The Easel

28th July 2026

Heart of darkness

Alexander Adams | The Critic | 24th April 2026

After winning a Salon prize in 1849 Courbet set about disrupting the art establishment. That meant painting the realities of everyday life, being respectful of the labouring classes and painting erotica. It gave him a reputation as “a bucolic thug from the [provinces] trampling all over the classical tradition”. We still care about him because, across his wide-ranging work, he blazed the path away from Romanticism toward what, just a few decades later, became modern art.

Marcel Duchamp, Reactionary? A MoMA Retrospective Exposes The Radical Artist’s Bourgeois Yearnings

Jonathon Keats | Forbes | 11th May 2026

Amidst the hoopla around the Duchamp retrospective in New York, a fiercely contrarian view. Duchamp’s “singular” contribution to art history was the “readymade” – quotidian items that he declared to be art. While they challenged the establishment’s narrow definition of could be considered art, readymades didn’t really change anything. Duchamp merely created a new set of things for museums to collect, things that he himself was only too happy to supply.

Flora Indica unearths botanical drawings. They were lost to colonialism for two centuries

Almin Khatoon | The Print | 9th March 2026

As the East India Company expanded in 19th century India, it funded local artists to document unknown plants. Huge quantities of this botanical art went back to Britain in the search for plants with commercial potential. This art was often intricate and displayed a “compositional sensibility rooted in [Indian] traditions”. In a long “bureaucratic afterlife” back in Britain the work fell into obscurity. Botanical classification became a “system of forgetting“. A review of a related book is here.

Where the Light Falls

Clare Bucknell | Harper's Magazine | 17th June 2026

Vermeer is known to us “only through crumbs and scraps”. A biography sets out the known facts. There wasn’t much money in his family, he moved in with the in-laws after getting married and he had a loyal and supportive local patron. What can we learn from his works? Do his famous interiors contain clues about a religious affiliation? Was he merely showing private relationships, sometimes with a whiff of eroticism? Ever elusive, “Vermeer’s work is ambiguous, self-sufficient, intractable, ineffable.”

Their art was whimsical, elegant, ‘scandalous,’ and colorful. It was also revolutionary.

Cathryn J Prince | Forward | 27th July 2026

The Wiener Werkstätte opened in 1903 with grand ambitions and produced sleek modernist objects (jewellery, tableware, fashions, ceramics) using expensive materials. It was highly influential – think the Bauhaus and minimalism. Art history gives most credit for this to the male founders but in fact female designers and artisans were major contributors. They helped “shape modernity” and women’s roles and capabilities in that emerging world. Says one critic, “gender is a very vital subject.“. Images are here.

21st July 2026

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Many A Moonlit Caveat

Killian Wright-Jackson | The Brooklyn Rail | 15th June 2026

A dreamy review of Yiadom-Boakye’s latest show. These works seem familiar – figures captured in mid-action, alone or in groups. They are not studies of actual people but imagined figures, placed in plain, neutral interiors. What accounts for their enigmatic pull? People are doing things but it is hard to know exactly what. Of one figure “He is dressed for himself. He is not performing for you. … His dignity persists, seriously and without your permission.”

Van Dyck, the European

JS Marcus | The Art Newspaper | 22nd June 2026

Van Dyck knew success from early on. Taught by Rubens he worked in Antwerp, Genoa and London, where the prosperous wanted portraits that declared, in a handsome way, their public persona. Van Dyck was alert to this but alongside their “serene opulence” he wanted also to show the private personality.  Stiff, straightforward portraiture in Stuart England and in Europe was changed forever. Says one writer, without van Dyck “there would have been no Reynolds, no Gainsborough and no Sargent”.

This Novel Traces Painter Richard Dadd’s Descent into Madness and Murder

Jemima Skala | AnOther | 13th July 2026

Dadd was a promising artist and “the toast of the town” after the Royal Academy in 1841. Soon after, a tour of the Mediterranean transformed his work but triggered psychosis and, on returning to London, he murdered his father. Confined to psychiatric hospitals from then on,  he produced according to one writer great art that has an “ethereal, profoundly sad beauty”. Dadd’s story is a tragedy that befell a talented person. His story also queries how day to day life and an artistic vision are linked, or not. Images are here.

Buckingham Palace’s Royal Picture Gallery Revives the Salon-Style Hang, Doubling the Number of Masterpieces on View

Christian Thorsberg | Smithsonian Magazine | 16th July 2026

King Charles’ art collection (the one held in trust for the nation) is stonking – Leonardo’s drawings, Vermeer, multiple Rembrandts. A re-hang happens only once every few decades, so the current one is a big deal. It’s not in the style of a white walled gallery but rather “salon” style with the collection’s “best bits” displayed in rows up the walls. Charles likes it this way, apparently. One critic, though, asks why the public are changed an entry fee, unlike “the [free] masterpieces down the road at the National Gallery”.

Who, Exactly, Were All Those Girls in Renoir’s Paintings?

Catherine Ostler | Literary Hub | 17th July 2026

The book from which this article is drawn tells the life story of two Jewish sisters featured in a famous Renoir painting. Commissioned by a patron, the painting shows the “elegance, comfort and prosperity” of wealthy Parisians. Tragic events in WW2 now make the work seem a “lie”. Critics of Renoir say he only ever painted feel-good images. Defenders will protest that Renoir cannot possibly  be blamed for later events. And flattering paintings – is that such a sin?

‘Get wild’: 10 things to know about Tom Wesselmann

Staff | Christie’s | 11th July 2026

A backgrounder. After trying his hand at cartooning, Wesselmann got interested in art, moved to New York and became an important Pop artist.  Steering away from abstract expressionism, his breakthrough came with Pop-styled nudes, both figures and body parts such as “seductive, ominous mouths”. He also had a long interest in collage, making still lifes with advertising material. The writer hastens to add that during the 1960’s sexual revolution “Wesselmann is able to toe the line very gracefully”.

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