The Easel

21st July 2026

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”.

14th July 2026

Ana Mendieta review – were she still alive she’d be at the forefront of art in this century

Jonathan Jones | The Guardian | 13th July 2026

Mendieta placed her art “in the tradition of a Neolithic art”. If she meant that art was part of the process of life, that would make sense. Her earth-body works, executed outdoors, were ephemeral and did indeed return to the natural world. Beyond her obvious focus on womanhood and environmental concerns, however, her work is hard to decipher. What Mendieta undoubtedly did have was an instinct for emotional, unforgettable images. “This artist is irresistible”.

Clearly Fake: Zurbarán’s Uncanny Realism

Jackson Arn | The Paris Review | 8th July 2026

A recent review of Zurbarán’s London show was straight up and down. Not this one. “By the late 1620s, Zurbarán had become the leading religious painter of Seville. [Yet he] makes paintings that are at once exquisitely lifelike and completely implausible. [It is hard to name a first-rate Zurbarán without this faint wrongness. People are less rational than they’d like to pretend, which is why all truly haunting images … share a slight, nagging offness.”

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