According to Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler was ‘never dull, his brilliant wit, his caustic satire and his amusing epigrams made his views on art as delightful as they were misleading, and as fascinating as they were unsound.’ Wilde and Whistler were notorious dandies of Victorian London and vied with each other for the position of preeminent wit and vainest man of the era. They were famous friends until Wilde’s growing reputation threatened to knock Whistler, who was tw

JMW Turner and John Constable were contemporaries and artistic rivals at Royal Academy exhibitions. Rivals and Originals at Tate Britain offers a chance to see their paintings side by side and trace their diverging approaches to landscape. Initially similar, their work became radically different from each other. Turner and Constable were both accomplished watercolourists. The youthful Turner’s watercolour paintings were highly detailed topographical views that gave no hint

A visit to the William Nicholson exhibition at Pallant House Gallery was a great way to brighten up a cold January day. I had seen Nicholson's Silver Casket and Red Leather Basket at a previous exhibition and I knew he was the father of Ben Nicholson, who had been one of the pioneers of British abstract art. I thought that was the extent of my knowledge but stepping into the first room of this gorgeous exhibition, I recognised many of the prints on display, especially the one

I was really looking forward to the National Gallery’s latest blockbuster exhibition Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers. The gallery website claimed I would be ‘blown away by Van Gogh’s most spectacular paintings in this once-in-a-century exhibition’ and encouraged me to ‘see the work up-close’. Unfortunately, I was blown away by the hordes of people in front of every piece in the exhibition and I barely achieved a distant or partial view. This was the worst exhibition experience I’v

The Courtauld Gallery exhibition Monet and London: Views of the Thames brings together a group of paintings that were first exhibited in Paris 120 years ago. Monet painted his Thames series during visits to London in 1899, 1900 and 1901, while staying at the Savoy Hotel, from where he could look out on the river and surrounding architecture, shrouded in the notorious London fog. Monet visited during the winter, when the fog produced by the city’s heavy industry was at its mos

This Pallant House Gallery exhibition, called The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain, starts with Dutch paintings from the 17th century, when still life was regarded as the lowest genre in art. Representations of fruit and flowers – usually hyper-realistic and giving artists an opportunity to show off their skills – highlight the brevity of life and reminded us that ripe fruits and beautiful blooms will die and decay, just as we will. The exhibition traces the journey of

This exhibition at Tate Britain explores the importance of costume in John Singer Sargent’s portraits of members of high society in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The claim is that he carefully stage managed his sitters’ clothing in order to reveal personality and identity but I don’t think these portraits reveal much about the sitters’ individual identity. I’m sure all portrait painters make decisions about what sitters wear, how they are posed, what the lighting is like,

I recently visited the marvellous Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to see the retrospective exhibition of John Craxton, called A Modern Odyssey. The show traces his career from British Neo-Romanticism to a distinctive kind of Modernism, embracing a variety of influences from Picasso to Pop Art. The exhibition starts with work made by Craxton in the early 1940s – images of melancholic poets in gloomy landscapes that hark back nostalgically to a long-lost English idyll – and