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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.
'Femme s'essuyant.' The intensity and sensuality of this picture by Edgar Degas, the great voyeur of late 19th century art whose pastels are as potent as his paintings, so impressed Vuillard he bought it from Degas' easel.
William Blake's 'Christ in the Sepulchre,' depicts the moment Mary Magdalene visited the tomb of Jesus after the crucifixion and found two angels hovering where the body had lain. The colours are so delicate that the picture is almost monochrome.
'Ahmed Yusef, an Iraqi Messenger Boy.' Edward Bawden was something of a polymath in the art world and thought of himself as a designer, not an artist though he was a talented watercolourist. This picture is from 1942, painted while serving as a war artist in Baghdad.
'Murder.' Cézanne is famous for paintings of deep silence. The young Cézanne was different. He was so close to the edge his former school friend Émile Zola used him as the model for a doomed artist in his novel The Masterpiece. Is this early painting a confession of dark urges?
The Bible describes how King Nebuchadnezzar was driven mad & forced to live like a wild animal as punishment for excessive pride. William Blake's startling print is of a grand old man with a long beard, crawling on his hands and knees, recalling Goya’s 'Saturn Devouring His Son.'
'Corner of a Cafe-Concert.' The cropped realism of this scene is increased by the fact that it is one half of a painting Manet cut in two. The effect is jarringly powerful, adding to the sense that we’re not seeing a special event but simply a random moment in everyday life.
The figures in William Nicholson's painting of 'Canadian Headquarters Staff,'may seem identical from one another yet he grants them a range of body language & eyelines that effectively leads us through the painting, taking us away almost before we have realised what has happened.
This 1934 work 'The Dustman or The Lovers,' is certainly true to Stanley Spencer’s famous remark: 'I am on the side of angels and of dirt.' It portrays a dustman, returned home to the arms of his wife. She lifts him up like Christ ascending to heaven in their front garden.