The exhibition also includes pieces made from tins of sardines. This is reminiscent of an early series of Jack’s work where he ate sardines for lunch for 100 days, in order to collect enough tins to use in his artwork. Did it put him off the food for life? ‘No, I love them,’ he reassures me. ‘They’re from Waitrose, they’re called Sardine Piccanti and I’m still eating them. In fact, I did a piece with them the other day. I just titled it “Monday the 13th of April”, or whatever the day was that day.’

His creative process, he says, is simple: ‘I don’t have a plan. I just do whatever comes into my head, as it were.’ With the exhibition, his goal is positivity. ‘It's such gloomy times at the moment, and a lot of art now seems to be rather dispiriting and focusing on the miseries of life,’ Jack says. ‘I suppose I wanted my work to bring joy, in a way. I think it should be pleasurable to see it, and I also want people to walk away with it and take it away with them in their heads.’

Bibliophilia runs until May 17 at Shapero Modern, New Bond Street, London

We are currently experiencing a dolls’-house revival — and it’s not only for children. In fact, it’s not even for children. From highly skilled designers generating the most intricate interiors to devoted dilettantes rediscovering a childhood staple, the world has gone Lilliputian.

As did many recent crazes, it stemmed from the Pandemic, when a renewed focus on domestic crafts afforded an escape from home schooling and throat swabbing. Yet the obsession has a far longer history, with the earliest modern dolls’ houses dating to the Renaissance. Spurs to imagination rather than toys, they included Petronella Oortman’s cabinet house (1686–1710), now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

The work of more than 700 international craftsmen, it was a perfect snapshot of the world of the Dutch Golden Age, duly inspiring Jessie Burton’s hit 2014 novel The Miniaturist. Oortman’s cabinet house, those of her compatriots and their even grander 1700s English equivalent at Nostell Priory in West Yorkshire, complete with itsy-bitsy silverware, chintz and porcelain, were exactly the kind of miniatures Queen Mary came to adore in the early 1900s.

Recognised for her love of ‘elephants of agate with jewelled howdahs, small tea sets in gold or silver, papier-mâché workboxes, tiny watercolours of flower-gardens, glass paintings,’ according to her biographer James Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary’s mania led to the construction of her own enormous dolls’ house, now at Windsor Castle. Created between 1921 and 1924 as a gift from the nation, it is the largest and most opulent scaled home in the world.

Inspired by Queen Mary’s infamously ‘predatory’ love of artefacts, which often provoked claims of kleptomania, the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens built a dolls’ house fit for miniature royals. Working with the Queen’s childhood friend Princess Marie Louise, he ensured all its contents were of the highest possible quality, even providing a record of life in Edwardian England, before the memories faded.

Lutyens’s imagination ran riot, but some miniaturists prefer to replicate the world even more exactly, as husband and wife Kevin Mulvany and Susie Rogers do. Originally art historians, they employ a breadth of knowledge, site visits and detailed research into old plans to ensure their 1:12 houses are historically correct. Undaunted by even the most lavish architectural feats, they have, to date, miniaturised Hampton Court, Versailles and Buckingham Palace, among others. Their most recent project, Ham House, as found on the Thames at Richmond, is so deft in its imitation that you’ll find yourself reaching for your National Trust membership card.

Regardless of your chosen approach to life in the miniscule — think of Monica and Phoebe’s distinct dolls’ houses in Friends, one a temple of perfectionism, the other to spontaneity — there is space for all at the London Dollshouse Showcase. Founded in 1985 by the much lauded, recently departed Caroline Hamilton, it has been a hub for enthusiasts and collectors for the past 40 years. Some of the world’s most talented artisans, creating minute Georgian silverware or Chesterfields clad in Morris fabrics, come to Kensington Town Hall for others to gaze in wonder. It is now so popular that, alongside its packed Christmas gathering, there is a second fair in May and a late summer online showcase.

It was winter 2022 when the writer and self-confessed interiors nerd Lucy Clayton saw the queue outside. Strolling with her daughter, Bunny, in a pram, Lucy was glad of a moment’s respite and joined the throng. Inside, her imagination was fired, but she also found solace, as her late father was critically ill at the time. She had no idea how much she needed a dolls’ house in her adult life, but it gave her the space to perfect something when everything else was imperfect, as well as allowing her to forge a closer collaborative bond with her mother, Rebecca.

Initially, they planned to make a house for Bunny, for which Lucy knew she needed to get away from characteristically cluttered Victoriana. Instead, she wanted timeless, fashionable rooms with a touch of whimsy. It soon became clear, however, that this was no longer something for Bunny — although she remains Lucy’s poster girl — but a creation in and of itself, inspired by, but never limited by reality. It gave birth to the Kensington Dollshouse Company, a tribute, in part, to the Dutch houses of the 17th century.

I couldn’t help but ask if they ever got nervous about children playing with their houses. ‘I’d love to say not at all,’ Lucy replied cautiously, before answering more clearly: ‘OK, very!’ Peering into one of the rooms they have conjured, with a four-poster Chinoiserie bed upholstered in vintage silk, I can easily see why. ‘Nobody needs what we are making,’ she adds, ‘but I’m entirely comfortable with that.’

In truth, many people want what they offer, which combines her mother’s instinctive touch for embroidery and upholstery with Lucy’s magpie collecting fads. For a Christmas-themed townhouse, she found an old Sotheby’s catalogue with period ski posters, all perfectly sized for tiny picture frames, and another project featured a miniature hand-painted fire screen, made in the 1940s. Such details are endless, although the sense of virtuosity stems from the pair’s ability to be builder, decorator and designer combined.

Like those hallucinatory moments in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lucy admits the constant shift between scales can be confusing. Her go-to architect, Will Creech, with whom she’s worked both on her own home and the miniature projects, has often had to ask, ‘is this dolls’ house or real house?’ Although amusing, such immediacy means that when you see a Clayton house, it is like looking at the property pages in Country Life, complete with Edward Bulmer paints, vintage fabrics and classic wallpapers. As a result, the mother-and-daughter team has been able to make a big impact in a small world.

Following collaborations with House & Garden, Cece Jewellery and Harrods, as well as private clients, they are currently working on two completely new houses and a major renovation. At a little under 5ft long, it is an antique house that has become the springboard for even wilder flights of fancy, with each room set to represent a children’s story, pushing what the team has fashioned so far and moving towards a manifest artwork. Yet their goal always remains that moment ‘when people first see what we do; their sense of wonder and surprise’. That’s true whether you’re examining an actual dolls’ house or the book of their work.

‘To do anything that generates such a response is something to treasure,’ Lucy smiles, before turning back to the project in the palm of her hand.

This article first appeared in the April 1 edition of Country Life magazine. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

A gondolier artfully manoeuvres his vessel through the aquatic traffic, a single oar raised, spear-like at the stern. Daytrippers meander towards the merchants of Venice, feeling the magpie attraction to objects that glint in shop windows. Light refracts through chess sets, candlesticks and curiosities. It has always been like this in the Italian city where glass flows as freely as the waterway inlets.

That molten history is explored in Tracy Chevalier’s latest book, The Glassmaker, where the Girl with a Pearl Earring author turns her attention to the Venetian island of Murano. We meet Orsola Rosso in 1486 as she learns how to handle glass by practising with honey on a stick. The craft becomes increasingly sophisticated, featuring ‘white goblets embellished with swans, blue with fish, yellow with parrots, red with snakes’, and Rosso’s timeless ‘mouse dropping’ seed beads, which go on to adorn Italian socialite Luisa Casati’s extravagant gowns. Glass dolphins continue to be passed as love tokens into the 21st century; fortunes may ebb, but the Venetian glass-making tradition will never sink.

My first dalliance with Murano glass was in Suffolk. Pottering around my favourite antique shop in Bungay, I encountered a pale-pink dachshund figurine that was just the right side of kitsch. It was stretching in exactly the same downward-dog posture that my real dachshund adopts and, despite the hard, unrelenting medium, there was movement to the piece. ‘That’s Murano glass,’ the seller informed me with authority. It would be some years later, as I toyed with buying a mallard (eventually determined to be on the wrong side of kitsch) from a gallery in Venice — dizzy from coloured glass, you understand — that this pitch gained full meaning.

Murano — and Venice more broadly — is closely associated with skilled development of blown glass; a method based on the controlled expansion and manipulation of a molten bubble through a blowpipe. Decorative effects developed over time, including plunging a hot half-blown vessel into water to intentionally cause cracks to form on the surface. However, Venetian glass’s reputation is an early modern phenomenon: A History of Glassforming by Keith Cummings explains that, although until the 1960s it was thought that glass wasn’t commonplace until medieval times, blown glass is now known to date back to 50BC, when it was invented in the Syro-Palestinian area. The V&A Museum’s glass gallery in South Kensington includes a selection of Roman mould-blown head vases, a style still popular today.

Working under the brand La soufflerie, Paris-based couple Valentina and Sébastian Nobile’s pieces begin life as a clay sculpture that is then moulded in plaster. From this, another mould goes to a bronze founder in the Somme region of France. ‘It is this third cast into which we blow our glass,’ explains Valentina. ‘We work with a Venetian glass-blower who handmakes our tools for us.’ La soufflerie tableware is blown from the couple’s workshop in Tunisia. ‘There’s no machinery involved; everything is done with hand tools and a furnace,’ explains Valentina. ‘At the bottom of each item, you can feel the pontil mark left by the glass-blower’s cane.’

One particularly compelling aspect of glass is that it can be recycled an infinite number of times. At a recent craft fair, there was an inevitable butter-fingers moment with a glass decoration. The potter next door looked ashen, but the cheery glass seller simply collected the broken pieces and set them aside to use in a new creation. Valentina shows me bottles in varying shades of green, including Perrier. ‘Everything we make is from recycled glass,’ she says. It can be almost anything; ‘even car windows’.

Another intriguing side of glass-blowing is the performance around it. Although other art forms rely on multiple processes — paint can be layered at different stages, for example — blown glass must be crafted in one continuous session. This adds a sense of jeopardy, rather like cooking or the production of ceramics, where the maker is also at the mercy of a flame. Just as those crafts have inspired reality television shows (The Great Pottery Throw Down, The Great British Bake Off, both Channel 4), glass-blowing even has its own contest, Blown Away (Netflix), in which prizes include a residency at the Corning Museum of Glass, New York State, US.

For a closer experience, in Thuringia’s highland town Lauscha, Germany, visitors can watch artists inflate glowing spheres that become the Christmas baubles associated with the region. Glass has been blown in the area since the 16th century, with the first glass tree decorations — originally fruit and nuts — dating back to the 1800s. Demonstrations are also central to Glasi Hergiswil, the last place in Switzerland where glass is traditionally blown. The living museum, based near Lucerne, includes an archive of pieces created on the site over the past 200 years, and it is currently recruiting glass-blowers.

Although glass-blowing in manufacturing might be confined to a handful of workshops, it is thriving as an art form in its own right. Among the Venetian platters and German tankards at the V&A is a huge silver-plated glass sculpture that appears to be melting into a mirror. The mould-blown Narcissus (1975) by Erwin Eisch stoked the furnace for studio glass. These artists soon realise it is not a quick skill to learn. ‘It’s 10 years before you’re a proficient glass-blower,’ says Alison Stott, who came to glass after working as a visual-effects artist and was a finalist at this year’s John Ruskin Prize exhibition at Trinity Buoy Wharf in London. ‘In its molten form, glass is like lava; it requires your undivided attention. Once you’ve got that hot glob on the end of your iron, you can’t think of anything else.’

Alison is particularly interested in caustics — the bright patterns we see at the bottom of a glass of water in the sunshine. In her piece Naturally Focused III, selected from nearly 4,000 entries, Alison’s hand-blown lens allows light to dapple and pool, combining the innate proper-ties of the material with scientific application. A similar piece, Naturally Focused I, is displayed in the school of physics at Bristol University, with the central blown section installed in a brass structure emulating a historic instrument.

It’s a long way from the Renaissance seed beads and, yet, to invoke Chevalier’s ‘time alla Veneziana’, the making methods span the continuum

In 1985, when Harold Macmillan addressed the House of Lords as Earl of Stockton, his typically elegant speech on privatisation was greeted by ripples of appreciative laughter, mixed perhaps with apprehension, as certain peers found too personal an application to his analogy: ‘The sale of assets is common with individuals and states when they run into financial difficulties. First, all the Georgian silver goes, and then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then, the Canalettos go.’

He was speaking amid the decades in which the contents of great and middling British and Irish country houses were being dispersed, sometimes at the rate of two or three sales a month during the summer auction season. The preceding hecatomb of demolitions had been slowed by the development of house tourism initiated by the Marquess of Bath at Longleat in Wiltshire and the Duke of Bedford at Woburn, Bedfordshire, and brought close to an end by the seminal exhibition ‘The Destruction of the Country House’, organised by John Harris, Marcus Binney and Peter Thornton in 1974 under the aegis of Sir Roy Strong at the V&A Museum.

However, content sales continued, ironically encouraged by the ‘Treasure Houses of Britain’ exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, USA, organised by Country Life's late distinguished contributor Gervase Jackson-Stops, which was on show even as Macmillan spoke.

The grandest of such sales were mostly undertaken by Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and there Christie’s had the edge, as the firm had the longer connections with owners and their possessions, which it had often already valued and essentially catalogued over generations for probate purposes. Phillips and Bonhams were active on the next level, as were a number of regional and local auction houses. The great Mentmore sale for Lord Rosebery in 1977 tilted the scale in Sotheby’s favour and had a long-term consequence when Rosebery’s grandson joined that firm and headed its country-house sales department. In 1978, another connection secured the great Von Hirsch collections for Sotheby’s, whose chairman Peter Wilson had been a school-friend of Von Hirsch’s stepson.

Sotheby’s coups in securing first 56 Impressionist paintings from the Weinberg Collection in 1957, and then the Goldschmidt collection — only seven modern masterpieces — in the following year, had already begun the transformation of the art market and set the pattern for the next decades, when American collections were routinely offered in London rather than Paris or New York. Nowadays, many of the greatest American collections still go to Sotheby’s and Christie’s, albeit primarily in New York. At less rarefied levels, however, where the duopoly are no longer so interested, there is considerable choice for would-be vendors. The internet gives smaller firms access to the same international audience. It has become much easier to arrange private sales through dealers, agents or auctioneers and there are also more methods to consider. Selling exhibitions with dealers may in some cases be more efficacious than auctions, a bulk sale to a museum or another collector better than a steady drip of smaller parcels onto the market.

One thing, however, remains constant: trust. People who create, rather than inherit, collections, inevitably come to know the dealers and auction-house staff in their fields, in many cases building up relationships with them over years, and it is still more vital for dealers and auctioneers to foster such relationships. Thus, when the time comes to sell, the collector will already have an idea how best to proceed.

This, of course, works both ways. Will Pasfield of Bellmans West Sussex auctioneers has long experience in this field. He shared the Sir David Tang collection of Asian and contemporary art with Christie’s and, in 2023, he oversaw the dispersal of the contents of one of the last private houses in Grosvenor Square. At that time, he said that his fantasy was to be ‘handed keys to a house for our top-to-bottom attention; making some discoveries in the process and selecting the items for a Bellmans auction’.

He will now have to dream up a new fantasy. In recent months, he has been assessing, cataloging and packing the contents of the crowded flat into which an inveterate hoarder, Derek Duggan (1949–2015), had crammed the accumulation of a lifetime. His heirs are his two brothers, who still live in their native Cork, and, having got to know Pasfield, they were happy to hand him the keys. Despite their faith, however, he always observes his own rule: never visit a property unaccompanied.

Other than a firm’s reputation or personal knowledge of specialists, choice for collectors and executors may come down to convenience of location, in consideration of transport costs. Among other British houses that have earned reputations for handling contents sales are, in no particular order, Lyon & Turnbull, Dreweatts, Cheffins, Sworders, Tennants, Woolley & Wallis, Lawrences, Roseberys and Olympia Auctions. The last now holds regular sessions for property from the estates of artists whose reputations might not yet justify a one-person sale or exhibition, but who are likely to benefit from this process.

Obviously, terms, commissions and conditions are negotiable with more important properties. Sotheby’s had arranged guarantees on all lots in at least one of the modern-art collections sold in New York at the end of last year and it is unlikely that any wakeful executors or their owners would have accepted that auctioneer’s innovatory extra commission on lots that exceed their estimates — which are set by the saleroom. At Bellmans, Pasfield says all commissions are negotiable with the exception of the buyer’s premium.

An operation that stands between auction and traditional dealing is Dickinson of Jermyn Street. Simon Dickinson, who set it up in 1993 with the greatly missed David Ker, spent many years in Christie’s Old Master department, where he gained a reputation for a remarkable eye and visual memory. The business chiefly sells on commission and offers not only expertise and unrivalled contacts, but considerably lower rates than most auctioneers. It points out that auction houses will typically charge a seller 10% to 15% commission and a buyer 26% on the first $1 million. Thus, for a $1 million sale, the total commission can be more than $400,000, a 40% rate, pushing up the price for the buyer and reducing the return price to the seller. ‘Dickinson only charges commission once and at a significantly reduced level, normally between 10% and 20%.’

