Van Dyck
A sumptuous feast of an exhibition: Charles I at the Royal Academy reviewed
Peter Paul Rubens thought highly of Charles I’s art collection. ‘When it comes to fine pictures by the hands of…
Velázquez’s vanishing act
This is an extraordinary story. In 1845 John Snare, an unremarkable Reading bookseller, goes to an auction in a defunct…
Galleries are getting bigger - but is there enough good art to put in them?
Martin Gayford recommends the exhibitions to see — and to avoid — over the coming year
Artistic taste is inversely proportional to political nous
‘Wherever the British settle, wherever they colonize,’ observed the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, ‘they carry and will ever carry trial…
Rubens and His Legacy at the Royal Academy reviewed: his imitators fall short of their master miserably
The main spring offering at the Royal Academy, Rubens and His Legacy: Van Dyck to Cézanne, teaches two useful lessons.…
How will the British public take to Rubens’s fatties?
Are Rubens’s figures too fat for the British to appreciate them? Martin Gayford investigates
Pizza, choc-ice and Leonardos – the treasures of Turin
Laura Gascoigne enjoys a grand tour of Italy’s former capital city
The selfie from Akhenaten to Tracey Emin
If ever there was a time to write a book about self-portraits, this must be it. ‘Past interest in the…
Save our Van Dyck!
The Flemish artist’s final self-portrait was vital to British art. We’d be philistines to let it leave the country