John-Paul Stonard

AView of the Sky from a Prison Window, painted in 1823 by the German artist Carl Gustav Carus, now hangs in the National Gallery. It is one of a handful of recent acquisitions, which include an intricately painted Banquet Still Life by the 17th-century Dutch painter Floris van Dijck, and the spectacularly eccentric (and currently anonymous) 16th-century Virgin and Child with Saints Louis and...

Asmall,​ pale limulus horseshoe crab, one of those prehistoric-looking creatures with long tails, scuttles across the sandy bed of a large aquarium. From behind a boulder improbably suspended in the water appears a long-legged arrow crab, with its distinctive Eiffel Tower-shaped head and spindly scarlet legs. The arrow crab picks up something white with a pincer and begins to munch on it, as...

Tronies​ were character studies, popular among 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painters: useful images, painted from life and often recycled in larger works. They weren’t portrait commissions, and as tools for artists they were less bound by convention and the need for flattery. The tronie face might be laughing, crying, whistling, shouting, grinning, gurning. But they were sometimes...

In​ ‘Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter’, the unfinished typescript for which was discovered among his papers after his death in 2007, R.B. Kitaj describes the origins of his bookish approach to painting. As a student at the Ruskin School of Drawing in the late 1950s, he attended lectures by the German art historian Edgar Wind, so popular that they were held at the Oxford...

The Abolitionists in the Park​ (2020-21), a large oil painting by the American artist Nicole Eisenman, shows a group of figures sitting in City Hall Park in New York. They are part of the 2020 protest to defund the New York Police Department in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Eisenman herself appears twice in the scene – as a sleeping form on the left of the picture and on the...