One of Dickinson’s major sales in 2025 was a Reynolds portrait of Mrs Moses Franks, 1766 — a beautiful example of the artist’s portraiture. Franks is a rare and important Jewish sitter in Reynolds’s oeuvre and her father-in-law established the first synagogue in New York. The sale resulted from a visit Dickinson had paid to an American collection of 18th-century British paintings perhaps 30 years before. He had kept in touch with the owners and, when the heirs wanted to sell, he took the entire group. The firm’s head of research knew that the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama wanted to expand its holdings of British paintings and showed them the Reynolds. It has since re-crossed the Atlantic to join that collection.

This feature originally appeared in the March 18, 2026, issue of Country Life.

Maurice de Brunhoff, the chief printer at Parisian graphic-design company Lemercier, had a problem with the Divine. Not quite God, but the next rung down: Sarah Bernhardt. The temperamental diva of the Parisian stage had called to place an order for posters of the latest melodrama in which she starred, Gismonda.

Only, it was December 26, 1894, and the Divine Sarah wanted the posters up by New Year’s Day — or so legend has it. De Brunhoff had little choice but to make do with the one man at hand, Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939), a Czech émigré who was on the premises to correct some lithographic proofs.

He packed him off to the theatre — a feat that required the rather down-at-heel Mucha to borrow an old opera hat that kept falling over his eyes as he tried to sketch the actress — and hoped for the best. Once the proof came back, however, de Brunhoff was horrified. ‘Mais, mon Dieu!’ the artist’s son, Jiři, quoted him as saying in Alphonse Mucha: his life and art. ‘It’s a shambles. Sarah will never accept it.’

When theatre staff urgently summoned him and de Brunhoff, Mucha thought his career was over. He was wrong. ‘My poster was up on the wall, Sarah was standing in front of it, unable to tear her eyes away. When she saw me, she came and embraced me. In short, no disgrace, but success, great success.’ Even more, in fact, than he had anticipated: ‘The public’s appetite was immense; the posters were torn away or cut off walls with razors,’ notes Arthur Ellridge in Mucha: The Triumph of Art Nouveau.

So taken was Bernhardt with her golden picture that she put Mucha under contract and had him design not only posters, but also stage sets, costumes and even menus for her glamorous dinner parties.

Her seal of approval made the artist famous overnight. Suddenly, the one-time clerk who had been sacked from a court registrar post in his native Moravia for embellishing a record with portraits of the defendants and who in earlier years had survived on lentils and the generosity of his landlady, café owner Charlotte Caron, had a queue at his door.

Everyone, from Champagne houses to biscuits manufacturers and railway companies wanted a poster in le style Mucha — including Nestlé, then a maker of infant food, which commissioned him a design to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. In a bold palette centred on a very regal red — an unusual choice for him — he imagined one of his distinctive, leaf-wreathed women holding a crown in her hands, as if poised to place it on the head of the Queen, against a backdrop of smoking factories and ships that hinted at the foundations of Britain’s wealth.

Although most celebrated for his graphic work, Mucha also embraced sculpture and the decorative arts, drawing at will from Byzantine, Celtic, Japanese, Rococo and Czech motifs to design everything from cutlery to textiles, stained-glass windows and jewellery.

One of his greatest artistic collaborations was with goldsmith Georges Fouquet, who, having taken over the business from his father Alphonse, turned his back on tradition and firmly embraced Art Nouveau. It was the serpent bracelet Mucha had designed for Bernhardt’s poster of Medea that led, in 1899, to the first piece he and Fouquet made together: a gold snake, its head designed to rest on the top of the hand and linked by fine chains to a ring encrusted with opal mosaics, diamonds and rubies.

Many of Mucha’s jewellery designs were inspired by nature — an exquisite gold, opal, sapphire and diamond necklace ending in a pendant shaped like fuchsia flowers, a ring curling like a fern frond, a cloisonné enamel brooch shaped like a sycamore seed, its wings exquisitely iridescent. Others, often brooches, drew from his repertoire of beautiful, wreathed women. All were striking: ‘Mucha's work is monumental,’ wrote in 1902 poet and critic Gustave Kahn. ‘His jewellery bears no resemblance to the charming baubles made by his imitators. Each object is a masterpiece and gives an impression of solidity and force.’

As the perfect showcase for these extraordinary pieces, Fouquet also commissioned the artist the complete designs — from furniture to lighting — for his new shop in Paris’s Rue Royale. And what a shop it was. Welcoming visitors at the door was a huge female figure, hair streaming down her back, body draped in transparent veils. Inside, two sculpted peacocks, tail fanned, surveyed the room: 'Yes, the creations of Art Nouveau require a new kind of framework, a framework which will set the artwork off effectively and which will thus create a harmony,’ wrote in 1901 Revue de la Bijouterie. Everyone thinks so, everyone says so... Everyone hesitates, everyone waits... And now, suddenly, someone has been brave enough to make it a reality. He has opened a new kind of shop in the very heart of Paris. He has raised it to the level of his art, furnished it in accordance with the canon of his soul'.

One of the highest moments of Mucha’s collaboration with Fouquet was the collection they presented at Paris’s Exposition Universelle in 1900, a set of rich, golden pieces so flamboyant as to be tricky to wear. However, the Expo sowed the seeds of a dramatic change in the artist’s career. Mucha had also been asked to decorate the Bosnia‐Herzegovina Pavilion and it was when working on it that he first entertained the idea that would absorb him in his mature years: painting an epic cycle on the history of the Slavic nations. Having found a patron in Chicago businessman Charles Crane, the artist, who had by then moved to Zbiroh Castle, in Bohemia, began to work on the cycle in 1911, embracing a style that combined realism with symbolism and looked very different from his earlier Art Nouveau approach. It took him more than a decade to complete the Epic, which turns 100 this year, and in 1928, he and Crane presented the 20 monumental pictures to the City of Prague to mark the 10th anniversary of the independent Czechoslovak Republic.

However, fate, that fickle star, had in store a harsh blow. Mucha lived long enough to see his beloved country signed away to Hitler’s Germany on March 14, 1939, after which he was arrested by the Gestapo and interrogated. Although released shortly afterwards, he was broken in body and spirit and died on July 14, spared only the horrors of the Second World War.

This feature originally appeared in the March 11, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

When, in 2011, the National Gallery opened its Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition, it shocked the world. Its centrepiece was a painting, Salvator Mundi, newly attributed to the great Tuscan master, the first discovery of his work in a century and one of only about 20 thought to be by his hand.

The picture was discovered in 2005 in a regional sale in the USA, having previously been in the collection of British merchant Sir Francis Cook — albeit attributed to another Italian artist, Bernardino Luini. It was deemed to be the long-lost original after which the many versions of Salvator Mundi that issued from da Vinci's workshop were based.

It had taken six years of restoration and research to put forward the da Vinci attribution, but it was by no means universally accepted — indeed, it continues to cause controversy among art historians to this day. However, this didn’t prevent the picture selling for an astounding $450.3 million at a Christie’s sale in 2017.

Less than a decade after that record auction, the most distinguished copy of Salvator Mundi made by da Vinci's workshop, the de Ganay’s version — named after the French marquess to whom it belonged for a time — is now on offer, this time with Agnews, which is presenting it this week at The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht, The Netherlands (March 14–19).

Unlike the record-breaking Cook Salvator Mundi, this is not a rediscovery. It had been exhibited in Paris in 1866, when it belonged to ​​Baron de Lareinty, who maintained it had come from a convent in Nantes, which in turn might have received it, according to the late American art historian Joanne Snow-Smith, by none other than Louis XII, one-time employer of da Vinci.

In 1902, the de Ganay Salvator Mundi was then acquired by Parisian connoisseur Countess Martine de Béhague, before entering the collection of the marquess that gave it its name. Sold by Sotheby’s in 1999, it has been in a private collection until now.

For a brief moment, the de Ganay version itself was considered the prototype of the workshop’s Salvator Mundis, with Snow-Smith positing in 1978 that it had been painted by the master himself between 1507 and 1513, while he was at the court of Louis XII. Today, French art historian and da Vinci specialist Vincent Delieuvin deems it to be ‘a version by a faithful pupil of the master, doubtless painted under his supervision and with his possible intervention’ — but could it also be the truest to da Vinci's vision?

In 2022, when Spain’s Museo El Prado stoked the flames of the debate over the Cook Salvator Mundi by downgrading it to the category of ‘attributed works, workshop or authorised and supervised by Leonardo’, Spanish scholar Ana Gonzáles Mozo suggested that de Ganay picture could be the closest to what she believed to be the missing original by the master.

Although both the de Ganay and the Cook Salvator Mundi are painted on walnut panels of similar sizes and have similar proportions, there are several differences between the two, not least in the drapery — the de Ganay has a fold shaped like the Greek letter Ω (omega), thought to be a symbol of the crucifixion wounds — and the position of Christ’s hand. The rock crystal orb — an emblem of supremacy, as Antiques Roadshow expert and jewellery specialist Geoffrey Munn explains, ‘made from a noble material absolutely loaded with talismanic and apotropaic meanings’ — has an obvious cross painted over it in the de Ganay version. It suggests, says Geoffrey, ‘the universality of Christianity covering the orb, which is the world’.

He expects the de Ganay picture to cause a stir in Maastricht. Although it may not make the same head-spinning numbers as the Cook Salvator Mundi, it is certain to turn heads.

Dark, ominous clouds gathered above Windsor Castle in every watercolour George VI could see. Turning to the artist, he quipped: ‘You seem to have very bad luck with your weather, Mr Piper.’ However witty, the royal comment was perhaps a little unjustified considering when, why and who had painted the set: made during the Second World War, it was a commission from Queen Elizabeth, who wanted a record of the castle in case it was damaged by bombing. The hand that captured it belonged to John Piper (1903–92), who, as an Official War Artist, had witnessed the devastation the German air attacks wrought on Britain. It’s almost surprising that he had only limited itself to filling his skies with rain-laden clouds rather than a full-blown storm.

The wanton destruction of buildings cut Piper especially deep. ‘He loved architecture, church or town, from all periods,’ says Andrew Lambirth, who has curated the forthcoming ‘John Piper in the South Country’ exhibition at the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes. It was an interest the artist had developed early. By the time he was 12, Piper, who was born in Epsom, had already visited more than 60 churches in his native Surrey and started producing his own guide books.

Although his family indulged this passion, taking him on trips across the country and abroad, they tried to steer him towards a legal career — his father was a solicitor — with little success. Eventually, he enrolled at the Richmond Art School, then the Royal College of Art, but didn’t complete his studies. ‘As an artist, he always intrigued me because he’d started out pretty much as self-taught. He had a couple of periods of art school, but they didn’t go down very well with him. He liked to discover things for himself.’

The ancient landscape he found in Wiltshire, in particular, fascinated him: Stonehenge and Avebury, the Barrows on the Salisbury Plains, the burial mounds in Silbury and Devizes, which became his favourite market town. ‘He would come here again and again and he would draw,’ says Andrew, who is speaking from an office in the old tobacco factory Piper once recorded on paper. ‘What’s so good about [him] is the combination of his ability to capture the spirit of place, the atmosphere of a landscape, but also the detail of how it looked and of the buildings on it. He was an antiquarian, he loved the history of English architecture, particularly the Picturesque.’

Yet, if one eye looked back at the past, the other was firmly trained on the future and the latest artistic developments. ‘At the beginning of his maturity, he was very aware of what [Pablo] Picasso was doing, what [Joan] Miró was doing, what [Henri] Matisse was doing and suddenly realised that he’d been making pictures that he thought looked rather old fashioned.’ It was then that he decided to pursue what Andrew calls ‘the modern ideal’, experimenting with Abstraction, making constructions of wire and wood and embracing geometry. Yet: ‘Abstraction starved him’, as Christopher Neve wrote in Country Life in 1983. ‘He was up to the minute, but he wasn’t really himself,’ explains Andrews. Soon, he returned to landscape and architecture, but brought in ‘a modernist twist’ in the form of collage elements: ‘a way of renovating the great historical tradition of British romantic painting.’ He even tried his hand at making landscape collages en plein air — no easy feat in the great British weather — including one at Stourhead, Wiltshire, in 1939, which later became the basis for his striking Autumn at Stourhead.

The Second World War started that year and Kenneth Clark, who was director of the National Gallery, put Piper forward as an Official War Artist, a role in which he captured both the changing face of the countryside — the plough breaking the ground on Salisbury Plain to grow crops — and the wreckage of the towns. Just how harrowing Piper found it becomes evident not only from the dark clouds of Windsor Castle that prompted George VI’s pithy comment, but also from his paintings of bombed Bath: ‘There’s a terrible melancholy, there’s a sadness there and there’s an anger that comes out in the colour,’ notes Andrew. He channelled his efforts in recording what was being lost and, later, in rebuilding it.

Working with Patrick Reyntiens, who fashioned Piper’s designs from glass, the man who had spent much of his youth looking at churches now tried his best to breathe fresh life into them. He started with the windows for the baptistry of Coventry Cathedral — the new bones of the church he had captured as a mutilated shell, the morning after the Luftwaffe attack of November 14, 1940. Much more stained-glass work followed, bold with colours of the hope and optimism of a country rising from its ashes. Andrew knew Reyntiens — ‘lovely old boy,’ he recalls fondly — and says that in bringing Piper’s complex visions to life, he made stained glass do ‘things it had never done before: He had to use peculiar corners and edges and different colours against each other, to try and achieve the subtlety of the Piper [designs]’. Not all their commissions were religious and among the secular was a window for the Wiltshire Museum, which encapsulated much of what the artist loved about the landscape: the standing stones, the burial grounds and treasures such as the Stonehenge Urn.

Piper’s stained glass is testament to his extraordinary creative talent. Albeit primarily a painter and draughtsman, he turned his hand to almost anything: book illustration, ceramics, textile and stage-set design, tapestry — not least at Chichester Cathedral in West Sussex — photography, even writing and editing (among others, he worked with Sir John Betjeman, with whom he used to go on ‘architectural binges’, on a few Shell Guides to English counties).

He also defied categories: he was a leading modernist who then rejected Modernism; an accurate, almost topographical recorder of the world around him, who nonetheless felt the urge to interpret what he saw; a man who remained true to his long-standing interests at the same time as embracing new ideas and ways of working. Some called him fickle, others — mostly die-hard Modernists — even a traitor to the cause, but he bore it all with pride: ‘People think it dishonest to be chameleon-like in one’s artistic allegiances. On the other hand, I think it dishonest to be anything else.’

‘John Piper in the South Country’ is at the Wiltshire Museum, Devizes, until June 7

Conversation around the lunch table on Boxing Day turned to the Mona Lisa. The primary reason for this being that among our number was my father-in-law, who spent the last few years of a long teaching life imparting his immense knowledge of History of Art to A-level students, including, no less, our future King. The Renaissance is his speciality and even as he approaches four score years and 10 his ability to remember dates and details of the art and artists of that period is astounding.

The question under discussion concerned the beauty of Mona Lisa when, according to most of us heathens sitting around the table, she is such a plain Jane. Inevitably, my father-in-law sprang to her defence, citing not simply the obvious disparity in perceptions of beauty between the 16th and 21st centuries, but the more complex nuances of the painting. He talked of Leonardo da Vinci’s skilful use of sfumato in creating delicate, smoky layers of paint to convey his sitter’s emotional aura of dignity and calm; how the ambiguity of her beauty is in itself beautiful; how her face and her posture, unadorned by jewellery or obvious signs of wealth, is less about physical attractiveness and more about the moral and intellectual beauty of her soul. He told us how da Vinci worked on the painting for years, never delivering it to the Giocondo family who had commissioned the portrait, but keeping it with him until his death in 1519. For some reason, the artist could never let his Lady Lisa go.

The conversation reminded me of a similar impassioned declaration of female beauty my father-in-law had shared with us several years before. We were off to Venice with young children in tow, so thought we should consult the oracle for the perfect itinerary for a cultural, but not overly intense, family trip. The father-in-law, still teaching at the time, took the task very seriously, even going to the lengths of setting up a projector in his study, sitting the five of us down and presenting a slide show of all the best bits of La Serenissima and the sights he had singled out for us. There were to be a lot of Virgin Marys and Baby Jesuses, so we hatched a cunning plan that after every 20 spotted of either one the reward would be an ice cream at Nico’s, the city’s famous gelateria on the Zattere. Miraculously, we whipped around multiple churches and galleries with extraordinary speed and spent far longer than we might ever have anticipated watching boats on the Giudecca.

