Art History blog - Richard Morris

‘To make a mural,’ the Mexican artist Diego Rivera once said, ‘is to put the world on a wall.’

At any one time eighty per cent of the art owned by Britain’s many museums and public art galleries will find itself hidden away in storage.

I do not, if I can help it, catch a train to anywhere on a Sunday.

Capel-y-Ffin (1926-1927) by David Jones A few weeks ago I went along to a lecture on the Welsh artist, poet and soldier David Jones.

It is often said that one of the great unfairnesses in life is that bad people sometimes produce beautiful art.

In Britain our public art collections contain over 600,000 works, including paintings, sculptures, and other art forms.

Born to a wealthy family in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia in 1844, Mary Cassatt began her training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1860, when she was 16, one of the few institutions where women were allowed to study.

Thirty years ago, it wasn’t easy tracking down Vilhelm Hammershøi.

Walter Sickert's landscapes and townscapes of Dieppe and its immediate area, could be said to account for the major part of his lifetime’s achievement.

Gilbert Spencer was a British painter, muralist, illustrator, teacher, and writer whose career spanned more than six decades.

Claud Lovat Fraser by Marion Neilson (1913) National Portrait Gallery Claud Lovat Fraser, almost always known as Lovat, is a one of the great unsung heroes of 20thC British design.

In the years before the First World War, the Slade School of Art in London found they had attracted a golden generation of students – it was what the school's professor of fine art, Henry Tonks, called their last 'crisis of brilliance'.

In the summer of 1913, Harry Becker, his wife Georgina and daughter Janet moved from a densely populated area of London with few open spaces to Wenhaston, a small isolated village in the north east of Suffolk where most people worked on the land and few r…

In an age where we have become accustomed to limited attention spans and equating significant art with instant impact, there was a time not that long ago, when there was room for stoicism, consummate draughtsmanship, poetry and quiet contemplation.

The names are not quite equal in fame.

If people know of his name at all, Paul Fordyce Maitland is not usually thought of as an archetypal modern painter of London.