The Easel

27th May 2025

The British Museum’s Hiroshige exhibition will restore your faith in art

Mark Hudson | The Independent | 28th April 2025

The Japanese artist Hokusai had a major influence on 19th century European art but so too did Hiroshige. His landscapes depicted real vistas and were filled with a riot of colours – “seas like sapphire, skies on fire, acid reds and oranges”. Their expressiveness, done in the fiendishly difficult medium of woodblock printing, won van Gogh as a fan. Hiroshige can fairly be considered a “great precursor to the Impressionists”.

National Gallery Rehang: First Pleasure, Then Politics

Bendor Grosvenor | Art Review | 9th May 2025

Who cares about the re-hang of London’s National Gallery? Many people were, worried about that its Eurocentric, masterpiece-laden collection might be hijacked to tell some new curatorial story. They needn’t have worried. Works largely follow a chronological sequence and downplay today’s cultural battles. Works mostly tell the stories of their times and their presentation strikes a balance between “education and entertainment”, even though the male gaze remains strong.

15th April 2025

Grayson Perry’s Delusions of Grandeur asks not if it’s great or even good art, but if it makes you laugh – and it does

Mark Hudson | The Independant | 26th March 2025

Perry, a potter and famously a transvestite, seems a very British artist., His art is both cerebral and full of anti-establishment humour. A new show of pots, prints and tapestries, spread amidst the ornate rococo splendour of London’s Wallace Collection, is a case in point. Replete with fictitious identities, it includes items such as a tapestry in “hallucinogenic” colour that “makes you chuckle with respect at [its] mad hubris”. The only thing that doesn’t work, says a writer, is Perry’s claimed status as an underdog.

Singh in exultation

Skye Arundhati Thomas | The World of Interiors | 11th April 2025

What is going on in Singh’s paintings? A “pioneering” post-Independence artist, her works combine Indian elements like folk narratives and court painting with Surrealist influences. Teeming with ideas her works present detailed narrative tableaux that are “incohesive yet beautiful”. Even western eyes can detect themes of domestic life and India’s history of communal violence. Having struggled to interpret Singh’s work, one writer seems to give up and simply admires the “lush colours”.

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