Back on the slide show, however, our attention had been drawn to one church and one painting above all others that, in my father-in-law’s estimation, represented the most exquisite depiction of the Virgin Mary in all art history. We left this one until last, when we were so full of ice cream there was no need to rush and so pumped up on Virgin Marys we had plenty of benchmarks. In a campo, just beyond St Mark’s Square, we entered the church of San Zaccaria, posting a coin to illuminate an altar piece to the left. There she was. Giovanni Bellini’s famous Virgin, eyes cast down, a naked child Jesus standing in her lap with a surrounding company of saints. Painted in 1505, at much the same time as the Mona Lisa, Mary emits a comparable sense of humanity and spiritual depth. Consider Bellini’s use of soft, diffused light, my father-in-law had said, and see how her beauty shines through dreamlike stillness — details, of course, way beyond the comprehension of young, sugar-fuelled children. I have been back to San Zaccaria several times since, loving the idea that he loves her so.

This year, it’s time I revisit the Mona Lisa.

This feature originally appeared in the February 4, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In 1733, the Queen’s Gallery at Kensington Palace acquired a new object of curiosity: a mechanical model of the solar system. Commissioned by the Queen Consort, Caroline of Ansbach, it was the creation of Thomas Wright, mathematical instrument-maker to the King. Wright’s orrery was not new: he had remodelled an earlier one already in George II’s collection and from Caroline he received the large sum of £336 for ‘making all the Machinery and Wheel-Work to perform the Motions of all the planets… to the Great Orrery’. His handsome, gilt-metal-decorated instrument included all the planets then known: Earth, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, as well as the Sun and the Moon.

By 1733, Queen Caroline’s enthusiasm for science was well known. She had wooed Sir Isaac Newton, increased the pension paid to Astrologer Royal Edmond Halley, attended lectures at the Royal Society (founded in 1660 by Charles II to promote ‘Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’) and, following a series of experiments in which she took a close interest, agreed to the inoculation of her children against smallpox, at the time a new and widely mistrusted procedure. For her favourite son, William Augustus, she ordered that a laboratory be made in the cellars of St James’s Palace, where the 10-year-old Prince also had his own printing press. In 1734, accompanied by her children, she visited the natural history collections assembled by Queen Anne’s former doctor Sir Hans Sloane and afterwards corresponded with him on the subject of botanical taxonomy.

Caroline’s fascination may have been unusual for the period, in which, with few exceptions, science was widely regarded as a male preserve, but in the annals of royal history she is one of several figures who took a keen and questioning interest in science and scientific progress, adding equipment and treatises to the collections in palaces and royal residences.

Historically, royal education typically involved some instruction in science, although this was not always entrusted to a specialist. In June 1544, John Cheke was appointed tutor to the future Edward VI. He was chiefly renowned for his knowledge of Greek. His remit was to teach the prince ‘of tounges, of the scripture, of philosophie and all liberal sciences’, and it is clear that the ‘liberal sciences’ — which included geometry, arithmetic and astronomy — were neither his nor the young Edward’s primary concern.

Cheke was also among those responsible for the education of the future Elizabeth I. Her sharp intellect embraced wide-ranging interests, including, briefly, alchemy, as well as new scientific knowledge and gadgetry, the last evidenced in her ownership of a brass astrolabe for calculating the time. Presented to Elizabeth in 1559, it was made by Thomas Gemini, a Netherlandish copper-plate engraver who had begun his career plagiarising the anatomical drawings of Andreas Vesalius. However, if Elizabeth had hoped to hear of advances in scientific knowledge during her visit to Cambridge in 1564, she was destined for disappointment. The ‘learned disputation’ by students staged in her honour consisted of a debate in Latin on two motions clearly close to the young men’s hearts: ‘simple food is preferable to complex’ and ‘dinner should be more generous than lunch’.

By contrast, a focus on geometry played a part in the education of the future George III, a feature of the broader moral training devised for the then prince by the Earl of Bute. Geometric problems were considered as an exercise that encouraged the Prince to identify truth by tracking it through the extended chains of reasoning that were part of such calculations.

Dispiriting as this sounds, the young King grew up with a genuine interest in science and mathematics that not only occupied his leisure time, but shaped his patronage and collecting. In 1761, he commissioned from London’s finest scientific-instrument-makers a selection of pieces used for demonstrating and proving diverse theories, including an air pump made by George Adams employed in the study of gases — among other things, Adams’s pump proved that the removal of air from around an object prevented the transmission of sound made by that object. The same maker also supplied a philosophical table, equipped to enable the royal student to carry out experiments that confirmed theories of mechanics, in particular the relationships between matter, motion and forces.

The King then went a step further, commissioning not simply scientific instruments, but — driven by his love of astronomy — an entire observatory at Richmond, now part of Greater London. Halley had predicted that, in 1769, Venus would cross between the Earth and the Sun, enabling astronomers to calculate the distance between the two.

The King’s observatory was designed by architect William Chambers and completed in time for George and his wife, Charlotte, to witness the transit of Venus on June 3. Delighted with the new building, the King requested that his grandfather George II’s orrery, remodelled at Queen Caroline’s request, be moved there from Kensington Palace. He displayed it alongside ‘some excellent mathematical instruments… [and] excellent apparatus for philosophical experiments’ that were used not only by George III himself, but in his children’s education. Many years later, a clergyman and amateur clockmaker, the Revd George Tough, presented the science-loving monarch with another orrery, chiefly made from engraved glass. It remains in the Royal Collection.

Unsurprisingly, science was well represented in George III’s extensive collection of books. Among titles listed in the catalogue of his library at Kew Palace, compiled in 1780, was a two-volume guide, American Husbandry, published in 1775 (‘Containing an account of the Soil, Climate, Production and Agriculture of the British Colonies in North America and the West Indies’), a 12-volume French survey of natural history and, under the subject heading ‘Medecina’, handbooks including Robert James’s lengthily titled 1743 guide: A medicinal dictionary; including physic, surgery, anatomy, chymistry, and botany, in all their branches relative to medicine. Together with a history of drugs; an account of their various preparations, combinations and uses; and an introductory preface, tracing the progress of physic, and explaining the theories which have principally prevail’d in all ages of the world. Despite a troubled relationship with his heir, the future George IV, George III did pass on to his eldest son aspects of his scientific curiosity. Following the death of scientific-instrument-maker George Adams, the Prince of Wales appointed Adams’s son his optician.

A passion for science also animated Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, enriching both the Royal Collection and London itself. Technological innovation was a key focus of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Prince’s brainchild. The exhibition’s profits contributed to the building of the Science Museum and the Royal Albert Hall, which initially hosted regular science lectures and displays, such as the demonstration of a Morse Code link between Britain and Persia offered by the Society of Telegraph Engineers in 1872. In 1851, scientific and technological exhibits in the Crystal Palace included the most up-to-date telescopes, a prototype submarine, hydraulic presses and a revolving light for lighthouses. High-quality, but inexpensive lacquered brass microscopes exhibited by the Sheffield-based Chadburn Brothers manufactory were so admired by the Prince that he subsequently rewarded the company with his Royal Warrant.

Albert also took an interest in the displays of photography and photographic equipment, as the medium had intrigued him since the early 1840s. The displays in 1851 encouraged him to expand his fledgling collection of photographic prints that, by the time of his death in 1861, had grown to more than 10,000 items. Among that collection today is the 1855 charming Study of a Young Boy by Hugh Welch Diamond, a man unusual among early photography enthusiasts. A catalyst for his passion was his role as superintendent of the female department at Surrey County asylum. Diamond became convinced that patients’ facial features revealed their mental state and that photographs of their faces and expressions were, therefore, valuable tools for diagnosis. He expounded this hypothesis in a paper presented in 1856 to the Royal Society of Medicine, On the Application of Photography to the Physiognomic and Mental Phenomena of Insanity. Study of a Young Boy is quite different from such harrowing images, an engaging Chardin-esque composition that shows its subject holding a glass container, sitting at a table on which are arranged several pieces of scientific equipment. Diamond was a founder of the Photographic Society of London, of which Prince Albert became a patron, contributing £50 towards research into causes of the fading of photographs, one of his particular concerns.

Engineering, industrial design and conservation were among areas of scientific knowledge and research that captured the attention of another Prince Consort, the late Duke of Edinburgh. Unsurprisingly, Prince Philip, a former naval officer, also interested himself in navigational aids. Absent from the Royal Collection, however, is the Battenberg Course Indicator, designed in 1892 by the Duke’s maternal grandfather, Prince Louis of Battenberg, who served as First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy. Prince Louis’s gadget was intended to track the position of ships in relation to one another in convoys, a very practical application of science guaranteed to appeal to his sailor-scientist grandson.

This article first appeared in the February 26 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

‘Bye bye, Blue Boy,’ at least one alliterative art lover must have said — one imagines through tears — while staring up at the iconic Thomas Gainsborough painting when it was hung in London’s National Gallery in January 1922. The portrait of an unknown youth dressed in blue finery, owned by the Duke of Westminster and ensconced in Britain's cultural heritage, had been bought — by an American. Prior to being shipped to California, it was displayed publicly so Britons could bid farewell. Some 90,000 did so over three weeks.

The purchase of The Blue Boy, by railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington, was, in today’s terms, ‘a flex’. It signalled that things were going well enough in the former colonies across the Atlantic that the nation’s wealthy could pay the British prices they couldn’t refuse for their own treasures. Huntington paid 728,000 of those days’ dollars for The Blue Boy, making it the most expensive painting in the world.

Until then, the American attitude toward Gainsborough (1727–88), who in Britain was the most sought-after society portraitist of his day, might best be described as indifferent. As for contemporaneous interest, recall that America’s birth year is 1776, and you’ll grant the business of founding a nation to have been a reasonable distraction. Indeed, through most of the century that followed, America was more preoccupied with finding its footing than it was with overseas oil paintings; during the Civil War, it was Gettysburg, not Gainsborough.

That all changed with the Gilded Age and the turn of the 20th century, when America’s newly wealthy industrialists began acquiring Georgian paintings as a means of connecting to their British past. The Huntingtons on the West Coast and the Vanderbilts and Fricks on the East homed in on Gainsborough in particular. Even across the Midwest, in places like St. Louis and Kansas City, collectors clamoured for his portraits to hang in their homes.

Now, a century later, the artist is back in the spotlight in the USA with Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture, on view through May 25 at The Frick Collection in New York City (above). While Henry Clay Frick bought eight Gainsborough works in his lifetime, and the museum acquired others after his death, the exhibition is the first devoted to the artist at The Frick, and in New York more broadly, it’s the first of his portraiture, ever. Bringing together The Frick’s holdings as well as loans from collections across North America and the UK, the show explores the fashions depicted in Gainsborough’s portraits — all that brocade and silk and lace, rendered in the artist’s webby, illusionistic brushwork — as well as fashions around portraiture itself (the act of having a portrait made, and how).

The 25-work transatlantic grouping is the initiative of Aimee Ng. The Frick chief curator began working on it a decade ago, and with the museum’s highly publicised renovation complete and the place reopened, the show is on.

I asked Aimee about the Gilded Age enthusiasm for Gainsborough. ‘Suddenly, it's within the realm of possibility for these American collectors to get these treasured objects across the Atlantic’, she says. ‘The dust has settled, and America figures out, “Okay — we're okay — and there is a more historic and stately past to celebrate”. Americans see that their British origin is something they actually do want to aspire to recreate in some way.’

Across two rooms, The Fashion of Portraiture traces the arc of Gainsborough’s career, from the Suffolk native’s time working in the countryside, to his move to fashionable Bath and ultimately to London. Starting with a few of his early ‘conversation pieces’ — group portraits of small-scale figures, including the unforgettable Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (about 1750) — it moves through the full-length and bust portraits he made at his peak. For the era’s ‘people of fashion’ — a term connoting a rank below nobility, but above ‘the vulgar’ — what one wore in their portrait was as important as who painted it, or its execution. While Gainsborough sometimes depicted his sitters in period ‘Van Dyck dress’, he generally insisted on contemporary fashion, considering it integral to the likeness. He’d even alter a portrait years after he made it, painting over whatever clothes were originally shown to update the sitter’s look.

Speaking to the difference between Gainsborough’s place in Britain and in America, Aimee says that in negotiating loans from American collections, she was typically borrowing from a museum, where the work is an object with an inventory number. In the UK, she was sometimes asking to borrow a family portrait hung in a stately home, as was the case in petitioning the Duke of Norfolk’s estate for Bernard Howard, 12th Duke of Norfolk (1788).

With next year the 300th anniversary of Gainsborough’s birth, Aimee was relieved to pull off The Fashion of Portraiture ahead of the celebratory exhibitions being planned in the UK. ‘It's like a fistfight out there right now for Gainsboroughs,’ she says, ‘so I’m very happy to be clear of that.’

It's impossible not to be astonished by the sheer virtuosity of Adriaen de Vries’s Antiope and Theseus. Born in The Hague, de Vries (about 1556–1626) was the most famous sculptor of his time, working for royal courts across Europe, particularly in Prague, now Czechia. He learned a lot from the serpentine extensions and compressions of the body employed by his one-time master, the Flanders-born, Italy-based Giambologna — especially in the Abduction of a Sabine Woman (now in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence) — and inherited from both him and Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini a Mannerist wish to elongate form. In de Vries’s hands, however, this was amplified by an even more radical desire: to escape from the bounding condition so inherent to sculpture.

From all points of view, Antiope and Theseus (about 1600–01, Royal Collection) breaks its own edge and in doing so constantly teeters on the edge of instability. All of this is exaggerated in the way that its liquid surfaces continually reflect light. It is impossible for me not to honour the extraordinary casting virtuosity and how de Vries wanted to free the work from gravity and the ground. Look at how Theseus’s right foot steps out from the base and how his left foot is only attached by the big toe. How do you manage to cast such a detailed and dispersed perimeter, from Theseus’s right toe to Antiope’s left index finger — let alone the tips of her bow? The most spectacular answer is by channelling the flow of molten bronze through Theseus’s penis.

You may think that you could not find a more radical contrast to de Vries than my work Reflect, but they both deal with balance. I have eschewed all representation in favour of addressing balance itself. Here, we have 17 stacked blocks that evoke a self-reflexive human space in space. In contrast to de Vries, I have been intent on removing gesture and allowing the stillness and silence of sculpture to engage with questions of being.

The two bodies in my column share a head, the lower one looking up, the upper one looking down (but as it is inverted, it, too, is looking up). At the core of this work is a question about sculpture itself and the materialisation of imagination that it involves — the upper body being a product of the lower body’s mind.

Perhaps the biggest distinction between our two pieces is that I am using iron — a concentrated earth material in its pure form — and my work is a solid mass. In contrast, the de Vries sculpture is a bronze bubble with a skin rarely more than quarter of an inch thick. My surfaces demonstrate that all matter is in motion and celebrate this through an evolving rusty-red patina that absorbs light. De Vries is the opposite: his waxed and polished surfaces depend on careful conservation and continual polishing.

I hope that what unites us is our belief that sculpture, in its stillness, can encourage us to walk around the work and feel our own embodiment and connection to the earth.

'European Sculpture in the Collection of His Majesty The King' by Jonathan Marsden (Modern Art Press in association with the Royal Collection Trust, £350) is available now

It is so nice to be delighted by a thing, especially if it is a small thing. For the artist Paul Lucien Maze, those small things were colours or feelings. ‘I was to grow up with the great expanse of sea before my eyes,’ he said. ‘I remember the first sensation of a gentle wave crawling up to my toes and ankles. Later on, as the summer seasons repeated themselves, I became more and more conscious of the reality of things.’

Maze would soon come face-to-face with the reality of things, good and bad. After a childhood growing up in Le Havre, learning the fundamentals of painting from Camille Pissarro and sketching on the beach with Raoul Dufy, he joined the British Army for the First World War. He was almost killed by the British for being a suspected spy, and it was in the trenches that Maze met and befriended Winston Churchill, and became his artistic mentor.

Despite his French birth, Maze was a dedicated Anglophile, who became one of the very best chroniclers of British life and society in the mid-20th century. Works depicting trooping the colour, Goodwood races, Henley Regatta and Cowes Regatta are among many that are considered quintessentially English. He recorded the funeral of George VI in 1952 and was selected as the Official Painter of Elizabeth II’s Coronation the following year.

On Wednesday, March 11, works by Maze will be available for purchase via auction at Dreweatts in the forthcoming Modern and Contemporary show. The collection of works by Maze comes from the property of the late John Dru Montagu. ‘Dru Montagu, whose collection is being sold, was introduced to Paul Maze by the Earl of Sandwich, his grandfather,’ says Maze’s biographer and friend Anne Singer. ‘Paul Maze could be considered a chronicler of life in Great Britain in the 20th Century. Under his bony long fingers, the coloured chalks bring to life all the sporting activities which were a full part of British society’s sporting calendar: rowing at Henley, racing at Goodwood and Ascot, sailing at Royal Cowes, and all military parades.

