Naomi Grant

In​ ‘The Best Picture’, an essay written in 1925, Aldous Huxley calls Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection ‘the greatest picture in the world’:

Great it is, absolutely great … because its author possessed almost more than any other painter those qualities of character which I most admire and because his purely aesthetic preoccupations are of a kind which I...

In the early​ 1860s, Edgar Degas made a copy of Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Louisa Georgina Augusta Anne Murray. The original, now in Kenwood House, is thought to have been completed between 1824 and 1826 and shows the four-year-old goddaughter of the Duke of Wellington prancing before her audience like a 19th-century Shirley Temple. There are ribbons and rosy cheeks and ringlets and...

Iam​ looking at a painting by the American artist Lennart Anderson, a still life from the 1960s. It’s a simple work: five objects arranged on a table top. A loaf of bread, a terracotta jug, a red pear, a funnel and a shape I can’t identify. The painting is a rare achievement of balance and spacing. No two objects are placed in the same relation; every interval is considered. The...