Nicholas Penny is a former director of the National Gallery. He is cataloguing the earlier Italian paintings at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, with Imogen Tedbury.
Each and every place in the life of Kenneth Clark has been investigated by James Stourton, from the country house in Suffolk where, as a boy, Clark judged the dresses of female dinner guests, to the château in Normandy belonging to his second wife, Nolwen, where, in his later years, he tried to find ways to communicate with the lovers who had once hoped he would marry them. Stourton...
In 1811, at the age of 26, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau inherited the estate of Muskau (nearly 200 square miles in size, annexed to Saxony in 1806 but allotted to Prussia by the Congress of Vienna and partly absorbed by Poland in the 20th century), together with the smaller estate of Branitz. He was determined not only to carry out improvements but to create a landscape park on...
Titian: His Life is – not surprisingly, considering its great length – really about Titian’s ‘life and times’, and often seems to be more about the latter than the former. Even when we meet with a fact about the artist (and there are a good many new ones here) – it may be about the family timber business, about the artist’s investments in land, about...
The earliest published image of the Greek Revival building by William Wilkins which stretches across the north side of Trafalgar Square is an engraving that shows it under construction in 1836, with the dignity of its architecture masked (as it so often is today) by hoardings covered with noisy advertising. In front of them some violent encounters of the sort familiar to Mr Jingle and Oliver...
Nicholas Penny looks through the letters of Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, who visited England in the late 1820s.
Nicholas Penny, former director of the National Gallery, explains how Kenneth Clark transformed the National Gallery as director from 1934 to 1945, with a look at the Myra Hess concerts and Clark's wide-ranging...
There are two forces at work in sculpture. One pushes it towards the waxwork, where materials suggest something quite contrary to their native qualities – marble flesh, wooden flowers,...
When I used to give a survey course for first-year students, I dreaded December. That was when I reached the High Renaissance and my audience fell away. It was not only the alternative seasonable...
Richard Payne Knight was an important English intellectual of the era of the French Revolution. He flourished from the 1770s until his death, perhaps by suicide, in 1824. Most of that time he...
Here, at last, is a book of which we can sincerely say in the old phrase that it meets a long-felt want. It offers, in the modest words of the Preface, ‘a series of illustrations (which are...
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