‘He was a French artist enamoured with light and colour, movement and lightness.’ And his paintings are quite delightful.

Lashed to the mast of his ship, Odysseus throws back his head, his beard-garlanded chin jutting towards the entrancing singers he strains to join. His men, ears plugged with wax, row on, as oblivious to the chorus that fills the air as to their king’s pleas to be freed. On two rocky outcrops, the Sirens stand, crooning the sweet promise of knowledge. One, however, is already vanquished by Odysseus’s cunning and falls, eyes closed, into the sea.

Dating from 480BC – 470BC, the Siren vase, a red-figure stamnos from ancient Greece now at the British Museum, is an early example of art inspired by literary classics, a tradition that stretches all the way from antiquity to today. Homer, by virtue of having written two of the oldest epics of Western culture, is one of the authors with the longest-lasting artistic influence, his heroes and their foes reimagined throughout the centuries. The dejected Achilles — who, in the House of the Tragic Poet in 1st century AD Pompeii, catches one last look of Briseis before she’s taken to Agamemnon — morphs, almost 2,000 years later, into the wrath-filled squiggles of Cy Twombly’s Fifty days at Iliam (1978, at the Philadelphia Art Museum, US).

From Troy also springs another of the great artistic heroes of ancient literature, Virgil’s Aeneas, a man profoundly devoted to the gods, his father, his homeland — anyone except, arguably, the woman who rescued him and offered him her love and her kingdom: Dido. That Jupiter persuaded him to desert her sounds suspiciously like an excuse, although J. M. W. Turner did his best to absolve the Trojan prince with the masterly Mercury sent to admonish Aeneas (now in Tate Britain’s ‘Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals’ exhibition), in which the figures are puny against the vast, iridescent haze that suggests the fragility of man against Nature and, in this case, divine will.

Like Claude before him, Turner found the Aeneid endlessly fascinating. As the late art historian Anthony Bailey noted, it was the painter’s longest-running subject, first embraced in about 1798, then revisited again and again, including in the last four pictures Turner would ever exhibit at the Royal Academy, of which Mercury sent to admonish Aeneas was one: all dissolved into light and vapour, all carried inscriptions from his own poem, Fallacies of Hope, and all centred on the choice between love and destiny.

Perhaps, as Eric Shanes suggested in The Life and Masterworks of J. M. W. Turner, the artist felt some closeness to the Trojan prince, for he, too, had ‘forsworn an easy life, the enjoyment of wealth, marriage and the delights of the senses for a higher calling’.

Virgil never quite finished the story of Aeneas — the abrupt ending sees the enraged hero slay Turnus, king of the Rutuli, to avenge his friend Pallas — but Ovid soon stepped into the breach. The tale of (a somewhat passive) Trojan prince becoming a god is one of more than 250 foundational legends of Western culture woven together by the Roman poet under the guise of the history of the world: Metamorphoses. ‘No other classical author treated so great a variety of mythological subject matter,’ wrote Erwin Panofsky in Problems in Titian, mostly iconographic, and none, not even Homer, had a greater impact on art, as ‘Metamorphoses’, the current exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, highlights.

Granted, for some artists, Ovid was perhaps little more than a pretext to explore whatever struck their fancy. Cornelis van Haarlem seemed rather more interested in capturing the might of a bull than in telling the story of the river god Achelous fighting, in bovine disguise, against Hercules, as Ovid specialist Paul Barolsky pointed out in Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics in 2021, and Correggio reworked the myth of Jupiter and Io, in which the former rapes the latter, into a picture of carnal ecstasy.

However, the prize for capturing the spirit of Metamorphoses, a poem in which desire is central, must go to Danaë, even though she is only mentioned in passing by Ovid. The princess of Argos, ‘whom Jove filled with life-giving shower’, became — after a failed medieval attempt to turn her into an emblem of purity — the perfect cover to indulge in portraying female sensuality for everyone from Correggio (again) to Rembrandt and Gustav Klimt. The Danaë Titian painted for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese — the first of at least six versions he made — was so sultry, her body voluptuous and naked, her face possibly borrowed from the prelate’s favourite courtesan, that, by comparison, even the artist’s seductive Venus of Urbino looked like ‘a Theatine nun’, according to papal nuncio Giovanni della Casa.

More than a millennium after Ovid’s death, a poet indebted to both the author of Metamorphoses (whom he often paraphrased) and to Virgil (whom he called his guide) would help shape our collective vision of the afterlife and of human emotions: Dante Alighieri. It’s the writhing, suffering mass of the damned in the Inferno that at the end of the 19th century animated Auguste Rodin’s gigantic Gates of Hell, 37 years in the making and only cast in bronze after the sculptor’s death.

About a century earlier, in 1773, Britain had seen what Dante scholar Paget Jackson Toynbee believed to be the first ‘easel picture’ of a Divine Comedy subject by a domestic artist: Sir Joshua Reynolds’s take on the grim, but deeply human story of Count Ugolino (now at Knole, in Kent). Once the most powerful man in Pisa, Ugolino was later locked up with his family and left to starve. Soon, his children and grandchildren died: ‘Over them all, and for three days aloud/Call’d on them who were dead,’ wrote Dante. ‘Then fasting got/The mastery of grief’. Reynolds imagined the family in the moment of its most abject desperation, the youngest child clutching his grandfather — yet his Ugolino sits straight and rigid, staring fiercely out of the canvas.

The Inferno scene was Reynolds’s first history painting and although Horace Walpole found it ‘admirable’, many critics panned it, recoiling more from its subject matter than the artist’s approach: ‘If the same Excellence had been employed on a pleasing Subject, it would have enchanted, as it may now terrify, the Public,’ wrote The Public Advertiser.

If Reynolds had been the first British painter of Dante, the most prolific was the Italian author’s Pre-Raphaelite namesake, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who created some 100 pictures inspired by The Divine Comedy and by the lesser-known Vita Nova. It’s from the latter that comes Dante’s Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice (1871, Walker Art Gallery Liverpool), Rossetti’s largest painting, in which the poet looks on as his beloved breathes her last. The oil, preceded in 1856 by a similar watercolour, brims with symbolism, from the poppies (sleep of death) to the red doves (love) and the flower bouquet (purity), but equally meaningful is the fact that the model for the unrequited love of Dante (the poet) was Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris, with whom Dante (the artist) had a decades-long affair.

Another facet of love to which the Pre-Raphaelite painter also applied his brush was the tragedy of Paolo and Francesca. The star-crossed couple, who remained inseparable even after death, moved every artist from Dutch-French Romantic Ary Scheffer — his picture, a version of which (1835) is at the Wallace Collection, prompted George Eliot to say she ‘could look at it for hours’ — to George Frederic Watts, who painted the lovers tenderly holding hands as the ‘restless fury’ of the ‘stormy blast of hell’ bellows around them. Rossetti, too, showed the infernal storm dancing around the couple, but as part of a watercolour triptych in which they are also seen in life, the two scenes separated by a central panel featuring Dante and Virgil. The picture, dating from 1855 and now at Tate Britain, was bought by John Ruskin and never turned into an oil painting.

The tale that, according to Dante’s Divine Comedy, had lit the spark between Paolo and Francesca was another forbidden love, this time between Lancelot and Guinevere. The Arthurian cycle — brought back to 19th-century British attention by the reprinting of Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Le Morte Darthur and the publication, from 1859, of Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King — was a favourite with the Pre-Raphaelites. One of the most monumental takes came from Edward Burne-Jones, who in The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (today at the Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico) showed the king, mortally wounded in the battle against Mordred, frozen in a deathless slumber in Avalon until the day he will be needed again.

Burne-Jones had begun painting the picture in 1881 for his friend, patron and fellow Arthurian enthusiast George Howard, later the 9th Earl of Carlisle. Over time, however, he became particularly attached to it, seeing himself as Arthur and the story of the king’s demise, tinged with the hope of his return, as a parable of his own art, which he perceived as increasingly overlooked, but which he wished would at some stage be appreciated again. Howard kindly agreed to receive a replacement painting and Burne-Jones kept The Last Sleep of Arthur in his studio, working on it until his own death in 1898, nearly two decades after he had first set his brush to it.

Yet perhaps the most artistically beloved of the Arthurian tales hinges not on the once and future king, but on a relatively minor figure, the Lady of Shalott, whose story was first told in a 13th-century Italian novella, then, magisterially, by Tennyson in 1832–42. Alone in her remote island tower, ‘half-sick of shadows’ as a spell forces her to see the world through a mirror, Elaine of Astolat spots ‘bold Sir Lancelot’ passing by and can’t help but look at him from her window, bringing upon herself the curse that will cause her death. William Holman Hunt, who with Rossetti had illustrated the 1857 edition of Tennyson’s poems published by Edward Moxon, painted the Lady several times, including the moment in which, hair whipping around her face, she makes out Lancelot in the mirror.

The picture (now at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, US) was a more sophisticated version of the original book image, of which Tennyson had been rather critical. In his memoirs, Hunt recalled the poet as saying: ‘I must now ask why did you make the Lady of Shalott, in the illustration, with her hair wildly tossed about as if by a tornado?’ When the artist replied that he had attempted to ‘convey the idea of the threatened fatality by reversing the ordinary peace of the room and of the lady herself’, Tennyson rebuffed him with a pointed ‘an illustrator ought never to add anything to what he finds in the text’. The poet died in 1892; Hunt only completed his large-scale oil of the Lady in 1905, but as Abigail Joseph puts it in a 2017 article for the Journal of Victorian Culture: ‘One suspects that if Tennyson had lived to see this painting, he would have been strongly displeased.’

No hair blows inappropriately in John William Waterhouse’s take on the same tale, a series of three pictures painted in reverse order. In the most celebrated canvas of the trio, dating from 1888 and titled simply The Lady of Shalott (now at Tate Britain), the doomed protagonist appeared ‘robed in snowy white’ as ‘down the river’s dim expanse,/Like some bold seer in a trance,/Seeing all his own mischance—/With glassy countenance/ Did she look to Camelot’. Although best known for the Lady, Waterhouse — who, despite being born in the calendar year after the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed, often echoed in style his predecessors — ran the gamut of literature in his work, choosing at will from Homer and Ovid, Dante, Boccaccio and Shakespeare. The Bard’s Ophelia seems to have particularly enthralled him — he painted her many times, whether adorning her hair with flowers or staring desperate from the canvas, for a series he was still adding to when he died in 1917. Yet, it’s John Everett Millais who wins the palm for the most famous portrayal of Shakespeare’s tragic heroine.

Now at Tate Britain, his Ophelia, begun in 1851, when he was only 22, shows her floating in the river, the flowers she had been entwining in a garland still in her hand, just before ‘her garments, heavy with their drink,/ Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay/ To muddy death’. Doubling as the ‘weeping brook’ into which the Danish noblewoman falls was the Hogsmill River in Ewell, Surrey. Millais painted the landscape from life across five months — including all the flowers Ophelia is holding, which bloomed at different times of the year. So realistic were his pansies, daisies, forget-me-nots and poppies that, according to John Guille Millais, the artist’s son, ‘a certain Professor of Botany, being unable to take his class into the country and lecture from the objects before him, took them to the Guildhall, where this work was being exhibited, and discoursed to them upon the flowers and plants before them, which were, he said, as instructive as Nature herself’.

The figure of Ophelia was painted in the artist’s studio and standing in for the heroine was Elizabeth Siddal, one of the Pre-Raphaelites’ favourite models. Millais had her lie, dressed in a brocade gown, in a bath tub full of water, which he heated up with oil lamps. Unfortunately, Siddal, icy cold from staying still and wet for hours, became ill and, although she eventually recovered, her father insisted that Millais pay for the costs of her medical treatments.

Well before Millais was even born, Hamlet and the other Shakespearean tales had become central to John Boydell’s efforts to establish a British school of history painting. His Shakespeare Gallery was a mammoth project, combining the publication of an illustrated edition of the Bard’s works and a folio of the prints with an exhibition of the original pictures in London. Almost all of Britain’s top artists of the time were involved, from Reynolds to Angelica Kauffman, although William Blake, who would go on to shape our view of John Milton’s Satan and his legions was somewhat sidelined — a surprise, as he had previously worked with the Boydells and would later confess to be a Bard enthusiast: ‘Shakespeare in riper years gave me his hand,’ he once wrote to sculptor John Flaxman.

Another painter to whom the project brought some disappointment was George Romney, a man so obsessed by Shakespeare that he had made hundreds of drawings inspired by his plays. His picture of The Tempest was ambitious — but ended up being reviled for having dared to mesh two different scenes on the same canvas. The gallery was a financial disaster — Boydell went bust — yet the Bard continued to prove ready tinder for the creativity of artists, not least Edwin Landseer.

In 1851, the same year in which he conjured up The Monarch of the Glen, he painted Titania and Bottom for Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s dining room. Now at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, it captures the moment in which the fairy queen, drugged by Oberon’s love potion, languidly embraces the object of her love, Nick Bottom — Landseer’s mastery of animal painting is evident in the poor weaver’s asinine head and the white rabbits ridden by two fairies. The work entranced not only Queen Victoria, who called it ‘a gem, beautiful, fairy-like and graceful’, but also Lewis Carroll, who, on November 17, 1857, noted in his diary: ‘Called at Ryman’s to see “Titania” painted by Sir E. Landseer. There are some wonderful points in it, the ass’s head and the white rabbit especially.’ Might Landseer’s work have influenced the author’s zany cunicular character?

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass would go on to become artistic inspirations in their own right, particularly for the Surrealists — one of the movement’s founders, André Breton, said at a 1934 lecture that ‘Carroll [was] surrealist in nonsense’. Tidbits of Wonderland — often filtered through the eyes of John Tenniel, who had illustrated the first edition of the book — are referenced in many Surrealist pictures, from Max Ernst’s portraits of Leonora Carrington as Alice to Dorothea Tanning’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943, on loan from Tate to the Dallas Museum of Art, US), in which two young girls face a giant, sinister sunflower. Both Ernst and Tanning grew up in repressive households, notes Catriona McAra in a 2011 article for Papers of Surrealism. ‘Alice becomes an interesting figure of identification in this regard. She appears sweet and wholesome, but transgresses the confines of her bourgeois nursery, through escape into imaginative, fantastical domains.’

In 2012, another artist who fled the restrictive (and, in her case, abusive) confines of her early life, Yayoi Kusama, illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in a glorious vortex of her characteristic polka dots and pumpkins, sprinkled with floating mushrooms and giant mouths. Ms Kusama’s interest in Lewis Carroll’s books spans several decades. In 1968, the Japanese artist held an Alice happening in New York’s Central Park, in which she, ‘mad as a hatter’, and her troupe of dancers, nude except for the dots festooning their skin, performed ‘under the magic mushroom of the Alice in Wonderland Statue’. Calling the Lewis Carroll character ‘the grandmother of hippies’, she informed the public: ‘I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland.’ Literature had morphed not only into art, but into the artist herself

This article first appeared in the February 11 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Craft has become a buzz word. For the past decade, the profile of the handmade has been rising, even attracting big business, as luxury brands, food and drinks companies extol the talent of their artisans. How to define ‘craft’, however, is open to debate.

Once celebrated not only as producers of everyday objects, but also as artists, artisans gradually came to be seen as the skilled makers of functional items, who often used traditional materials and forms. Their work, although lauded by William Morris and the Arts-and-Crafts Movement in their rejection of the mass produced, increasingly fell out of favour. Artisans were skilled, yes, but what they did was not considered part of any intellectual debate or significant storytelling. Craft was not art.

Today, however, it has a very different status. The thrust now is on using materials and objects to investigate ideas and concepts and to tell meaningful stories about contemporary life. Craft is underpinned by intellectual investigation, powerful narrative and the development of materials and processes — head, heart and hand. ‘Contemporary craft is storytelling; about old methods and new materials; about the maker’s ideas and heritage,’ explains metalsmith Ane Christensen.

As a society, we no longer know how things are made. We do not perform or even witness the alchemy of materials being transformed into objects. We have, as Karl Marx predicted, been removed from the means of production, so the public is now fascinated by the process of making. It’s no wonder that luxury brands fall over themselves to imbue their products with the notion of the handmade.

Craft also appeals on a haptic level. Humans are hardwired to interpret the world by touch, yet, for many of us, this is reduced to tapping computer keys and moving a mouse. We miss that sensory input and handmade objects can give it to us. ‘In a digital world, we long for the tangible, meaningful and tactile,’ suggests Christensen. The lack of that routine stimulation accounts not only for the rise in interest in cooking and the growing number of people attending pottery classes or knitting bees, but in the desire to hold handmade objects.

