“... painter, inhabiting a peaceful milieu.)Lloyd has taken his subtitle from another colleague. Lawrence Gowing, wryly defending the slow rate of production for which Andrews was notorious, wrote that ‘he paints hardly anything but masterpieces.’ I’d question whether this assertion of art-historical authority supplies Lloyd with a sensible basis ...”

“... the second and larger of his two versions of this subject; the other is reproduced in Lawrence Gowing’s Freud monograph – and Factory in North London (1972), which are also window views and have the same apparently arbitrary framing. It is typical of Freud, who abhors rhymes and easy patterns in composition, that he permits neither the ...”

“... It is the tradition of Ruskin, of Proust himself, of Benjamin on aura, of Adrian Stokes, of Lawrence Gowing on Vermeer. Its patient exploration of the phenomenology of perception, rather than the brilliant and erudite iconographic work of Panofsky and his disciples, can best help us to understand that it is what Chaucer and Langland have in common ...”

“... here and there, that George Lyttelton’s name is spelt indifferently right or wrong, or that Lawrence Gowing becomes ‘Gowring’. But a student sent by the bibliography in quest of ‘Whittkower’ might not end up at Wittkower’s door; Marjorie Hope Nicolson is three times hidden as ‘Nicholson’; the enquirer after Bolingbroke will be ...”

“... too). During this period Hamilton spent many hours on the train from London to Newcastle, where Lawrence Gowing had hired him to teach; this helped to pay the bills that his art couldn’t yet cover. (At this point Hamilton had two young children with his first wife, Terry, who died in a car accident in 1962.) For Hamilton, 1956 was a watershed ...”

“... Ayer called him ‘the only natural logical positivist he had ever met’ (this is how I heard Lawrence Gowing quote the remark; Laughton leaves out the ‘natural’, rather spoiling the gag), he was claiming him for an ethos in which nothing is ever allowed to become too mysterious – in effect, for a birthright to the breezy world of ...”

“... wife’ – are levered by near scepticism: ‘that figure, whoever she may be’. Lawrence Gowing expanded on this in his 1950 monograph on Vermeer. He characterised Vermeer’s stepping back from looking – his refusal to integrate the eye’s experience with the hand’s so as to picture the world in terms of body outlines – as a ...”

“... off on critical admirers who grew up reading him in the 1940s and 1950s – David Sylvester, Lawrence Gowing and above all Richard Wollheim. In later life his own understated work as a painter from observation (‘the poor man’s Bonnard’ – he got the crack in first) gathered in conviction, and the showing after his death in 1972 of his ...”

“... likeness’ is irrelevant to a ‘good picture’. His idea about portraiture, he once told Lawrence Gowing, ‘came from dissatisfaction with portraits that resembled people. I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them … As far as I am concerned, the paint is the person.’ He says to Gayford of his portrait: ‘You are here to ...”

“... lesser artists submit.’ Painting set free. That phrase, the subtitle of this exhibition, was Lawrence Gowing’s, who about fifty years ago came up with the claim that Turner was the first modern artist, perhaps the first abstract expressionist. His view of Turner was based on the recovery of works left rolled up in his studio when he died, kept in ...”