Degas
The making of Van Gogh as an artist came at a terrible cost
In the manic years 1886-88 when he lived with his brother in Paris, Vincent worked at fever-pitch, exhausting himself and Theo and driving them both towards insanity
How Miss La La captured Degas’s imagination
‘Can you come Saturday morning to my studio, 19 bis rue Fontaine?’ Degas wrote to Edmond de Goncourt in 1879.…
Breathtaking: Mary Cassatt at Work, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, reviewed
Work – in the sense of toil – is about the last thing a 19th-century painter wished to be associated…
Impressionism is 150 years old – this is the anniversary show to see
The time that elapsed between the fall of the Paris Commune and the opening of the first proper impressionist exhibition…
Surreal visions: the best of this year’s art books reviewed
Subjects include Anna Atkins’s cyanotypes, Leonora Carrington’s paintings, Albrecht Dürer’s dreams and the photographs of Lee Miller
The art of window-peeping
Themed exhibitions pegged to particular pictures in museum collections tend to be more interesting to the museum’s curators than to…
A licence for licentiousness
In the winter of 1861, visitors to the Louvre might have seen a young artist painstakingly copying one of the…
London calling
Madame Monet was bored. Wouldn’t you have been? Exiled to London in the bad, cold winter of 1870–71. In rented…
I spy
Where was Degas standing as he sketched his ‘Laundresses’ (c.1882–4)? Did he watch the two women from behind sheets hanging…
French connection
Walter Sickert was fluid in both his art and his personality: changeable in style and technique, mutable in appearance —…
Life after death
This is not the biggest exhibition at Edinburgh and it will not be the best attended but it may be…
A 50-year infatuation
The subject of the least characteristic essay in this engrossing collection of meditations on painters, painters’ lives, painting and reactions…
Monet maker
When it was suggested that a huge exhibition of Impressionist paintings should be held in London, Claude Monet had his…
A feast for the eyes
Tourists are attracted to queues, art lovers to quietude. So while the mass of Monet fans visiting Paris line up…
Not dynamite, more blancmange
Debunking reputations is now out of fashion, says Philip Hensher, and Craig Raine should give it up — especially as he always misses the point