T. F. Chan, the new director of the Craft Council’s forthcoming Collect Fair, an international selling exhibition of the best of contemporary craft, now in its 22nd iteration, maintains that: ‘As we become increasingly enmeshed in the digital world, craft helps us reconnect with the physical: tactility, material intelligence, the ingenuity of the human hand. Contemporary craft feels particularly compelling as it reframes time-honoured traditions through fresh imagination. It gives us an opportunity to create work that is unmistakably of our time, that future generations can look back on with admiration.’

By its very nature, the handmade implies something unique — which, since the dawn of the 2000s, has proven to be a significant draw for those who can afford mass-produced objects, but want to stand out, a trend amplified by social media. The value of provenance has grown and knowing the stories of a piece of work and its maker adds value for the buyer, who becomes a collector. Grasping that full story has also become ever-more important in a world polluted by fake news, fake truths and — increasingly — artificial intelligence. ‘Talking to people involved in tech about AI,’ says cultural consultant Jenny White, ‘there is a growing sense of distrust. That means that there is a revived desire for authenticity, so craft is seen as real and tangible. Seeing the work in front of you is the antidote to AI and the world we can’t control and to which we haven’t given consent.’

Craft relates to the human, the individual and the personal. It is high quality, intelligent and beautifully constructed. The work of many of today’s makers not only has meaning, but it is shaped by hand, with skill. It looks good, feels good and can be used, sitting on the continuum between fine art and design — and, interestingly, leading fine artists have jumped on the bandwagon to use craft skills in their own work, albeit not always successfully. Craft is still considerably more affordable than fine art—something Christensen maintains ought to change. ‘[It] needs to be seen on a level with fine art, as an investment that can hold its value.’

That is seemingly the direction of travel: ‘Look at the prices of craft objects in auction houses, they’re going up and up and up,’ notes Simon Fraser, director of the MA Design at Central Saint Martins, London. ‘Craft is moving into a collectible, socially acceptable phase.’ He sees design shop JW Anderson’s establishment of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, for ‘newness, excellence and artistic merit in modern craft’, rewarding the winner with €50,000, as an important influence in making craft desirable. (This year’s Loewe Prize exhibition will take place at the National Gallery Singapore from mid May.)

Until prices go up, interesting and affordable work will be on show at the Collect Fair (February 27 – March 1), with some 40 galleries, not only from the UK, but also from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China, as well as European contributions from Ireland and Poland. ‘Craft,’ believes Chan, ‘is having a moment because it pushes back against our culture of disposability.

In this era of abundance and stimulation, people are yearning for artworks and objects that genuinely enrich and elevate our lives — made with care, rich with meaning and able to stand the test of time.’

Today, it often seems there is nothing new under the sun, yet there was a time when the world was a place of wonders and every vessel that sailed from a European port could return with something miraculous never before seen on these shores. In 1520, Albrecht Dürer was in Brussels, now Belgium, when the cargo of a treasure ship newly returned from the Americas was put on display as part of the celebrations surrounding the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

Among the gold and mosaic work, the startled onlookers were confronted by intricately wrought feathered shields in jewel colours and jaguar pelts. Dürer, the son of a goldsmith, was stupefied. ‘All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things,’ he wrote, ‘for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art.’

If most of these were objects fashioned by human hands, even more remarkable were the unknown birds and animals, whose plumage and pelts went into some of the treasures. What sort of creatures could these be? Small wonder, then, that Dürer was fascinated by the report of an Indian rhinoceros, named Ganda, arriving in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1515, the first in Europe since Roman times. The artist never saw the animal himself, but made a celebrated woodcut of it based on a written description and a sketch. As a result, his rhino looks as if it is armour-plated, its body covered with scales and patterned whorls and with other random lumps and excrescences — but this, after all, was a creature that almost defied imagination.

Indeed, Ganda’s story is almost one of (unhappy-ending) fable: he arrived as a diplomatic gift from Gujarat, survived a staged ‘fight’ with an elephant in a Lisbon park (the latter fled when Ganda approached) and was then dispatched by Manuel I as a gift to Pope Leo X in Rome, Italy, wearing a collar of green velvet decorated with flowers. However, the ship transporting him was wrecked in a storm near La Spezia, on the Italian coast, and Ganda drowned. His carcass was later recovered and his hide returned to Lisbon.

In the 1740s, another Indian rhino had better luck. Clara was adopted as an orphan at one month old and brought first to Rotterdam, then taken on a tour of Europe that lasted 17 years, meandering from Versailles and Zurich to Rome and Warsaw. Wherever she went, she caused a sensation — and gripped artists’ imaginations. In Dresden, she was sculpted by the great porcelain modeller Johann Joachim Kändler for Augustus the Strong’s menagerie of ceramic animals; in Paris, Jean-Baptiste Oudry made a life-size painting of her (her celebrity also led to a fad for wigs à la rhinocéros); and in Venice she was painted in her stall — dung and all — by Pietro Longhi, with her keeper brandishing her horn, which she had rubbed off. Clara ended her days in London in 1758, where she was exhibited in Lambeth, dying aged 20.

Some 30 years later, one more rhino arrived on these shores and was sold into a travelling menagerie to be taken around the country for the wonderment of English audiences. During the course of its tour, the poor animal was given sweet wine to drink, for the amusement of onlookers, and became too partial to it, knocking back four bottles at a time. In 1793, perhaps under the influence, it took a fall, dislocating a leg, which led to an infection and death. Before its unhappy demise, however, it was painted by George Stubbs, with a dreamy look on its face and eyeing the horizon — perhaps, suggests the artist, remembering the country where it was born.

Stubbs was no stranger to exotic animals. During the course of his career, he painted strange fauna arriving from Britain’s overseas dominions, including a zebra, a nilgai (a large Indian antelope), a kangaroo and a dingo, a giraffe, a tiger and a Canadian moose. In about 1765, he painted Cheetah and Stag with Two Indians: the picture shows the cat — the first of its kind ever seen in Britain, given by George III to his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland — with its two Indian attendants. The Duke was eager to see how cheetahs hunted, so he had it put in an enclosure in Windsor Great Park with a stag. According to the St James’s Chronicle, the cheetah attacked twice and was beaten off and on the third attempt ‘the Stag threw him a considerable distance, and then followed him, on which the Tiger [cheetah] turned Tail’. The two Indians later found it in the woods eating a fallow deer, oblivious of its ignominy. The stag, meanwhile, was rewarded with a silver collar. Stubbs, entirely reasonably, ignored the bathos of the episode and painted the moment the cheetah’s hood was removed so it could see its prey, although the landscape is based on Creswell Crags in Derbyshire, rather than Windsor.

Big cats had long fascinated artists: in 1621, for example, Rubens painted four dramatic hunting pictures for Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria, showing a lion and tiger hunt (with a leopard thrown in for good measure), as well as a wolf and crocodile hunt. A few decades later, in the 1650s, Rembrandt made several ink drawings of the recumbent lions he saw in a Dutch menagerie.

However, the artist who best captured the ferocity of the creatures was the 19th-century French animalier sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye. He specialised in small bronzes of panthers and lions with rippling musculature, bringing savage nature into the genteel salons of Paris. He also made larger public works — among them a Tiger Devouring a Gavial and A Lion Crushing a Serpent, this last sculpture standing in a public square in Philadelphia, USA, where passers-by have burnished the lion’s fangs to a sheen with their touch. Such was the animalier’s skill that, in 1850, the critic Théophile Gautier, noting how ‘Barye aggrandises his animal subjects, simplifying them, idealising and stylising them in a manner that is bold, energetic, and rugged’, called him ‘the Michelangelo of the menagerie’.

Big cats were objects of fascination in their native lands, too. Tipu’s Tiger, the famous automaton made in about 1795 for Tipu Sultan, ruler of the Indian kingdom of Mysore, shows a specimen devouring a European soldier — a keyboard hidden inside the beast emits the wailing of the man and the grunts of the big cat. The grisly object was a symbol of Indian resistance to colonisers. Further east in China, the image of a tiger was used to symbolise bravery, as well as being a defensive talisman. These predators long featured on robes, ceramics and metalwork, as well as in paintings, and some regiments of the Qing army even wore tiger outfits and hoods made from painted cotton.

In novelty-hungry Europe, of course, the creatures of the air were no less intriguing for artists. In about 1622, the Flemish painter Roelandt Savery expressed his sense of amazement at nature’s fecundity in his Landscape with Birds. Here, in an imagined craggy landscape inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a flock has gathered. More than 20 species are represented and they have flown in from all over the world. There are the familiar — swans, ducks and chickens — and the exotic. Ostriches from Africa stand above a cassowary from New Guinea, parrots from South America preen next to crowned cranes from sub-Saharan Africa, pelicans swim next to spoonbills and there, about to take a drink, is a dodo all the way from Mauritius.

The accuracy of Savery’s depiction meant that he must have seen these birds from life, almost certainly in the aviary of his patron Rudolf II, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. He had the most celebrated Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities) of the age at Prague Castle and wanted every wunder of the natural world under his sway, too, so he commissioned elaborate gardens and a menagerie. He went so far as to allow a lion and a tiger to prowl around the castle and, if an unfortunate servant was mauled when going about their duties, they were paid compensation — if they didn’t survive the encounter, their families received the money instead.

It was, however, naturalist-artists of succeeding generations who did most to introduce nature’s bizarreries to European audiences. In 1699, for example, the dauntless German entomologist Maria Sybylla Merian visited Suriname with only her daughter for ‘protection’. On her return, laden with bug samples and sketches, she noted that: ‘All the people there were amazed that I came out of it alive, for most people there die of the heat.’ In 1705, she published the results of the trip as Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, a luxury volume in which she didn’t draw her flora and fauna as if pinned to the page, but composed them into vivid tableaux of nature in the raw — a caiman eating a snake, a spider devouring a hummingbird, soldier and leaf-cutter ants on the march.

As John James Audubon was also to show with the 435 large-scale illustrations in his monumental Birds of America, published in Britain (not America) between 1827 and 1838, there was no need to dream up fantastical creatures. Nature had already done just that.

This feature originally appeared in the February 11 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'

The sea called to Georges Seurat. Every summer, he fled to Normandy, ‘to wash his eyes of the days spent at the studio,’ as he told the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren, and ‘translate as accurately as possible the bright light, in all its nuances’.

Although today he is most readily associated with Paris and the suburbs he captured in his seven ambitious paintings, including Bathers at Asnières and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, ‘for Seurat’s contemporaries, his avant-garde friends, it was actually his sea-scapes that were most characteristic and most important,’ says the head of the Courtauld Gallery, Ernst Vegelin van Claer-bergen. ‘They represented that extraordinary sense of stillness, of quietude, that is so distinctive of Seurat and they were an absolute cornerstone of his life and of his art.’

So much so that the Courtauld, which has the UK’s largest collection of the artist’s work, is now devoting an entire exhibition to ‘Seurat and the Sea’, presenting some 17 paintings, plus oil sketches and elaborate drawings, many of which have never been seen in this country before.

Seurat, says the gallery’s senior curator of paintings, Karen Serres, is a little like Vermeer and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in that there are only a little more than 40 known, finished paintings by him, 38 of which he exhibited in his lifetime. Those were the ones that made his reputation and the vast majority of them, 24, are marine views.

Indeed, even critics who panned his larger canvases appreciated his coastal works: the same man who could not ‘​​abide his Sunday at La Grande Jatte, which is crude in tone and in which the figures are cut out like poorly made mannequins’ praised the ‘extreme delicacy of colours in his suite, particularly of the seascapes of Grandcamp’. However, adds Dr Serres, his sea and Parisian pictures should not be seen in opposition: the ones influenced the others throughout his short life.

Seurat was born in the French capital in 1859 and trained first at the École Municipale de Sculpture et de Dessin, then, from 1878, the École des Beaux-Arts, although, a year in, he left for military service. When he returned, having explored the coast of France from his posting in Brest, Brittany, he decided to forgo the school to set up on his own.

‘He had a very traditional education, but he rapidly forged his own path, looking to the Impressionists, their use of colour, and also, crucially, [their] subjects of modern life, but creating his own idiom,’ explains Dr Serres. His family was affluent enough to support him, which allowed him to pursue his artistic interests freely. ‘He was really the most radical artist of the 19th century,’ Dr Serres believes. ‘He completely transformed the Impressionist style into a very specific technique, Pointillism, having dots of pure colour side by side to render light.’

His method was grounded in scientific rigour. Painters had long intuitively understood that the same hue, when placed next to black, white or grey, takes on different values or that, if it’s placed next to a complementary colour, both appear more vivid. Seurat, however, turned to new developments in optical theory, deliberately juxtaposing pigments at first in short strokes, then in dots, so that ‘they would fuse in the eye of the beholder,’ says Dr Serres.

Even the palette where he mixed his paints reflected his approach. Whereas Monet’s was encrusted with a messy explosion of vibrant blobs — proof perhaps of the instinct and spontaneity that artist Paul Signac said drove the Impressionists — Seurat’s was painstakingly organised. At the bottom he had black pigments, at the top he had white and in the middle row, progressing neatly from left to right, a sequence of hues from the palest yellow to the darkest blue.

If science was his basis, however, the sea was his catalyst. It was the place where this reserved, introspective artist could reflect and explore light in large spaces empty of people — so much so that he demurred when his friend Signac suggested joining him. ‘The relationship between sky and water and light was absolutely crucial for him to develop his technique, which is why every time he came back to Paris after spend-ing the summer on the coast, he said it refined what he was trying to do,’ notes Dr Serres.

The evolution of his method is evident in the seascapes on display at the Courtauld. In his early pictures, he may have added a few strokes of red next to pink and blue, but, by 1888, says Dr Serres, ‘you can see the incredible mixture of colour to render the light falling and the shadows on the coast’. His dots have become smaller, the range of their colours greater. ‘In 1890, two years later, his method became much more separated, much more pure.’

The north of France was his summer destination. With the exception of 1887, when he remained in Paris, probably to finish his grand winter works Models and Circus Sideshow, he went there every year from 1885 to 1890. Armed with a boîte à pouce, or à pochade — a compact box complete with mini-easel, which took its name from the fact that it had an opening for the thumb that allowed it to rest on the artist’s hand — he would sit on the beach and sketch on wooden panels. ‘We found embedded in the paint a lot of sand,’ says Dr Serres. ‘He really was working out of doors, very much following the Impressionist tradition.’

No sand was ever retrieved in his exhibition paintings, however, suggesting they were made indoors and probably finished in Paris. Critics saw a touch of sadness and melancholy in his sea-scapes, but Seurat disagreed. His friend and fellow artist Charles Angrand recalled him saying: ‘They see poetry in what I do. No, I apply my method and that is it.’

Much as his technique progressed over the years, so did his choice of seascapes change. Initially, explains Dr Serres, he painted the coastline of Normandy that had caught the eye of Eugène Boudin and the Impressionists before him: small fishing villages such as Grandcamp and resorts frequented by middle-class Parisians on holiday, including Honfleur. In time, however, he became more interested in less popular places, such as the canal at Gravelines, a town near Dunkirk.

There, in the most productive of his summer ‘campaigns’, he used a tighter spacing of dots and a more restricted palette to render the open skies that most seemed to interest him at the time. ‘It’s very interesting to see how he’s starting to become more and more abstract in many ways,’ says Dr Serres. ‘Had his life not been cut short, we don’t know how his art would have evolved.’

Seurat’s four Gravelines paintings were on show at the newly opened 7th Salon des Indépendants when he died suddenly on March 29, 1891, aged only 31, probably of diphtheria, although Signac thought he had ‘killed himself by overwork’.

Such was the late painter’s affinity for the Northern French coastline that Angrand, when visiting Dieppe after Seurat’s death, wrote to another common friend, ‘I thought of him as I always do when looking out to the sea. He is the first to have rendered the feeling it inspires on quiet days… The truth was that the tone of his palette, a unique tone, captured the essence of things.’

'Seurat and the Sea' is at the Courtauld Gallery, London, from February 13–May 17

This article first appeared in the February 11 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here

James Birch holds the buff coat once worn by John Hussey, the second son of Sir Edward Hussey of Doddington Hall, who was killed in fierce fighting on Foxby Hill at the Battle of Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, on July 28, 1643.

A hole in the right breast of the leather coat shows precisely where the Royalist cavalry officer was shot. He was just 21 years old.

The fatal musket ball also pierced the collar rim of the breastplate he wore, visible on the chair to the right and in the detail below. There is no exit hole, so the ball must have lodged in his body.

Hussey’s helmet, gloves and boots also remain at the hall, in a very rare and complete survival from the time. They are not well matched, however. The breast plate is suited for a pikeman and the buff coat was, by the standards of the 1640s, both old and thin. The helmet is likewise antiquated, all hinting at the improvised armament of even wealthy soldiers in the Civil War.

‘Many Royalist houses were burnt down,’ says Birch, ‘but Doddington may have been spared because one of John Hussey’s aunts was married to Ferdinando Fairfax, father of Black Tom Fairfax, commander of the Parliamentarian New Model Army.’

