EDITORIAL

Bigwigs & blackguards

A new history of the national gallery, london, by a former director tackles the sensitive question of the often tense relationship between its trustees and director.

ARCHITECTURE

Knight's Tale

The recent discovery of J.H. Nixon’s water-colours of the Eglinton tournament underscores the importance of medievalism in British life.

Market Review

One topic dominated conversation: the closure of the Grosvenor House Art & Antiques Fair.

Theme & Variation

As well as outstanding 20th-century German art, the 10th Fine Art Fair in Hamburg offers fine antiquities, decorative arts and photography, together with a musical exhibition, writes Annie Blinkhorn.

Collectors' Focus

Futurism’s centenary, autumn’s auction sales and new galleries in London and Paris are adding a buzz of excitement to this market, writes Annie Blinkhorn.

Art Business

A new online gallery seeks to change the art world’s surprising reluctance to embrace the Internet for selling works.

Around the Galleries 

Collectors of tribal art are heading to Paris and London, where a host of fairs and exhibitions awaits them.

Market Preview

Asia Week is this month’s highlight in New York, while London and Dublin stage major fairs.

Collectors & Collecting

Udo Horstmann and his wife, Wally, have filled their home in Switzerland with one of the world’s greatest private collections of tribal art. As Mr Horstmann explains to Louise Nicholson, it is ‘an expedition into another world’. Photographs by John Angerson.

An Italian Affair

This month’s Florence Biennale – the major fair for Italian art and antiques – celebrates both a birthday and its own renaissance, writes Isabel Andrews.

A Prince with a Practical Touch

Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in Rome houses Italy’s most celebrated private art collection. Louise Nicholson talks to Prince Doria about the responsibilities it brings, from coping with EU bureaucrats to repairing earthquake damage. Photographs by John Angerson.

A New Ribera Drawing among Michelangelos

A drawing in the Ashmolean Museum long associated with Michelangelo is here attributed by Carmen C. Bambach to José de Ribera. One of his rare drawings in red chalk, it can be linked to the artist’s well-known interest in grotesque faces.

In Search of Eileen Gray

Towards the end of her life the designer Eileen Gray wrote that although she had spent her entire career in France she thought of herself as essentially an expatriate Irishwoman. Jennifer Goff, curator of the Eileen Gray collection at the National Museum of Ireland, tells the story of a great Irish modernist

Land of Heart’s Desire

Brian Burns’s extraordinary collection of Irish art tells the story of a nation. At home in Palm Beach, he explains to Susan Moore how it was inspired by his émigré grandfather’s pride in his roots. Photographs by Brian Smale.

Letter

The opening in June of the Acropolis Museum in Athens has rekindled the quarrel over the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum. Guy Weill Goudchaux – who is neither British nor Greek – invites us to consider some points.

In the Light of Reason

The Uffizi’s exhibition on 18th-century art in Florence is short on historical context but rich in unfamiliar works of art, writes Andrea M. Gáldy.

A Revolution in Colour

Kathryn Ferry visits the V&A’s bicentenary exhibition on a great but neglected Victorian designer, Owen Jones.

Ploughing his Canvases

A large and ambitious exhibition in Basel is the first to provide a full survey of one of the key aspects of Van Gogh’s work, his paintings of landscapes, writes Martin Bailey.

The Human Animal

This anniversary exhibition on Darwin’s links with the visual arts is aesthetically rewarding and intellectually provocative, writes Michael Hall.

Waterhouse, the Seductive Symbolist

Despite its title, the Royal Academy’s exhibition on J.W. Waterhouse is more convincing when it presents the painter in the context of the Symbolists rather than the Pre- Raphaelites, argues Simon Poë.

From Birth to Death

J.M. Musacchio traces the life cycle of renaissance families through the art they owned, writes James R. Lindow.

The Artist's Many Faces

An overly narrow focus limits the value of this sensitive study of Veronese’s portraits, writes Thomas Martin.

Fitting the Pieces Together

The long-awaited catalogue of the Italian Renaissance ceramics in the British Museum is a triumph, writes David Ekserdjian.