What Renoir saw by the sea in Guernsey

Nearly a century and a half after the painter’s trip to the Channel Islands, his paintings of Guernsey can now be compared to the actual views

18 Oct 2023

Berthe Morisot, always in the moment

The painter went to great lengths to make her careful compositions look effortlessly spontaneous

30 May 2023

The comic strip genius of Charles M. Schulz

The man who invented Snoopy and the Peanuts gang revolutionised cartoons – both aesthetically and emotionally

28 Nov 2018
Ranger’s House in Blackheath.

Strange splendours at Ranger’s House

The diamond magnate and collector Julius Wernher was drawn to what he described as the ‘splendidly ugly’

4 Sep 2018
The Taking of Christ (1602), Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. © The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

Fed up of the Fringe? Then escape to a museum

Edinburgh’s museums and galleries provide respite from the onslaught of the Fringe

4 Aug 2017
Spray (1939), Harold Williamson. © Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum

Scared of the modern?

The British realists of the 1920s and ’30s scrupulously recorded the modern era – but in doing so, they were also avoiding it

17 Jul 2017

Scottish arts funding is precarious, but at least people are engaged enough to get cross about it

There was much controversy over cultural spending last year, and as cuts start to bite in 2017, there may well be again

19 Jan 2017
Pays Inconnu (2016), Vivienne Koorland. Courtesy the artist

William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland peel back the layers of history

The two artists make a rewarding double act at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery

4 Jan 2017

The cultural and corporate icon that is Monarch of the Glen

Drinks company Diageo planned to sell the painting, but after public outcry it now seems likely to remain in Scotland after all

18 Nov 2016
Sunset near Villerville (c. 1876), Charles François Daubigny

How Daubigny inspired Impressionism

A modest exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery makes clear the big impact Daubigny had on modern art

25 Sep 2016
Calton Hill (2014), Jock McFadyen

Scottish artists who turned to the dark side

A survey of postwar Scottish art reacting against the forces of reason includes wonderful pieces, but explains its own meaning a little too neatly

2 Jul 2016
Perspective of the Palace Complex in its Landscape Setting, Viewed from Inland

Visionary palaces in a gallery’s empty basement

Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s palace designs came to ‘nothing more than a beautiful dream’ – and, thankfully, a fascinating set of prints

2 May 2016