I have long been a fan of the Rococo - that peculiar stylistic trend that amplified the excesses of the Baroque with a frilly twist of its own in the mid to late 18th century. As a teenager on a trip to Paris with my family, I remember being totally transfixed by the painting of the pierrot, sometimes called Gilles, by Watteau in the Louvre. My gauche 15 year old self seemed to find some empathy in the forlorn looking clown caught between regret and apprehension. My pleasure

One of the most well known and beloved small paintings must be The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius. An enigmatic image painted by an...

I am just back from Paris where I saw the Hockney retrospective at the Frank Gehry designed Fondation Louis Vuitton, on the edge of the...

The magnificent Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery in London which closed at the weekend has been visited by almost 300,000...

This week I went to the cinema to watch Nosferatu, director Robert Eggers’ updated version of the classic vampire tale. The first...

I am unashamedly besotted with The Gilded Age, the sumptuous HBO costume drama set in New York in the last two decades of the 19th...

We’re told to never judge a book by its cover but in the 1890s, you certainly could. And if that cover was yellow, you were in for a...

“Do you really believe... that everything historians tell us about men - or about women - is actually true? You ought to consider the...

Last month I attended a talk at the Arc in Winchester to accompany their small but perfectly formed exhibition that focuses on the dark...

The Motive and the Cue at the National Theatre is a play about putting on a play. That play is the 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet. It...

Last month, I visited the Barbican to see the large and impressive retrospective of the work of Alice Neel. It is the first exhibition...

We are all, I think, captivated by the myth of Icarus - the compulsion to defy the elements, to pit our wits against the forces of...

On a visit to London last week, I was keen to tick off a number of exhibitions that had been stacking up on my list. The one that made an...

"He had a dark complexion and dark eyes and his eyebrows and hair were black: this colouring was naturally reflected in his paintings"...

Santa Margherita dei Cerchi, or Dante’s Church Approached off the via Dante, on the other side of the street to Casa Dante - itself a...

Walking north from the Duomo’s entrance you can soon see, dominating the street like a stately cruise liner in port, the imposing,...

Just over the Ponte Vecchio, on the Oltrarno side of the city, is the church of Santa Felicita, believed to be the second oldest church...

If you are travelling to Tuscany over the summer and thinking of visiting Florence for a day or two, there are plenty of knockout works...

I have just returned from a trip to Florence - my favourite city - where I managed to visit the Iris Gardens. These gardens open, free of...

What to do or say at times like these? Keeping our hearts open and embracing moments of joy, however small, feels important. My daughter...