Everything else at the National Gallery was, if I am honest, a warm-up. I had come for one painter. Van Gogh has pulled at me for years, and with a trip to …
England
I have stayed at Sea Containers in London more than once, and I have eaten breakfast there more times than that. It has never disappointed. Of everything I have written about this …
- London
The Lewis Chessmen: A Grumpy Medieval Court at the British Museum
by Bubblyby Bubbly 8 min readI have stood in front of the Lewis Chessmen more than once, and not one of them has ever looked pleased to see me. They are small, carved from walrus ivory, more …
- London
The Post-Impressionists at the National Gallery: A Word Invented in London
by Bubblyby Bubbly 8 min readThe word post-Impressionism was invented in London, by an Englishman, about a group of French painters who never once used it themselves. In November 1910 the critic Roger Fry took an open …
I have a habit when I travel. Whatever European city I am in, I look for the Roman layer underneath it. Sometimes it is obvious. More often it is a fragment of …
I have been a Gordon Ramsay fan for years, and I know the reputation: loud, sweary, hard on people. That is only half of him, and it is not the half I …
I have stood at the edge of Monet‘s pond in Giverny, watched the water lilies wrap around me in the Orangerie in Paris, and then, not expecting it at all, found the …
London does Christmas at street level. The lights are strung the length of whole shopping streets, hung under Victorian market roofs and packed along the river, rather than gathered around a single …
Darkest Hour came out in 2017, with Gary Oldman under layers of prosthetic makeup as Winston Churchill in the last weeks of May 1940. Joe Wright directed, and Oldman won the Academy …
- London
Manet, Not Monet: A Cut Canvas Reunited at the National Gallery
by Bubblyby Bubbly 6 min readA small public service before we start: this is Manet, with an ‘a’, Édouard Manet, and not Claude Monet, with an ‘o’. The two are forever muddled, and I will come back …
Regent’s Park in London covers 410 acres of what was once a royal hunting ground. Henry VIII took the land at the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s and kept it …
The National Gallery in London turned two hundred in 2025, and to mark it the whole collection was rehung and a few new works came in. One of them is this pastel …