It's a sad and salutary reminder of how the conflict split families apart, and vividly illustrates the complexity of civil war.

Find out more about Doddington Hall.

Caroline Avedon is dressed like a glamorous New York cowboy at the exhibition she has curated at the Gagosian on Grosvenor Hill in London. She wears a black leather fringed jacket, snakeskin cowboy boots, gold jewellery and a curtain of dark pin-straight hair. A gold ‘C’ hangs from a chain around her neck, as if to remind her of who she is. One small blue hoop earring is the only thing I can spot on her person that isn’t meticulously curated to fit a sleek, mature aesthetic. Curating, after all, is a big part of Caroline’s job, as the curator and archivist at the Richard Avedon Foundation, which continues to showcase the work of her grandfather, the famous photographer.

Avedon is perhaps best known for his glamorous fashion shots for Harper's Bazaar, Elle and Vogue, but 'Facing West' (until March 14) is entirely different. The exhibition is a selection of original work from 'In the American West', a series of portraits of working-class individuals taken by Avedon in the 1970s and 1980s; beautiful, devastating and intense snapshots of a real America. They were arranged by Caroline so that the darker images are viewed first. One of her favourites is an image of BJ Van Fleet, a shotgun toting nine-year-old who stares stubbornly down the lens. Caroline says it sums up the state of the USA today.

Avedon died when she was five, but Caroline still has ‘incredibly vivid’ memories of him. It wasn’t until he passed away, however, that she realised the enormity of his success. To her, ‘he was just Grandpa Dick’. Shortly after his death, she was watching TV when she saw his obituary on CNN and innocently asked her father: ‘Why is grandpa on the TV?’ Aged five, she didn’t even know what his legacy was — now, aged 26, her life is dedicated to preserving it.

As a child, she wanted to be a marine biologist, as she grew up beside the ocean in Long Island, in the Hamptons. ‘That evolved and moved on as I grew up, but still not to anything artistic,’ she recounts, although she always had a love of dancing. ‘I wanted to be a lawyer. I’ve always been interested in politics and helping people and I am quite skilled at winning an argument,’ she says. Caroline is headstrong; a necessary trait to deter potential nepo baby allegations. After all, it can’t be easy to have the same surname as the company that pays your bills (her mother is the CEO of the foundation, and her brother, Matthew, also works there). After being put off by the idea of ‘being a woman in Washington DC at that time,’ Caroline abandoned her dreams of politics and law and worked in fashion for a spell (which she didn’t like) before asking her mother for a bit of temporary work. Four and a half years later, she ‘couldn’t imagine doing anything else’.

Caroline admits she was cautious at the start. ‘I was a little concerned that, especially for the two non-family members [that work for the foundation], that I might be perceived as, kind of…’ she trails off. ‘I don't know much about art. I didn't know much about art at the time. I didn't study art, and I wasn't exactly qualified. I taught myself a lot, and I read and took courses, but yeah, there's always the looming nepo baby thing — especially in America. People like to talk about that. I don't consider myself that at all, especially because it's a very niche environment.’

She explains: ‘I always try to have the hardest work ethic I can have at the foundation [...] reminding myself, and other people, that this is something I’m very passionate about, not just a “bailout”.’ I believe her. After all, her dad, although he is the President of the board, has other work to keep him occupied. Currently he is the Dalai Lama's authorised biographer, Caroline tells me, casually, without much further detail. For her, family is everything. ‘I think one of the coolest things I realised right off the bat [at the foundation] is that I had everything I could ever want to know about my family at my fingertips. Every family photo, every correspondence, every voice recording. I have learned so much about my history, my grandparents’ history, my great-grandparents, my dad, over the years and I wouldn't trade that for the world.’ For many years, Caroline couldn’t listen to an audio or video recording of Avedon. ‘It would stop my heart. I would just start to cry and slam the computer. It was an incredible jerk reaction,’ she says. ‘I just couldn't do it. It made me incredibly emotional. But now I think I've healed that part of myself by working at the foundation, because I don't remember him as ‘my dead grandpa’, now I remember him as this incredible, accomplished person.’

She describes him as ‘incredibly energetic, charismatic, vivacious and outgoing,’ without ‘an ounce of fear’. ‘He would walk into a room and light it up, for better or for worse — that is how I would describe him.’ In terms of likenesses, she thinks they share the same stubbornness as well as social temperament: ‘I'm an extroverted introvert, I would say, and I think there was a little bit of that in him as well. I think he was a smidge more outgoing than me.’ The job has changed how she sees the world, and herself. ‘It's kind of shifted my focus when I see people on the street,’ she explains. ‘For instance, instead of looking passively, I noticed little features about people that I definitely did not do before this job. I am always looking for something interesting about someone: what makes them unique, what's different about them.’ When it comes to having her own photo taken, things have changed too. ‘Loved it as a child,’ she says. ‘I don’t mind it now, but with social media and things, I’m much more critical of my appearance, which is sad [...] I think the older I'm getting, unfortunately, the more aware I am of my appearance and how I want to look, and so it's a double edged sword. I like the attention sometimes, and I also hate it sometimes because of how I'm feeling that day. I think, honestly, that's just the experience of being a woman.’

Caroline shows me around the exhibition, lovingly pointing out specific details of each portrait that tell a bit of the subject's story, and speaking as if she has known them all her life. The things Caroline admires so much about her grandfather’s art: the way he captured someone's clumsily applied makeup, the dirt flecked across their cheeks, a rip in their clothing or their uneven skin tone — essentially the things that make them look unique — are the imperfections she cannot abide in a photograph of herself. It’s a strange irony, I think. It’s a shame Richard isn’t around to take her photograph today. Through his lens, I am sure she’d be able to see things differently.

Your favourite painting

It's so tricky. This is a really hard question, and I don't know if I can hone in on one per se. I love romanticism in general. I love Monet a lot, but I don't think I could pick one, and I know that's kind of a bad answer, but I tend to gravitate towards landscape images, oceans in particular.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I have a bit of a shopping problem. I am a very large Manolo Blahnik collector, and my most recent pair of Manolos that I bought myself for Christmas are probably my last purchase. My birthday is next week, so we'll see what I come up with for that. I buy a lot of shoes.

Your aesthetic hero

Of course I love my grandfather, but I would say Lauren Hutton has been an obsession of mine. I really love her, and her aesthetic. Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen — love them — and Zoë Kravitz, she’s incredibly unique.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

This is a hard question. I go to see a lot of art. I love art and photography, but I will selfishly say Avedon 100 was an incredible accomplishment. That was the first big project I worked on at the foundation. It was such a journey and humongous, and it was incredibly rewarding. So I would say that, as it was just so unique, and nothing, I think, has been done like it. To have been a part of that, I am so grateful.

A book you found inspiring

This is a weird answer. I don’t know if inspiring is the right word to describe it, but my favourite book of all time is The Great Gatsby. I’ve read that book, I think, about 13 times, and I travel with it. I love how beautifully heartbreaking it is. ​I think it is such a sad story, but a good sad story — if that makes any sense? I love his writing in particular. I've read a few of his books. I just think it's something I can never put down, and I think that's the best feeling in a book. The whole romanticism and utopian energy of Jay Gatsby and how it all comes crashing down I think is an incredible life lesson also, and I took a lot from it in my own life: that you can be so at the top of everything and feel like you're getting the world, and the next day it all goes away. I also find that Daisy Buchanan is one of the biggest villains of all time in fiction. She just grinds my gears in a good way. I have my grandpa’s copy of it with his notes in. It’s really cool, but they’re kind of hard to understand. I'm pretty sure, in the front cover, it says Heathrow and the time of a flight he took.

A possession you would never sell

My watch was grandpa's. He was a tiny man, hence why it fits my wrist. I would never even think about selling it. I honestly would never sell anything that was my grandfather's or my grandmother's.

The music that you work to

Mainly rap — it was probably the first music I was introduced to by my brothers. A lot of classic rock too. I love The Beatles, I love The Rolling Stones, I love The Grateful Dead and Rage Against the Machine, then I love jazz music, too. I'm a huge fan of Leo Armstrong, and house music. I will listen to almost anything. The one thing I don't like to listen to, because I grew up with it as background noise every day in my life with my father, is classical music — other than The Nutcracker, I could listen to the soundtrack of that all day long.

The last podcast you listened to

I am not the biggest podcast person, but I adore Amy Poehler's podcast. She is one of my favourite people on this planet. Parks and Recreation is my favourite TV show of all time, and I just think she's a great interviewer and keeps it funny and light. And I love the people that she's had on. It's the one podcast I actually sit down and listen to, and watch.

The person that would play you in a film of your life

Emma Roberts. She is the one person that I ever get told that I look like physically. She actually lives for periods of time near me, and her sister I grew up with. I don’t know her, but she’s fantastic, and I think she would play me well. I'd be honoured to be played by her.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

This is a really dumb answer, but water. I am a water fiend. The idea of even surviving without water doesn’t work for me.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

A very obnoxious alarm. I have to do the really awful one [she imitates the sound of a military claxon]. It's funny, because I'm not a good sleeper. I don't sleep much, but I have a really hard time waking up. When that alarm goes off for the office in the morning, I'm like: ‘Noooo!’ I love my bed. My bed and I are best friends. But, on a weekend, I would say a true New York bacon, egg and cheese and a vanilla ice latte.

The items you collect

Shoes. I’m fascinated by them. I think they’re beautiful. I've gotten to a point where I'm a collector of them so much that I want the weird ones. I want the — I don't want to say ugly, because I think they're beautiful — but you know the really wacky ones? I have a bunch of pony hair and animal print shoes. Oh, and jackets and coats — vintage jackets and coats is another one. And, shout out to a British company, I am about to be 27 but I'm obsessed with Jellycats.

A hotel you could go back and back to

Round Hill hotel in Montego Bay, Jamaica. I will die there, I will be buried there, I will live there. That's a family story, actually. Grandpa was very best friends with John Pringle, who's British and who founded Round Hill in Montego Bay in 1952, if I'm not mistaken. My family's been going there since 1952 and my dad grew up there for weeks and months on end. He's been going his whole life and I went for the first time when I was about eight, fell in love with it, and now it's my favorite place in the world. I can't imagine going anywhere else.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever had

I've had some really great jerk chicken in Jamaica, that’s memorable for me. I really enjoy cooking and I make a mean chicken cutlet. There's so many memories associated with that type of food. My mom's Italian, so I've been eating Italian food my whole life. I perfected my recipe in college and made it for all my friends. It’s all my boyfriend will eat.

The best present you’ve ever received

I am fortunate enough to have received a lot of great gifts. The one that stands out the most to me is, after my grandpa passed away, we got a package in the mail and it was a blanket with a giant dog head on it that my grandpa had made for me, and it wasn't finished until after he passed. I love dogs and I’ve always loved dogs. It actually arrived about three weeks after he had passed away, which is beautiful and obviously gut wrenching at the same time. That's probably the best present I've ever received, just because of the sentimental value of it. It sits in my bedroom in my parents' house.

Richard Avedon: Facing West is at Gagosian on Grosvenor Hill in London until March 14.

Financial difficulties faced by the Temple-Grenville family of Stowe House, Buckinghamshire, during the 19th and early 20th centuries led to a series of content sales, including one in 1848, when the sculptures of Cybele and Juno from the south-front portico were sold on the same day for £31.10 and £21.

The buyers were a Mr A. Robertson of Fleet Street and Lady Glamis respectively and, whereas the former statue ended up in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, USA, Juno has since been lost.

Melanie Whitrow from Stowe House says: ‘Usually, we’re able to track things down… but this one eludes us.’ In December and January, however, reimagined Cybele and Juno were returned to their original locations for the first time in 178 years, marking the culmination of the first quarter-century of the house’s restoration by the Stowe House Preservation Trust.

With no paintings or etchings existing from the time and, therefore, with missing Juno’s features something of a mystery, sculptor Sam Steel was enlisted to design the new statues, for which he used a Getty Museum 3D scan of Cybele (a Roman sculpture dating from about AD50) as a template and drew on comparable surviving examples to reintroduce missing details, such as the nose and left hand.

For Juno, Steel adapted his Cybele model, introducing a new head from a 3D scan of Juno Ludovisi from Rome’s Museo Nazionale Romano, altering the pose and introducing a peacock, as well as removing Cybele’s lion.

Now they are in situ, a final limewash coat will be applied to each 700kg statue in the spring. ‘Seeing Cybele and Juno arrive has been deeply moving for everyone involved,’ says Anna McEvoy, co-director and house custodian.

European Sculpture in the Collection of His Majesty The King by Jonathan Marsden (Modern Art Press in association with the Royal Collection Trust, £350) is available now

Indignation flared in 1921, when two 7in by 5in etchings included in the Royal Academy (RA) Summer Exhibition turned out to be the work of a 15-year-old girl. The umbrage was dismissed. ‘We judge the work, not the persons,’ declared jury member Claude Shepperson. ‘We do not know the painter’s name, and it does not matter if the artist is three or 300. Looking at the work from an artistic standpoint we had no hesitation in accepting it. It is no fault of ours that Miss Soper, aged 15, can hold her own with the giants of old age. We are proud of the girl.’

In time, the art of Eileen Alice Soper would find a place in millions of homes, for she would illustrate the covers of all 21 of Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’ adventures, published from 1942 to 1963; her wholesome and outgoing youngsters reflecting the period style and taking a firm place in the nation’s illustration heritage. However, long before the Blyton contract, Soper’s sketches of younger children had charmed people both here and in the USA. Exhibitions in Los Angeles and Chicago drew rapturous praise, with one critic declaring her a genius and her portrayal of ‘dream children’ a miracle and another describing her as ‘a schoolgirl among the masters’.

English art critic Haldane Macfall praised her ‘purity of artistic intention thoroughly attuned to the years of innocence’ and ‘wholly devoid of the mechanical stuff of the art schools’, a relevant comment as her natural talent had developed under the tuition of her father, George, a brilliant portrayer of working horses.

Growing appreciation brought a flood of requests, but Soper was ‘far too busy’ and even turned down a commission to illustrate A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. The year 1924 saw a particular accolade, when Queen Mary visited the RA spring exhibition and asked for an immediate print of her Flying Swings etching.

Success was proving material. Aged 22, Soper bought a Vauxhall tourer. She not only enjoyed driving (she kept a clean licence for 65 years), but added mechanical skill to her virtues, servicing cars herself. She toured extensively with her father, the pair sketching and painting the natural world.

Motoring revealed a foible, however, for she considered herself frail, had an obsessive fear of hospitals, and would make a detour to avoid passing one. She also thought that cancer could be contracted by breathing and did not welcome general human contact. She is not thought to have formed any romantic attachment and remained a spinster — as did her sister Eva, a potter, with whom she lived.

Soper never went abroad, ate no meat, had pet dogs, hated cats, had no formal religious adherence and abhorred alcohol, swearing, smut and ‘freak’ modern art. She wrote to well-known figures requesting autographs — and obtained Hilaire Belloc’s. She had also long written verse and, although her efforts failed to impress those whose advice she sought, including playwright and novelist John Galsworthy, she forever scribbled lines on bits of paper that lay to hand.

The Soper family lived in a house at Harmer Green near Welwyn (then a village) in Hertfordshire that was designed by George and set in a semi-wild garden. Eileen and Eva spent their lives there and, after their father’s death in 1942, they christened it Wildings. It became a wildlife haven, attracting many animals. Mice ran free through the house; birds flew in to perch on heads and shoulders and be hand fed. Eileen skilfully sketched every species that appeared.

She developed a special passion for badgers, spending cold, dark hours draped in foliage with a red-filter torch to observe them. Cubs took food from her hand and escorted her home across the field. ‘Here, in company with those merry wanderers, I had met the fabulous spirit of midsummer night,’ she wrote. Among other books, the richly illustrated When Badgers Wake established her as a naturalist author.

Soper died in 1990, the same year as her sister, aged 84. Executors found Wildings in damp disrepair and the garden vastly overgrown. Rooms were piled with boxes and bags of hoarded papers, and mice nested everywhere, but a trove of artwork lay within. According to Duff Hart-Davis, author of Wildings: The Secret Garden of Eileen Soper, several thousand works by father and daughter were rescued, with an estimated value of £900,000 (£2.6 million today) and are now sought after.

In one room, some 3,000 jam jars were stored, but not for jam. She had eschewed their disposal as rubbish, fearing they would be smashed on a council tip and cut the paws of her beloved badgers.

Works from the Soper Collection can be viewed at the Pannett in Whitby, North Yorkshire. The collection is on loan from the Chris Beetles Gallery, which holds the copyright and exclusively represents The Estate of George and Eileen Soper

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

Sir James and Lady Graham stand beside a chalk portrait by French Society artist Théobald Chartran of Sister Charlotte Harriet Graham (1839–1927). She was one of nine legitimate children of Sir Bellingham Graham, 7th Baronet of Norton Conyers, who squandered his fortune on ‘slow horses and fast women’. In 1870, aged 31, Charlotte joined the Community of St Peter, an Anglican nursing order and, in 1893, became the head of St John’s House, London. She ran this ‘training institution for nurses for hospitals, families and the poor’ for 18 years.

