Tom Fleming is deputy editor of Literary Review

Lucian Freud and the art of paying attention

No one could accuse the painter of flattering his subjects, but he was certainly painstaking about capturing them on canvas

3 Jan 2023
Benton End, Suffolk, home of the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing from 1939–78.

School for sandals – educating artists at Benton End

Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines’s art school in Suffolk was an unusual meeting of rural idyll and bohemian vice

3 Mar 2022
John Craxton (left) and Patrick Leigh Fermor (right), Serifos, Greece, 1951.

John Craxton was a great artist – but his real talent was for living life to the full

A new biography of the British painter has a fine sense of his precocious talent – and real feeling for his rakish charm

29 May 2021
Nude, East Sussex Coast (detail; 1959), Bill Brandt.

Common ground – the elemental forms of Bill Brandt and Henry Moore

The first exhibition to bring the sculptor and photographer together reveals intriguing points of convergence between their work

12 Sep 2020
Cover 'The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth' by William Feaver

The great dictator – William Feaver’s biography of Lucian Freud, reviewed

The painter exerts the force of his personality from beyond the grave in the first part of this unconventional biography

6 Feb 2020
Igor Stravinsky and Mstislav Rostropovich (c. 1959) and (late 1960s), Milein Cosman. Royal College of Music, London Photos: Justin Piperger; © Milein Cosman

The unsung art of Milein Cosman

Cosman was a fine portraitist who captured the leading cultural figures of her time

22 Jul 2019
Frontispiece and title page to Christina Rossetti, 'Goblin Market and Other Poems (1863), after Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Christina Rossetti among the Pre-Raphaelites

The Brotherhood loomed large in the poet’s life, but she was careful to carve out her own creative space

4 Feb 2019
Still Life with Three Sailors, , 1980–85, John Craxton, Private collection, © 2018 Craxton Estate/DACS

The art of friendship in post-war Greece

The lives of John Craxton, Nikos Ghika and Patrick Leigh Fermor come under the spotlight at the British Museum

4 Jun 2018

Keith Vaughan’s private drawings are full of hidden longing

These erotic fantasies reveal how painfully separate the artist kept his private and public lives

4 Nov 2017