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“... 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 employment that left the slopes of the theatre to echo vacantly my conventional claims for the ideal. Although I did not disbelieve the convention, it was hard to feel sure that the perfections of Leonardo and Michelangelo – the ideally empirical theory of knowledge and the ideal of human physique in the likeness of God – did not outclass the merely intelligent perfection of pictorial form, which was the apparent distinction of Raphael ...”

“... example of his father, Sir Joseph Joel Duveen, who commissioned W.H. Romaine-Walker to create the Turner Wing (the first Turner Wing, opened in 1910), Joseph Duveen had already paid for the new modern foreign galleries and the Sargent Gallery, which were inaugurated in 1927 (also partly the work of Romaine-Walker). Spalding ...”

“... memoirs. At Chatsworth as a young man he had a brief ‘romantic friendship’ with the Grand Duke Nicholas, later Emperor of All the Russias, with whom he larked about, sang songs and engaged in what Lees-Milne calls ‘delicious uninhibited intimacies’. The Duke was over-impressionable and liked to think he had enjoyed a romantic friendship with Princess ...”

“... he hurled his copy down the corridor in disgust. Wilson’s book also charts the meteoric rise of Nicholas Serota, who had first worked at the Whitechapel in 1971 when, as an exhibitions officer at the Arts Council, he helped install a retrospective of Kenneth and Mary Martin. In 1976, after a stint as director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford (where he ...”

“... and are especially active, like the Surrealists, on the beaches. Tony Cragg, recently awarded the Turner Prize, made his name with relief murals composed of ‘beach-worn ship-refuse, plastic bottles, lids, frisbees, old toys, plastic milk crates’. For Waldemar Januszczak these were didactic – ‘one of the things they were about was the indisposability ...”

“... They have been exhibited round the world to great acclaim. They have recently been awarded the Turner Prize. They will also no doubt be included in the Saatchi collection. It cannot be said that there is much public controversy about them. Things were different a decade ago, as recalled in an introductory essay to the Royal Academy catalogue by Caroline ...”

“... to free himself from tradition, which was topographical’, whereas an artist like Tom Girtin or Turner had ‘got free, and was turning his wings in the open, which was landscape’. For all this, the reviewer continued, Sandby ‘contributed much to the reputation of English landscape, and paved the way for more illustrious successors’. For Martin ...”

“... Circus’ (c.2008). It has been said, in relation to his swirling child’s-eye visions of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s intimidating Christ Church in Spitalfields, that Kossoff assimilates hostility, confronting the alien stack of this Anglican invader in order to make stone spring upwards into the light. Kossoff speaks of the burden of accumulated ...”

“... back from a journey to the East, where he was looking for authentic detail for Biblical subjects. Turner, ever the competitor, had at one point been spurred by the younger man’s success into trying to outdo him in the domestic/rustic genre: now he did a painting of Wilkie’s burial at sea.Bright detail and a sweet touch draw you towards the small to ...”

“... in England. At this point in the story, the Hechters’ life undergoes a radical change. Rex Smail-Turner, one of High Hampton’s bachelor masters, accompanies young Jules home one Christmas, and quickly sets about ingratiating himself with the family. His success is complete. Henriette falls in love with him, and since he is already her husband’s ...”

“... technology have quite eclipsed older faiths. On the island of Kea in the Aegean, the chapel of St Nicholas stands on a rocky promontory, a bright, whitened landmark by day and, by night, a working lighthouse.The myth of the Pharos still resonated powerfully enough in 1941 for it to be plausibly rumoured that the British illusionist Jasper Maskelyne and his ...”

“... not only in the Wasteground but also in Freud’s painting of studio rags. It has its own life. Turner was a great painter of litter: the people in some of his foregrounds are a sort of litter, and so are the odd still-lifes he disposed there (it is a feature that Ruskin attributed to a child hood spent near Covent Garden). Freud has discerned this in his ...”

“... experience of hanging paintings will know how the depth in a landscape – the spatial effects of Turner or Koninck – is completely altered once the horizon line is above eye level. The difference to a painting when its frame is changed or even when it is given new partners on the wall is no less extraordinary. It is inconceivable that an intelligent ...”

“... move from one field to another. In her accounts of the antiquaries Arcisse de Caumont and Dawson Turner, Hill suggests that their earlier interests in the study of geology and botany, respectively, may have helped them to analyse and illustrate the medieval antiquities of Normandy. She also observes that the strong organisational intelligence and meticulous ...”

“... 1880s, and his Cicely Alexander of the previous decade. It was a conjunction as unhappy as that of Turner and Claude in the National Gallery. Sargent’s force seems harsh and vulgar beside such delicacy, yet it succeeds in making the delicacy look timid and precious. We learn something from the dual fatality. Sargent’s artistic outlook was conditioned by ...”