CONTEMPORARY ART

Collecting for the country

Today’s avant-garde is not destroying historic country houses: it is embracing them.

ARCHITECTURE

Tragic triumph

Lutyens’s memorial to the missing of the Somme at Thiepval is one of his greatest works, but new research has revealed the difficulties he faced in its creation – and the telling silence that greeted its unveiling.

Contemporary design

When Lord Bath had to sell two antique desks, he decided to replace them with the finest modern equivalents for himself and his wife. As Amicia de Moubray explains, he turned to Senior & Carmichael, with inspired results.

‘One rare piece of novelty’

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan and Tim Knox explain how a drawing found by chance on a market stall proved to be an astonishing rarity: a design for one of the most splendid 17th-century church furnishings in England, Canterbury Cathedral’s font. The drawing goes on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum this month.

Masterpieces of a merchant city

This month Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, reopens after a major refurbishment. Robert Wenley introduces one of the major new displays, a gallery of outstanding Dutch and Flemish Old Masters. It offers an enthralling picture of collecting in Victorian Glasgow.

Fabergé in London

The discovery in a Moscow archive of unknown photographs of Fabergé’s shop in London, published here for the first time, reveals much about the role of the great jeweller in Edwardian high society, writes Kieran McCarthy.

Modigliani and the Artists of Paris

As a major exhibition on Amedeo Modigliani opens at the Royal Academy, London, Jeffrey Meyers, author of a new biography of the artist, places him in the context of the colourful circle of artists in Paris whom he befriended and painted in the years 1915-17.