Julian Bell

‘Self-Portrait with Portrait of Émile Bernard (Les Misérables)’ (1888)

Broad shoulders​ retreating down a gangplank: my mind’s eye rests there, after reading two new books about Paul Gauguin. The gait is springy: this passenger pushes away from the others; he strides off. The ground on which he alights is Peruvian, then French, Danish, Panamanian,...

Whatever​ the Laughing Cavalier is so pleased about, I’ve no wish to know. That bumptious bar-room menace from the Wallace Collection has me taking to my heels. I gravitate instead towards a black-hatted roué from the Fitzwilliam, more at ease with his slouch and sad wry smile. Elsewhere in the National Gallery’s Frans Hals exhibition (until 21 January), a debonair...

In London​, I had taken A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal for a dependable rest point on strolls around the National Gallery. In Amsterdam, relocated to join 27 other Vermeers in the Rijksmuseum exhibition, its strangeness re-emerged. This canvas, executed towards the end of Vermeer’s relatively brief career (some four years, perhaps, before he died aged 43 in 1675), commits to a...

‘Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry’ (c.1895-99).

The pigments​ in paintings of Cezanne’s middle age cluster like gangs in a schoolyard. Cobalt, ultramarine and Prussian blue cleave to a bay or bolt of fabric. Emerald and viridian occupy pears, jars and foliage. The biggest grouping, the ochres and terracottas, huddle around roofs or rocks or...

There​ are the known unknowns: the 52 sarsens – ‘Saracen’ stones, accessories to un-Christian religion – clustered on the bare Wiltshire upland. It is now agreed that the boulders of quartzite, weighing on average 25 tons, arrived at the site around 2500 BCE after a twenty-mile journey from the slopes south of Marlborough, and that the 44 bluestones nestled among...