‘We love this portrait, as the sitter looks kind, calm and sensible,’ says Lady Graham. ‘James feels that her taking the veil may have been a reaction to her father’s feckless and irresponsible behaviour. The artist has captured her compassionate and gentle, but firm character, as well as her authority. She keeps this part of our house peaceful.’

Sister Charlotte is only the second most noteworthy Charlotte linked to the house — and by coincidence, she was born in the same year that her more illustrious namesake visited Norton Conyers. Charlotte Brontë came to the house in 1839, and was — according to her friend Ellen Nussey — much impressed by the house in general, and in particular a dark tale that was part of the Graham family history.

'Like any good novelist, Brontë used her impressions of several houses to build up a picture of Thornfield, Mr Rochester's country seat in Jane Eyre,' Gervase Jackson-Stops wrote in Country Life in 1986, shortly after Sir James took over the the stewardship of the house. 'Yet Norton Conyers, which she visited in the summer of 1839, as governess to the then-tenants' grandchildren, contributed one of the most important ingredients in the book — the Graham family legend of a madwoman confined in the attics.'

The woman in question was referred to as 'Mad Mary', as Lady Graham herself explained in a 2003 article in Country Life. 'Who she was, whether servant or family, is not known,' Lady Graham wrote. 'Perhaps she was a servant who had children by "master" and who suffered from epilepsy or post-natal depression rather than madness.'

Although Brontë's connection to Norton Conyers was well known for many years, confirmation of the existence of the attic didn't come until part of the long refurbishment work undertaken by Sir James and Lady Graham removed some panelling to reveal a previously hidden staircase. Sir James — whose family have owned the house since the mid 17th century — asked for a hollow-sounding panel to be investigated, and his hunch proved correct: stairs up from the 'Peacock Room' to an attic room were uncovered.

There seems little doubt then Brontë based her timeless tale in large part on Norton Conyers. ‘We believe that the house inspired Thornfield Hall and the mad Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre,’ observes Lady Graham.

Both house and gardens at Norton Conyers are open on some days each year. The Norton Conyers website has full details.

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Monk shoes were — shock, horror — worn by European monks in the Middle Ages; close-toe alternatives to their traditional sandals, designed to help them better traverse rough terrain and conduct manual labour.

They have a similar silhouette to an Oxford shoe, but instead of laces, they have a thick strap and buckle fastening. They sit between an Oxford and a Derby on the spectrum of smartness; a single-buckle monk shoe in polished black leather is the most formal version because of its streamlined look. Ones with a toe cap or broguing are more informal.

During the 17th century, members of the French aristocracy adopted the monk shoe, appreciating them for their comfort. They were made from high-quality, fine materials such as leather and velvet, in rich colours and with ornate buckle detailing. But what of their rise to fame in Britain? Shoemaker Edward Green helped to popularise the style among British gentleman when he added single and double buckle monk strap styles to his roster in the late 19th century. Handcrafted in leather, Green made the shoes look sleek and stylish. Several decades later, the style was increasingly viewed as a fashionable alternative to Oxfords — helped along by the fact that they were worn by Hollywood stars such as Clark Gable and Cary Grant.

In the 1940s, English shoemaker John Lobb introduced the now iconic ‘William’, a double buckle style initially designed as a sports shoe for weekend wear. They were ‘definitely not to be worn with suit’, according to the brand, but ‘times have changed’ and they now happily recommended it as a business-approrpriate style.

Of course, it wasn’t all plain sailing. In the mid 20th century, monk strap shoes fell out of favour until the 1980s — and were replaced in people's affections by loafers and trainers. Their resurgence, buoyed by fashion-conscious youth, coincided with the release of Crockett & Jones’s ‘ready-to-wear’ monk strap shoe, in partnership with a Parisian retailer looking for a maker that balanced quality and affordability.

The shoe’s popularity flourished enough to make it an icon and they garnered significant attention when Daniel Craig’s James Bond wore them not once, but twice — in Skyfall (2012) in Crockett & Jones’s Monkton shoe in black calf leather, and in Spectre (2015) in the Camberley, a double-buckle boot version.

Though undoubtedly versatile, a double strap monk shoe can only go so far up the ladder of smartness, so if you find yourself in evening attire more often than not, a single strap is the way to go. If you really want to make somebody look twice, Burberry’s snakeskin, chunky heeled monk strap shoes, created in the 1930s and now residing in the Northampton Museum and Gallery, might be your best bet. Sadly, they’re not for sale — so you’ll have to plan your own Louvre-style heist.

Their Majesties The King and Queen

The roar of the crowd is almost audible in this picture, taken from inside Buckingham Palace in London as The King and Queen waved from the balcony after the coronation on May 6, 2023 — Charles III was the 40th monarch and his wife the 29th consort to be crowned at Westminster Abbey. More than 200,000 people lined the areas immediately around the palace, representing a miniscule fraction of the hundreds of millions who watched the televised event worldwide.

Marilyn Monroe

On September 15, 1954, Marilyn Monroe made history when, clad in a white cocktail dress, she stepped over a New York ventilation grate in The Seven Year Itch and the air current from a passing train blew up her skirt, exposing her legs. The scene was positively risqué and Monroe’s then husband, Joe DiMaggio, was incensed (the couple divorced shortly afterwards).

Twiggy

Only 12 years later, no windy excuse was necessary to reveal Twiggy’s legs to the camera. Mary Quant had changed the course of fashion with her miniskirts. The British model Twiggy (now Dame Lesley Lawson), who would go on to become the face of the Swinging Sixties, had been scouted mere months before she was photographed wearing Quant’s mini dress, aged only 16.

The then Duchess of Cornwall, Country Life's 2022 guest editor

Another one-of-a-kind picture appeared on the cover of Country Life on July 13, 2022, an issue guest edited by the then Duchess of Cornwall. Her portrait was taken by amateur photographer and fellow Royal Family member Catherine, then the Duchess of Cambridge.

Man on the moon

It was a small step for a man, but a giant one for humanity when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to take a walk on the Moon on July, 20, 1969. In what would become a legendary picture, Armstrong, who commanded the Apollo 11 mission, photographed fellow astronaut Aldrin standing by the American flag the pair had just planted into the lunar soil.

Elizabeth Hurley and Hugh Grant

It was also a small step and a giant leap for Elizabeth Hurley when she set out in a Gianni Versace black dress with Hugh Grant at the 1994 premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral. The actress carved a name for herself overnight, becoming a symbol of the nascent Cool Britannia.

The Channel Tunnel

On December 1, 1990, as the final hole was dug into the Channel Tunnel, the British and French crews met and workers Philippe Cozette and Graham Fagg shook hands, each man holding their respective country’s flags. Excavation had begun three years earlier, in December 1987, on the British side and the first test train would run in December 1993, ahead of the official opening in May 1994.

Mo Farah

A British triumph of a joyously different kind came in 2012. At the spectacular London Olympics, Mo Farah secured a double victory, taking gold in the 10,000-metre race (it was the very first time Britain had won that particular medal), then in the 5,000. He would repeat the feat four years later in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Sir Mo was only the seventh man ever to win over both distances at the same Olympics.

Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery

On May 4, 1945, British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery accepted the surrender of the German forces stationed in north-western Germany, The Netherlands and Denmark. Four days later, representatives of the German Army, Navy and Air Force would sign the same in Berlin, although the Second World War only came to an end on September 2, 1945.

The big wide world

The squabbles of nations must have seemed absurd to Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders, who photographed this ‘Earthrise’ when orbiting the Moon in 1968. Looking back on the day decades later, he wrote: ‘The Earth we saw rising over the battered grey lunar surface was small and delicate, a magnificent spot of color in the vast blackness of space. Once-distant places appeared inseparably close. Borders that once rendered division vanished. All of humanity appeared joined together on this glorious, but fragile sphere.’

A tiny seahorse

In 2016, photographer Justin Hofman was snorkelling off the coast of Sumbawa, Indonesia, camera in hand, when he saw a seahorse riding the current. Suddenly, a tide of plastic refuse rushed in and the little critter grabbed a cotton swab. Hofman’s perfectly timed picture has become a tragic testament to the pollution that’s killing the oceans

The war-time postman

The poster child for ‘Keep calm and carry on’ must be the postman out for his round in Watling Street, London, in the aftermath of a night-time air raid in May 1941. Not all superheroes wear capes, but some definitely wore Royal Mail uniforms.

New York, New York

On September 20, 1932, 11 iron-workers ate their lunch sitting on a steel beam 850ft above the ground, off the 69th floor of what would become 30, Rockefeller Plaza in New York and their picture became a worldwide sensation. It was, however, an artfully staged shot: the construction company had commissioned it to create a buzz and promote its new skyscraper.

Losers to lovers

Hopefully, a happy ending awaited the seemingly oblivious couple who kissed in Vancouver, Canada, even as police went in to control the riots that had broken out after the local hockey team lost a game in the Stanley Cup finals in 2011.

Sir Winston Churchill

As 1944 drew to a close, on December 30, Winston Churchill kept up the nation’s morale with his famous V-sign, a mere fortnight after the Germans had launched the Ardennes Offensive, their last major attack of the Second World War.

Man's best friend

Riley, a golden retriever, was one of the 300 service dogs working amid the wreckage of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center in New York, USA, although he became depressed because he could find no survivors. His picture as he was transported out of the debris made world headlines. He lived a happy retirement and died aged 13 on February 26, 2010.

Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange

Female strength wears many faces, but perhaps the most famous was captured by Dorothea Lange in 1936. Migrant Mother, depicting a worn woman looking into the distance as her children cluster around her, became the emblem of the Great Depression. She had travelled to California in the USA with her children to find work as a vegetable picker and had stopped almost by accident at the camp in Nipomo, where Lange found her. The picture caused a stir when it was published in the San Francisco News and the camp received generous food aid in the days following. By then, however, it was too late for the family in the picture, who had moved on. Labelled ‘the Mona Lisa of the 1930s’, the mother remained un-named until 1978, when a reporter identified her as widow Florence Owens Thompson.

Muhammad Ali

The mood was tense ahead of the fight between Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston held in Lewiston, Maine, on May 25, 1965. In February 1964, Ali, then Cassius Clay, had unexpectedly beaten Liston, then the heavyweight world champion, sparking rumours of a fix. The rematch began — and in less than two minutes, it was pandemonium: Liston was felled by a punch that most spectators couldn’t see. Ali stood over his rival, shouting at him to stand up. When Liston eventually rose, it was too late — Ali was awarded victory. Allegations that the former champion had thrown the fight swirled, prompting calls to ban boxing — but the shot that ringside photographer Neil Leifer had taken of Ali hovering over his opponent became one of the most celebrated sports images of all time.

Freddie Mercury

As people starved to death in an Ethiopia ravaged by famine, singers Bob Geldof and Midge Ure staged a fundraising concert, Live Aid, held simultaneously in London and Philadelphia, in July 1985. Almost anyone who was anyone in rock took part, including Queen, with lead vocalist Freddie Mercury, who played for 20 minutes — with more than 70,000 people clapping to Radio Ga Ga. It was later hailed as ‘the world’s greatest rock gig’.

Speed of sound

The moment an F/A-18 Hornet jet broke the sound barrier when flying over the Pacific Ocean in 1999.

Elizabeth II

Elizabeth II moved the nation when she appeared, masked and alone, strictly adhering to covid restrictions, at the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, Berkshire, on April 17, 2021. Even in her moment of greatest sorrow, the late Queen upheld the rules of the country she loved.

This feature originally appeared in the January 7, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The Earl of Leicester's fireplace in the Long Library at Holkham is one of the highlights of a 1730s interior designed as part of the family wing of this great house by William Kent.

Set in the overmantle is an image of a lion triumphing over a leopard. It is presented as a painting in a gilt frame — and replaces a seascape by the 17th-century artist Claude Lorrain — but is, in fact, a micro mosaic.

Mosaics were staple of art and design in the Ancient World, but micro mosaics are much newer. The term refers to the minute pieces of glass, or tesserae, used in their composition, with some works having more than 3,000 tesserae per square inch.

The earliest known micro mosaics come from the Byzantine Empire, but the development of this type of artwork owes much to the 16th century decoration of St Peters in Rome. The Vatican commissioned a series of artisans to create micro mosaics, since they're far more robust and hard-wearing than paint. If you've visited the great Basilica you'll have seen endless examples: some 10,000 sq metres of this vast church is decorated in micromosaic. Later artists refined the technique used to create micromosaics, and from the late 18th century they became even more intricate.

The Holkham micro mosaic sits in the middle of this timeline. It was purchased in Rome by Thomas William Coke — the great nephew of the builder of the house — on his Grand Tour in 1771–74 from the collection of the Palazzo Mignanelli. It originally came from the theatre at Gubbio, from where it was removed in the early 17th century. The creation of this piece likely dates to that period, but the inspiration is far older: a coarser mosaic of the same subject dating to the 1st century BC was excavated in Pompeii and is now in the Naples Museum.

Lord Leicester stands beside this country house treasure holding an 1817 guidebook describing the mosaic. ‘I don’t like to have favourites at Holkham,' he says, 'but I chose this both on account of its beauty and because its collector went on to become a celebrated agriculturist.'

Visit the Holkham Hall website to find out more.

This feature originally appeared in the January 7, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Last May, Tate Modern celebrated its 25th birthday with a gala in the Turbine Hall: a raucous affair attended by artists Sir Grayson Perry, Sir Antony Gormley and Dame Tracey Emin. Food was prepared by the River Café’s Ruthie Rogers and guests enjoyed a performance by the Pet Shop Boys.

As Hollywood stars Daniel Craig and Reese Witherspoon mingled over Champagne, Maria Balshaw, the director of the gallery, was fielding questions about Tate Modern’s future. Accounts for 2023–24 revealed yet another deficit budget approved by the trustees, ‘due to self-generating income not increasing at the same pace as the cost base post-Pandemic’. Last March, Tate Galleries cut 7% of its workforce.

When asked whether free entry to Tate Modern’s permanent collection could one day be revoked, Balshaw said ‘I very much hope not’; yet she didn’t rule out the matter. Acknowledging these difficulties, the group’s état major launched an endowment fund with the goal of reaching £150 million by 2030. This has been touted as ‘one of the most ambitious campaigns of its kind’, designed to support exhibition programmes, research and public reach. Charlotte Mullins, art critic and former editor of V&A Magazine, describes this target as ‘ambitious, but achievable’. Then came September.

News that the National Gallery had received not one, but two landmark donations, worth £150 million each, sent shockwaves through Tate’s upper echelons. Donations came from the Julia Rausing Trust and Michael Moritz’s Crank-start foundation and, with an extra £75 million from the National Gallery Trust, will enable the completion of a new building behind the Sainsbury wing by the early 2030s. Billed ‘Project Domani’, the extra space will allow the National Gallery to grow its permanent collection beyond the remit of pre-20th-century art — something its director, Gabriele Finaldi, has been keen to do for years.

Not only does this risk eroding Tate Modern’s hegemony on works post-1900, but it also places the museum front and centre of the cultural consciousness. The lark is ascending. The National Gallery enjoyed a wildly successful 2025, which saw the previous year’s 200th anniversary celebrations reach across to May, when the permanent collection was rehung to great acclaim and the Sainsbury wing finally reopened after years of renovations, granting the museum a new entrance.

Although Tate Modern is, technically, also on the rise (its visitor numbers, albeit down 27% from 2019, have been up year-on-year since 2022), it has struggled to win back its historic audience of young European visitors — who, Balshaw believes, have been negatively affected by Covid and Brexit. Since September 26 last year, the gallery has stayed open until 9pm each Friday and Saturday in the hope of wooing young viewers. This would prove to be one of Balshaw’s final moves for the museum: last month, it was announced that she would leave Tate Modern in April, confirming the upheaval previously hinted at by the gallery’s closest observers.

Could Project Domani throw yet another spanner in the works? This remains to be seen. On the one hand, it seems entirely feasible that modern-art audiences might find an expanded collection at Trafalgar Square to be enough and no longer travel south of the river to see works by Dalí or Mark Rothko as often as they once did. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that the National Gallery would be able to add that many blockbuster paintings to its collection, given the astronomical costs of modern art. Michael Hall, former editor-in-chief of Burlington and Apollo magazines and Country Life’s erstwhile Architectural Editor, explains that ‘the National Gallery only ever buys masterpieces and notable Continental works from the early 20th century are extremely expensive’.

Despite the gallery’s recently inflated endowment, £375 million goes only so far when it comes to acquiring, say, a handful of Magrittes or Picassos. ‘I don’t think Tate will be having sleepless nights just yet,’ agrees Dr Mullins. Moreover, ‘the modern and contemporary wing will never be the dominant reason to visit the National Gallery — not when the Wilton Diptych, Stubbs’s Whistlejacket, Gentileschi’s self-portrait, Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed and all those Impressionists are on the walls’.

