Tom Stammers’s The Purchase of the Past won the 2021 Gladstone Prize.
The first academic book I read on Goya was by Fred Licht, for whom Goya distilled the ‘modern temper’ in art. It was thrilling stuff. Goya, it seemed, was a rebel and a nihilist, who profaned the nude, renounced the Enlightenment, mocked the royal family, championed the masses and anticipated war photography. His work contained in embryo much of modern art to come. I...
Rosa Bonheur set about trampling ideas of feminine decorum in the pursuit of professional excellence. Determined to understand animal anatomy closeup, she waded into the Abattoirs du Roule and conducted her own dissections; eager to explore the Pyrenees, she applied for formal permission to travel in male attire and was granted an exemption from the arcane law against cross-dressing.
On 19 June 1790 the Prussian nobleman Jean-Baptiste du Val-de-Grâce, baron de Cloots, appeared at the bar of the French National Assembly. Five years earlier, he had left Paris in disgust at monarchical despotism, vowing not to return until the Bastille – its most notorious symbol – had fallen. Now he led a delegation of foreigners pleading the right to participate in the...
In the first episode of a new four-part series looking at the way history was transformed in the Romantic period, Rosemary Hill is joined by Tom Stammers to consider how an argument over the ‘improvement’...
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