Art and Eye

  Charles West Cope's memorialisation of fellow painter Samuel Palmer, who died three years before this work was produced, is a small yet thoughtful etching which pulls a viewer closer. Palmer is aged and stooped, almost swaddled in layers of clothing, and leaning on the back of a chair as if to support himself, yet his gaze remains captivating and knowing. It is an interesting choice by Cope to choose the medium of etching to honour Palmer, and perhaps an oil of the same subject did at one point exist, as this was his favoured material. Training at the Royal Academy and travelling to Paris in the 1830s to expand his artistic knowledge, Cope built a career initially upon copying Old Masters which he then sold, before he created his own painted representations of historical scenes and looked to imagery centred on rural life for further inspiration. Often, he drew on the minute detail and vivid colouration found in the Pre-Raphaelite mode of working: his The Thorn of 1866, for exampl...

  Pale, uninterrupted colours seep, merge and flow together in Krøyer's Summer Evening on Skagen's Southern Beach, painted just before the turn of the century, and depicting the well-known artists' colony in Denmark. It is a painting of peacefulness personified, a quiet, contemplative scene where two figures and the boundless idyllic natural world live together in harmony. Through Krøyer's sweeping brushwork, the artist successfully closes the gap between sea, land and sky, as layers of blue and white bleed together into an expansive natural beauty.  Despite his merging of boundaries, Krøyer maintains an effortless three-dimensionality to his landscape, captured in the use of perspective: placing a viewer essentially on the same plane as the two strolling figures enables the coastline to stretch out before them and us, allowing a viewer to almost become involved in the painting. This additionally furthers the sense of nature's endlessness, as it disappears both ...

  In the dimness of candlelight, Joseph Wright of Derby depicts three figures gazing intently at the Classical nude sculpture in the centre of the work. The viewer joins in this exploration, taking their own seat at the table right in front of the the leaning, contrapposto figure, which seems to be an imitation of the Borghese Gladiator. From light to dark, from flesh to marble, Derby's painting is typical of his tenebristic style, yet here he takes on a new subject that expands beyond his oeuvre of portraits, or even beyond his most well known work An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. Certainly, the work in question bears similarities to the  Air Pump , particularly in the sudden explosion of light cast across the sculpture. Not only does this illuminate the musculature of the lean, stretching gladiator, but it also allows to viewer to catch a glimpse of the faces which surround the table, all of whom are individualised - in fact, the work is even said to include a portra...

  The Laughing Cavalier is a man on the cusp of unseriousness. His eyes follow a viewer around the room, his curled moustache twitches endearingly as if he struggles to maintain composure, whilst his lip is pursed to stop laughter escaping. The pose, meanwhile, is proud and monumental, filling the canvas with a foreshortened elbow and shoulder pushing into a viewer's world, serving to emphasise the silks and expensive dress against the monochromatic background.  Frans Hals was first and foremost a portrait painter. His oeuvre includes wedding portraits of solo male and female sitters, multifigure works including The Banquet of Officers from 1627, yet his depictions often turned to peasants or comical characters, notably his Jester with a Lute now in the Louvre, proving that portrait painters also had range. The Laughing Cavalier remains an equally intriguing work: despite being Hals' most famous piece, the sitter remains anonymous. Yet, the smile is so familiar to a viewer, an...

  Strikingly simple and strongly meditative, Zurbarán's multiple depictions of St Francis, including this example from the National Gallery's collection in London, are uniquely his. Drawing on the lineage of artists who recreated the saint, from Giotto to El Greco and more, Zurbarán's Tenebristic ode to the techniques of Caravaggio gifts us St Francis in an altogether different light.  St Francis' makeshift habit is pieced together from two scraps of cloth, alluding to the extreme life of poverty he chose to lead. Zurbarán may even be drawing more closely from the life of the saint here, a set of stories which are defined by dress and clothing - for example, on the path to sainthood, Francis famously gives his cloak to a poor man, and later, his renunciation of worldly goods is often represented by the stripping of his clothes, both of which are expertly rendered by Giotto in the basilica at Assisi. In true Caravaggisti fashion, Zurbarán includes a rip in the foreshorte...

  A collection of monolithic, monochromatic and freestanding dresses construct Anselm Kiefer's Women of Antiquity series, begun at the turn of the twenty-first century and revitalised by the artist in 2018. Exhibited most notably in his so-called 'studio' La Ribaute, these luxuriously tactile gowns have subsequently travelled across both exhibition venues and the art market. Mytris , who is weighed down by the book which constructs the head of the figure, is one such example. Kiefer, today, is one of the most talked about artists. A slow rise to fame has now blossomed into exhibitions that have drawn on literary references (Finnegan's Wake at the White Cube in 2023), expositions detailing his earlier working life (at the Ashmolean in early 2025), or his connections to canonical artists (Van Gogh/Kiefer at the RA which recently concluded). His colossal canvases suck a viewer in, his colours are captivating, as the artist draws on themes of violence, spiritualism, desolat...