Degas
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
A showstopper is at the heart of this winning show: Dulwich Gallery's Reframed – The Woman in the Window reviewed
Themed exhibitions pegged to particular pictures in museum collections tend to be more interesting to the museum’s curators than to…
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…
Between the death of Turner and advent of Bacon, there was no greater British painter
Walter Sickert was fluid in both his art and his personality: changeable in style and technique, mutable in appearance —…
The forgotten Swiss portraitist and his extraordinary pastels: Jean-Etienne Liotard at the Scottish National Gallery reviewed
This is not the biggest exhibition at Edinburgh and it will not be the best attended but it may be…
Is Julian Barnes right to think Lucian Freud will survive? Jonathan Meades thinks not
The subject of the least characteristic essay in this engrossing collection of meditations on painters, painters’ lives, painting and reactions…
Inventing Impressionism at the National Gallery reviewed: a mixed bag of sometimes magnificent paintings
When it was suggested that a huge exhibition of Impressionist paintings should be held in London, Claude Monet had his…
If only Craig Raine subjected his own work to the same critical scrutiny he applies to others'
Debunking reputations is now out of fashion, says Philip Hensher, and Craig Raine should give it up — especially as he always misses the point