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Beep beep! It's the birthday of Charles Sheeler, the American precisionist who features in my Big Big Big series for the BBC. Sheeler was the Poussin of the Rust Belt who managed to make American industry look calm and classical. He also invented a great salt and pepper shaker!
Signaal signaal! It's Rembrandt's birthday! It's a subject on which I am almost speechless. The ambitions he brought to art were so ORIGINAL! He was great, deep, strange, fluent, emotional and - above all - different! No one like him before. No one after. These are my favourites
I've been trying to think of a painting for Father's Day. Not easy. There are scores of great mothers in art, but not many dads. So I've gone for Joseph in Orazio Gentileschi's Rest on the Flight into Egypt. He's tired. He's had a beer. Yup, that's being a dad. #HappyFathersDay
Beep beep. It's Gauguin's birthday. There's a show of his portraits coming to the National Gallery in the autumn. Ooooh! One thing he was REALLY good at was self-portraits. Some of the best IMO. The first one is based on Les Miserables. Gauguin in the Hugh Jackman role! #Gauguin
Art lovers, you have before you two paintings. One is by a Dutch Caravaggist called Matthias Stom. The other is by the great William Dobson, Britain's first baroque giant. Which is which? Also, what are the important differences? #WalkerArtGallery #Liverpool
Beep beep. It's the birthday of Pontormo (1494-1557), the greatest of the Mannerists. With Pontormo, the Renaissance suddenly became crazily inventive. Opal fruit colours. Twisting poses. Weird subjects. He rewrote the book. If that isn't worth celebrating, what is?! #Pontormo
Happy Birthday - Tamara de Lempicka! Say what you like about her Art Deco Cubism, but she had a hell of a life! And she was Polish! Born Tamara Rozalia Gurwik-Górska in Warsaw in 1898, she married a Baron. So they called her 'the Baroness with a brush'. Died in Mexico in 1980.
'Allo 'Allo. It's George Braque's birthday. Cubism was such a fascinating invention. But telling apart Cubist Braque from Cubist Picasso is really difficult. I once made a film with the great John Richardson, and he got it wrong! So which is Braque below, and which is Picasso?