Category: Famous Art & Artists

A cart pauses in the shallows of a slow river, a cottage sits among the trees, and the wide Suffolk sky drifts with cloud. This is The Hay Wain, painted by John Constable in 1821, and it has become the best loved image of the English countryside ever put on canvas. It belongs to the… Continue reading The Hay Wain: Constable and the English Landscape

A lone figure stands on a rocky summit, his back to us, gazing out over a restless sea of cloud. This is Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, painted by Caspar David Friedrich around 1818, and no single image sums up the spirit of the Romantic movement more completely. It is a picture about awe,… Continue reading Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog: Friedrich’s Icon of Romanticism

Few paintings in the history of Western art return the viewer’s gaze quite like Las Meninas. Painted by Diego Velázquez in 1656, it is the crowning achievement of Spanish Baroque prints and one of the most analysed images ever made. If you are new to the drama and grandeur of the period, our Baroque buyer’s… Continue reading Velázquez’s Las Meninas: The Painting That Watches You Back

No artist did more to shape the look of the Pre-Raphaelite movement than Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Founder, poet and painter, he gave the Brotherhood its most enduring invention: the Pre-Raphaelite face, a particular kind of beauty built from full lips, a strong jaw, cascading hair and a distant, dreaming gaze. To explore the movement he… Continue reading Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Muses: Proserpine, Lady Lilith and the Pre-Raphaelite Face

She turns her head, parts her lips as if about to speak, and gazes out across three and a half centuries with an expression no one has ever quite decoded. Johannes Vermeer‘s Girl with a Pearl Earring is often called the Mona Lisa of the North, and for good reason: like Leonardo’s sitter, she is… Continue reading Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring: The Mona Lisa of the North

No artist embodies the exuberant spirit of the Baroque quite like Peter Paul Rubens, and few of his works are as instantly captivating as The Three Graces. Painted around 1635, it is a hymn to warmth, abundance and beauty, and a perfect gateway into the world of Baroque prints. The Baroque age loved drama, movement… Continue reading Rubens’s Three Graces and the Beauty of the Baroque

Ask most people to name a Pre-Raphaelite painting and, whether they know the movement or not, they will often describe the same picture: a young woman floating in a stream, surrounded by wildflowers, her face turned serenely towards the sky. That is Ophelia by John Everett Millais, perhaps the most famous single image the Brotherhood… Continue reading Ophelia by Millais: The Most Famous Pre-Raphaelite Painting

When Rembrandt van Rijn unveiled The Night Watch in 1642, he did something no group portrait had done before: he made it move. Soldiers stride, muskets load, a drummer beats and light spills across the crowd as though a door has just been flung open. It is the defining picture of the Dutch Golden Age… Continue reading Rembrandt’s The Night Watch and the Dutch Golden Age

If any single painting embodies the drama and awe of the Romantic sea, it is Ivan Aivazovsky’s The Ninth Wave. Completed in 1850, it is the crowning achievement of the greatest marine painter of the nineteenth century and a natural centrepiece for any collection of Romantic prints. The Romantic movement prized exactly what Aivazovsky delivered… Continue reading The Ninth Wave: Aivazovsky and the Romantic Sea

Few images capture the romance and melancholy of Victorian art like John William Waterhouse‘s The Lady of Shalott. Painted in 1888 and drawn straight from Tennyson’s poem, it has become one of the best loved works in the whole Pre-Raphaelite tradition. If you are drawn to this dreamlike world of Arthurian legend and doomed heroines,… Continue reading The Lady of Shalott: Waterhouse and the Tennyson Paintings

Few paintings capture the passing of an era as tenderly as The Fighting Temeraire. Painted by Joseph Mallord William Turner in 1838, it belongs firmly to the great age of Romantic prints, where emotion, atmosphere and the sublime power of nature take precedence over cool classical restraint. If you are new to the movement, our… Continue reading The Fighting Temeraire: Turner’s Farewell to the Age of Sail

Few painters changed the course of European art as abruptly as Caravaggio. Working in Rome around the turn of the seventeenth century, he pushed light and shadow to such extremes that his figures seem to step out of the darkness and into the room. This technique, known as tenebrism, became the defining language of the… Continue reading Caravaggio and Tenebrism: The Drama of Light and Dark