One major advantage boasted by the Tate Galleries is volume: their collection is roughly 30 times the size of the National Gallery’s. Works have swapped hands between the two before (on which, more shortly) and it seems likely the National Gallery’s top brass would try to schmooze Tate or even come knocking at the door of its multiple museums in the hope of borrowing back pictures it had previously handed over.

Indeed, both institutions are historically intertwined: Tate exists in part because the National Gallery did not have enough storage space to accommodate the collection of 19th-century sugar merchant Henry Tate, which led to the creation of what was then the National Gallery of British Art, later Tate Gallery, now Tate Britain (Tates Modern, St Ives and Liverpool would come much later). At the time, the National Gallery bequeathed several works from its own collection, including more than 100 by Turner, to the young rival museum in Pimlico. In 1996, an agreement was drafted to cement the dividing line between Tate and National collections. The line was 1900: any European art from before that date would sit in the National Gallery and any after that would go to Tate Modern (which, although not yet open, had already been earmarked for development in the former Bankside Power Station). Tate Britain, meanwhile, would hold onto British art across both time periods.

These various boundaries were never cut and dried, however. They were indications; goalposts; even Tate was able to recognise the National Gallery’s right to acquire 20th-century works by artists typically associated with the 19th (think Cézanne or Renoir). Over time, the latter has nimbly circumvented the agreement’s finer points: in the early 2000s, it hosted an artist-in-residence scheme inviting contemporary artists to show their work alongside the permanent collection and has partnered, over the years, with Richard Long, Paula Rego and David Hockney; in 2025, Ming Wong took the role.

Even when it comes to British art, ‘the National Gallery has never made its approach to collecting terribly clear,’ says Hall, allowing it to dip into waters typically seen as belonging to Tate Britain. Tensions between Tate and the National Gallery came to a head when the latter hosted a landmark Picasso exhibition in 2007. The press, then as now, agrees: it should have gone to Tate Modern. Now, the National Gallery’s promise to grow its modern-art collection has reopened old wounds.

The press, however, has also pointed out that anyone surprised by these developments must have been turning a blind eye. The National Gallery’s ambitions have been ‘hiding in plain sight for years,’ wrote Michael Prodger in Apollo, reminding readers that the museum’s intention is to take viewers through ‘a history of painting’. Speaking on this matter following his appointment in 2015, Finaldi said: ‘As time moves on, 1900 seems increasingly remote and less related to how we think about periods of history and art history... It is slightly frustrating to reach 1900 and then not go on.’

How should the National Gallery go about building its new collection? ‘The relationship between art’s historical past and the present is an important one for most artists and it will be fascinating to see how the new collection at the National Gallery is shaped,’ says Dr Mullins. An approach that illuminates these perspectives would also propose something quite different to ‘Tate’s forward-looking approach,’ she believes: ‘our past informs our future, so why not hunt out artists who explore this fully, such as Mickalene Thomas, Kerry James Marshall and Hew Locke?’

One should remember that, more than being rivals, Tate Modern, Tate Britain and the National Gallery are first and foremost public institutions. ‘All receive funding from the Department for Culture, Media & Sport,’ says Hall, ‘and they communicate closely with one another.’ With at least five years to go before the National Gallery unveils its new wing, Tate Modern still has time to recuperate and restrategise. Sources close to both suggest that, although gritted teeth are to be expected, the National Gallery’s latest evolution is unlikely to devolve into a full-blown row. ‘It depends how silly the trustees wish to get,’ one says.

The architects shortlisted for Project Domani were announced last month. Among them are Farshid Moussavi, Foster & Partners and Kengo Kuma, with the finalist to be announced in April. The new wing will back onto Leicester Square in a spot currently occupied by St Vincent House, a Brutalist edifice due for demolition that the National Gallery acquired 30 years ago and which currently houses a hotel and office complex.

Londoners who have long avoided Leicester Square for anything other than film premieres hope that revitalising this patch of the West End will improve prospects for both the neighbourhood and the gallery within it. As the National Gallery prepares to build big, Tate Modern will seek to make the most of its own existing infrastructure — what one source calls the museum’s ‘gung-ho extension from 10 or so years ago’. The primary culprit here is The Tanks, open since 2016 and billed as providing ‘a permanent gallery for live art, performances and film and video work from the Tate collection’ — a status that, so far, the gallery has under-exploited. ‘They’ve fallen off the radar for most people,’ confirms Hall, but this creates an opportunity.

Dr Mullins, for her part, believes ‘the Tate Galleries need to concentrate on how to present their collection to an audience that filters the world through social media, rather than make the London sites any larger. Traditional displays of Modernist art on white walls are less enticing to Millennials and Gen Z than the immersive installations of artists such as Yayoi Kusama.’ As it stands, Tate Modern’s 2026 programme is one for the ages, with two blockbuster shows on Dame Tracey Emin (February 26–August 31) and Frida Kahlo (from June 25).

The Tate Galleries would do well to capitalise on this — and, from there, raise a lot more money.

In the 2nd century AD, Roman polymath Ptolemy gathered together hundreds of coordinates corresponding to the cities and towns of the British Isles in his Geography. These were used to create a map that ‘terminates at all points with the ocean’. Far from defining the region as remote, however, this sea was the source of our relationship with Europe and with the countries that traded materials along the Asian Silk Roads and African ivory routes. It was also crucial for our creativity: artists in medieval Britain used garnets from India, walrus ivory from Greenland and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan — and Cornish gold has been found on prehistoric art in Germany.

This connectivity wasn’t restricted to materials: ideas flowed along sea routes and across kingdoms, bringing new perspectives and creating a fertile climate for art. Invaders brought fresh approaches: the Romans loved figurative sculpture; the Saxons preferred a sinuous, anthropomorphic style. Later, the British Isles became a place of refuge for Huguenot and Jewish artists and a place of opportunity for the Windrush generation, all of whom added to the rich history of British and Irish art.

Artists often worked in situ, painting the walls of churches and palaces, carving shapes into hillsides and tomb walls. We are fortunate that many such works are still visible today, often in buildings run by volunteers. Others are on display in our national museums, ensuring our collective visual history is preserved. For it is this history that brings us closest to our ancestors — to the things they held most dear, their spiritual and moral beliefs, their prejudices and their generosity.

The first place on our map this week is: Ireland.

Follow the sun

Brú na Bóinne, Co Meath, Ireland

To view the Brú na Bóinne passage tombs, you have to take a shuttle bus from the visitor centre near Drogheda in Co Meath and bump through the Irish countryside, before disembarking at each one in turn. The tombs are truly spectacular, a testament to the ingenuity and creativity of our prehistoric ancestors as they began to form permanent farming communities. They date to 5,200 years ago, but were only rediscovered in 1699 and not excavated until the 1960s. You can step inside Newgrange tomb and walk down the stonelined passage to the central chamber, where, on the winter solstice, a shaft of morning sunlight illuminates a complex triskele (three-headed spiral) on the back wall. Nearby, the grassy dome covering Knowth tomb is nearly 230ft across. Around the perimeter are carved kerbstones covered in spirals, crescents, serpentine lines and zigzags. These abstract patterns could once have communicated a world view, a belief system about our ancestors’ place in the cosmos.

Piece of the puzzle

'Decoration' by Mainie Jellett, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland

In recent years, museums and galleries across the British Isles have rethought their collections to present more work by women artists, which has enabled stories to resurface that are central to our understanding of our shared creative past. That of Mainie Jellett is one of them. She was born in Dublin in 1897, but studied in Paris in the studio of Cubist painter Albert Gleizes. Together with fellow Irish artist Evie Hone, she worked alongside Gleizes to push Cubism into new territory: abstraction. Jellett exhibited Decoration in 1923 at the Society of Dublin Painters, where it was the first abstract painting ever shown in Ireland. Despite the work’s Modernist credentials, it was met with incredulity and derision — one critic called it an ‘insoluble puzzle’. At a time when Ireland was fragmenting politically, Jellett’s orientation towards Europe was at odds with a fierce nationalism that saw painters such as Jack B. Yeats rapidly gain in popularity.

Tend to the sick

F. E. McWilliam’s Princess Macha and William Scott’s Mural, Altnagelvin Hospital, Derry, Northern Ireland

In 1948, the NHS was established and its first purpose-built hospital was Altnagelvin, on the outskirts of Derry. The architects commissioned William Scott to create a 15-panel mural (1959–61) to welcome visitors, keen for contemporary art to add an uplifting aspect to their design, and F. E. McWilliam’s Princess Macha (1957) was installed outside the entrance. He drew on Irish history for the commission: Macha was believed to have established the first hospital in Ireland more than 2,000 years before. She sits on a low stool and welcomes patients with open arms. The dove perching on her extended hand symbolises St Columba, who also treated the sick at his monastery in the 6th century.

Derry boys

‘The People’s Gallery’, Derry, Northern Ireland

In 1969, a civil-rights march from Belfast to Derry was attacked and Royal Ulster Constabulary officers and B-Specials flooded into the Catholic Bogside area of Derry. Residents fought back, declaring ‘Free Derry’. This began The Troubles, the 30-year sectarian conflict that saw Loyalists pitted against Republicans. Both sides were armed, but also harnessed the power of public art to create inflammatory propaganda murals on walls along the Shankill and Falls Roads in Belfast and in Bogside. Following the Good Friday peace agreement, three Bogside artists — brothers Tom and William Kelly and Kevin Hasson — created ‘The People’s Gallery’ (1994–2006), a series of murals that reflects on the history of The Troubles, yet offer messages of hope and peace.

This feature originally appeared in the December 31, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Sixty years ago this month, at the end of 1965, Bond fever was sweeping Britain. Thunderball was breaking box-office records and The Man With The Golden Gun, Ian Fleming’s final novel, was a runaway bestseller — but, quietly, almost unnoticed, a very different sort of spy was about to make his cinema debut.

George Smiley is easy to miss in Martin Ritt’s adaptation of John le Carré’s 1963 novel The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Played by Rupert Davies, he cuts a rotund and unthreatening figure, easily outshone by Richard Burton’s MI6 agent Alec Leamas. However, in the six decades since then, he has somehow managed to notch up almost as many outings as James Bond himself. He is currently in Oxford, integral to ‘John le Carré: Tradecraft’, a new exhibition at the Bodleian Libraries which tells his origin story. It’s superbly done, although Smiley, one of fiction’s most self-effacing men, would surely wince at the thought of display cases being devoted to him.

For Nick Harkaway, le Carré’s youngest son, he has always been like family. ‘My dad would write sections of the books and then read them out loud to my mum,’ he remembers. ‘When I was acquiring language, I was getting 90 minutes of Smiley a day, not only his dialogue, but his world as it evolved.’ Later, he would fall asleep listening to cassette tapes of the novels, drifting off as Smiley unravelled another knotty mystery. ‘Although he belongs to the world of espionage, the books work like detective stories — my dad was a huge Sherlock Holmes fan.’

Smiley was born between 1906 or 1916 (the date changes in the novels, stranding him in permanent middle age), but his birth as a character came in the late 1950s when le Carré, then an intelligence officer named David Cornwell, turned his hand to fiction during his commute from Buckinghamshire to MI5 in London. It was the height of the Cold War and the spy-heroes of the 1940s were having to get to grips with a less swashbuckling milieu. Amid stewed tea and clacking typewriters, George Smiley emerged as the antithesis of a kiss-kiss, bang-bang 007 figure.

‘Le Carré was quite explicit about the fact that his spy world was directly in opposition to Ian Fleming’s,’ explains Dr Jessica Douthwaite, co-curator of the Bodleian exhibition. ‘He did an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1966 in which he described Bond as an “international gangster” rather than a spy.’

In the books, Smiley is short and tubby, dressed not in a dinner jacket, but a poorly fitting suit. He is an outsider who travels through life ‘without labels in the guard’s van of the social express’. After being recruited at Oxford and a stint undercover in Nazi Germany, he forms an unlikely attachment to his boss’s beautiful secretary, Lady Ann Sercomb. There, any suggestion of glamour ends: the match is roundly mocked and Ann betrays her ‘breathtakingly ordinary’ husband continually, starting with a racing driver. Her infidelities are so public that innuendo follows Smiley wherever he goes, at least until the events of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy turn him — reluctantly — into the most influential man in British intelligence.

Smiley’s consolation is his desk job at a fictionalised MI6’s grubby headquarters, the Circus. His work feels rather cloistered when he is introduced in 1961’s Call For The Dead, but it becomes increasingly high-stakes: over the course of eight more novels he is dismissed and reinstated, wrangles with Soviet spymaster Karla and saves the day repeatedly, although always at a cost.

What really propelled him into the limelight was the BBC’s 1979 adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which drew eight million viewers per episode and created the bowler-hatted Smiley of myth. Tall and imposing, Sir Alec Guinness was physically unlike the ‘bullfrog in a sou’wester’ of the novels and, according to a letter in the Bodleian, he worried he wasn’t right for the part, even suggesting later that Arthur Lowe (Capt Mainwaring in Dad’s Army) replace him. It was le Carré who persuaded him. ‘He wanted to meet a spy, so he and my father went for lunch with Sir Maurice Oldfield [the retired head of MI6],’ Nick recalls. Sir Alec noticed he swung his umbrella ‘in a Charlie Chaplin sort of way’; the detail made it into the show.

Part of the series’ genius lay in its resistance to pyrotechnics and quipping. Much of the action is conveyed by no more than the twitch of an eyebrow and Sir Alec’s Smiley is a Prufrockian figure, cautious and meticulous, entirely without spy-game glitz. ‘It’s a far more realistic characterisation than the idea of someone endlessly glamorous and urbane,’ says novelist Charlotte Philby, whose own thrillers are full of ‘outsiders in a world that doesn’t belong to them’. Le Carré’s shadowy universe has long overlapped with hers: one of his books sat on a shelf in her parents’ house alongside all the volumes on her grandfather, the Cambridge spy and defector Kim Philby.

Smiley’s growing fame was a double-edged sword: le Carré himself found ‘his’ version increasingly difficult to write. ‘For a while the only voice he could hear was Guinness’s,’ says Nick. Smiley, however, was confirmed as a national treasure by being sent up by the Two Ronnies in 1985 and two late-1980s BBC radio adaptations. Denholm Elliott stepped in to play him in 1991’s A Murder of Quality. There are never any exploding pens or car chases: the thrill, as Dr Douthwaite puts it, is in the juxtaposition of ‘Smiley’s idiosyncrasies and insecurities and his extraordinary competence and capability’. Bond is superhuman, impossible to emulate, but we like to believe that we could rise to the occasion as Smiley does.

The next person to drag him out of retirement was Swedish director Tomas Alfredson, who remade Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in noir style in 2011. Le Carré breakfasted with Sir Gary Oldman, who borrowed some of his mannerisms for his painfully solitary yet steely Smiley (le Carré subsequently kept a photograph of him in costume on a bookcase). He would later don a much grubbier mackintosh to play a kind of parallel-universe version gone to seed: Jackson Lamb of Slow Horses, star of the ‘Slough House’ novels by Mick Herron, who was gripped by the BBC’s le Carré adaptations as a boy.

Le Carré died in 2020, aged 89, leaving instructions that his family should try to continue his legacy. Nick, by then a successful novelist, was persuaded by his brother to write a Smiley novel, which he set in 1963, between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. As soon as he sat down, he found a familiar figure by his desk. ‘It was as if Smiley was there, waiting patiently, and I was slightly late — if you’re quite prepared, Nicholas, we may begin,’ he writes in the novel’s introduction. He felt, too, the presence of every actor who had taken on the role. ‘Each of them did him slightly differently, but each subsequent to the first with a homage to each other. All those inheritances were mine to draw on. His voice is melancholic, it’s contemplative, it’s internal, it’s gentle, slightly suffering… It’s ultimately about revelation and in some senses faith, whether it’s disappointed or not, in humanity.’

Karla’s Choice was an instant bestseller in 2024; there are hopes for a sequel. Meanwhile, earlier this year it was announced that Matthew Macfadyen will play Smiley in a new series. Thus George marches on, his dream of a quiet life continually thwarted by a country that needs him. He offers us the hope that someone seemingly unremarkable can, as Nick puts it, ‘pick up the pieces of the broken vase, then tell you not only how it was broken, but how to put it back together’ — and, in our age of bombast, there is something very appealing about his understatedness.

‘George, you won,’ declares his friend Peter Guillam at the end of Smiley’s People after Karla has been vanquished. ‘Did I?’ says Smiley, with the gentle bemusement of a man who, against stiff competition, has just been awarded the prize for best-kept garden at the village fête. ‘Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did.’

‘John le Carré: Tradecraft’ is at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, until April 6, 2026