Julian Bell

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...

Gaius​ Suetonius Tranquillus was a scholar and man of letters on the imperial payroll in early second-century Rome. Around 120 ce he completed his Lives of the Caesars, a set of biographies informed by his access to official libraries and his longstanding insider status at court. Suetonius began with the career of Julius Caesar, whose rise to political supremacy 170 years earlier had marked...