Lesley Downer, author of The Shortest History of Japan, visits the Samurai exhibition at the British Museum and discovers that it’s “an exhibition of treasures” which show that the samurai were patrons of the arts as well as warriors. Prepare to be dazzled! A magnificent and ferocious-looking samurai in full armour stands guard at the […]
Beatrice Cenci: innocent victim, cunning killer – or both?
Beatrice Cenci is elusive. Even ‘her’ portrait isn’t a painting of her. Executed for murdering her abusive father, was she an innocent victim or a cunning killer? Both, says Elizabeth Fremantle, whose novel, Sinners, is a powerful reinterpretation of her story. But above all, she says, Beatrice was human. Elizabeth won the 2024 HWA Gold […]
The Bruegel Boy by Emma Darwin
In the summer of 1566 an inferno of political rebellion and image-smashing, the Beeldenstorm, swept across Flanders and Holland; young Gillis Vervloet, model and muse to artist Pieter Bruegel, almost didn’t survive. More than 60 years later, in the Saarland forest, Gil wants only to enter the monastery of St Bartolomëus and live out his days […]
The Paris Muse by Louisa Treger
“Living with him was like living at the centre of the universe. It was electrifying and humbling, blissful and destructive, all at the same time.” Paris in 1936, and when Dora Maar, a talented French photographer, painter and poet, is introduced to Pablo Picasso, she is instantly mesmerized. Drawn to his volcanic creativity, it isn’t […]
Holbein: The Ambassadors by Tracy Borman
Holbein’s The Ambassadors is one of the most famous paintings in the National Gallery. It is also one of the most intriguing. Laden with hidden symbols and mysteries, the work has been the subject of intense debate among historians during the five centuries since it was created. Tracy Borman’s book unpicks the secrets of this enigmatic artwork, […]
Madame Matisse by Sophie Haydock
This is the story of three women — one an orphan and refugee who finds a place in the studio of a famous French artist, the other a wife and mother who has stood by her husband for nearly forty years. The third is his daughter, caught in the crossfire between her mother and a […]
The hidden stories of the First World War
When Lucy Steeds was researching her debut novel, The Artist, she realised that writing about art in the 1920s was impossible without an understanding of how the First World War had left its mark — physical or mental — on everyone who lived through it. One powerful source was nurses’ testimonies. Here she writes about […]
Dora Maar: much more than a muse
Even now, Dora Maar is probably remembered for being Picasso’s lover and the subject of many of his paintings rather than as the innovative artist she was. Louisa Treger, whose latest novel retells her story, explains why Dora was much more than a muse. For years, the epithet ‘Picasso’s Weeping Woman’ has followed every mention […]