A skull grins out of the shadows. A candle sends up its last thread of smoke. A glass lies on its side with the wine long gone. To a prosperous household in seventeenth-century Holland, a picture like

Before Dulwich, looking at great paintings in England usually required an introduction, a private appointment, or the luck of being born into the right family. Pictures lived in country houses and tow

Christie's King Street is showing The Meeting Ground: Scenes from the KNMA Collection until 21 August, and the unusual thing about it is the price list. There isn't one. The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art,

Stand in front of almost any altarpiece painted between about 1300 and 1600 and the eye travels straight to the Virgin. Part of that is composition. A surprising amount of it is chemistry. Her mantle

Tickets for the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum went on sale on 1 July, and the first tranche, covering September to December, has already sold out. If you were planning to see it before Christm

In December 1933 two small steamers slipped down the Elbe carrying the intellectual cargo of a vanishing Germany. Aboard the Hermia and the Jessica were 531 boxes holding some 60,000 books and 25,000

A collection is only valuable while somebody agrees to value it. That agreement is usually invisible, held in place by auction records and insurance schedules. Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, the H

Few artists have built a career out of things designed to fall apart. Anselm Kiefer, who turned 80 in March 2025, makes paintings from lead, ash, straw and dried flowers, materials chosen precisely be

On the death of Gunther von Hagens, and the four-century-old genre he brought back. Cover: Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632), Mauritshuis. Public domain.

For a few years after the First World War, the most radical painter alive made pictures a Salon jury might have hung without blinking. Pablo Picasso, co-author of Cubism, spent the early 1920s drawing

Stand in front of Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece and you are looking at a picture its first audience could read like a page of text. A lamb stands on an altar, bleeding from a wound in its breast int

Every June, the Royal Academy of Arts does something no other major institution attempts. It throws open its Piccadilly galleries to a show assembled partly by strangers. A retired GP from Devon can h

Frieze London lands in Regent's Park each October like a polished, high-stakes carnival. Since 2003, it has pulled the global art world into a temporary tented city, turning a quiet patch of central L

Art prizes are rarely front-page news, but the Turner Prize has made a habit of it. Since its founding in 1984, the award has been a lightning rod for debate about what British art is - or should be. Na