//=time() ?>
To look at Raphael's 'Head of a Apostle,' is to stand at his shoulder while he works. His drawings are the direct evidence of his hand and eye, how he saw life, how he put his feelings about it on paper. He is a rare spirit whose art is a mirror of his idealism.
Gerald Brockhurst's portraits have an influence of the Italian Renaissance, in particular the work of Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci. Set in idealised landscapes, the sitter appears to float in the front of the picture plane.
In 1957, the writer Jean Genet described the studio of Giacometti as 'a milky swamp, a seething dump, a genuine ditch.' There was plaster all over the floor and lumps of paint on every available surface. And yet, 'as if by magic, art grew from the rubbish.'
'The Laundress,' (1882) dates from the important period of Van Gogh’s career when he began to develop the key themes that would occupy him throughout his life. Inspired by the life and work of Jean-François Millet he turned to subjects from the rural life he saw around him.
'The Glade,' a slender tree in a clearing blazing like a flaming torch, became Roderick O'Conor's first painting to enter a major museum collection, that of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It says much for the enduring, seductive pleasure of O’Conor’s use of colour.
Frances Hodgkins travelled from New Zealand to Europe in 1901 and visited France in the same year. The coastal town of Concarneau, where there was a school of water colourists led by Gaugin's friend and biographer Charles Morice, is most likely where this picture was painted.
'Portrait of Winston Churchill.' Bernard Hailstone's study is for the full length portrait of Sir Winston Churchill, as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, in 1955 and now in the Imperial War Museum collection.
Henry Moore, 'Three Women in a Shelter.' Much of the most successful art produced during WW2 dealt with the effect of the conflict on ordinary Britons, either through the actual consequences of enemy action, or the drastic changes in lifestyle that resulted.
It is easy to forget that before being inspired by Mondrian, Ben Nicholson was a painter of still lifes and portraits. Here's his portrait of his first wife Winifred and their eldest son Jake pictured in the drawing room at the family farm in Cumberland.
Hortense Cézanne is one of the great mystery women in art. She sat for 29 paintings by her husband and smiles in none of them. Yet there is something appealing about her plainness. She is nothing like her contemporaries who pass their days enoying boating parties and picnics.