It is easy to dismiss Jean-Antoine Watteau as the Barbara Cartland of early 18th-century French painting. That would be a mistake. True, his bucolic idylls of courting couples and little lapdogs have a domestic theatricality that has fallen from ...
Hadspen is a golden Palladian house that sits beneath an escarpment in north Somerset between Wincanton and Castle Cary. It had been in the rich, mercantile Hobhouse family for 200 years when Niall Hobhouse inherited it in 1982. He could have contented ...
Paul Gauguin may have earned his living for many years as a stockbroker, but he was at heart an adventurer. Though he longed to be an artist, Gauguin refused to study painting, preferring to learn from other painters. He drew with Pissarro, who became ...
Natalia Goncharova loved speed. She loved it in 1912 when she painted "Les Rameurs" ("The Oarsmen"), which sold two years ago for over £1m ($2m), nearly seven times its pre-sale estimate. She loved it the following year, when she painted "Cyclist", ...
Few of the international specialists who deal in Asian art could have predicted the outcome of the season's main sale at Christie's in London last November. Of the ten most expensive lots, eight went to Chinese buyers, including an early 15th-century ...
Auctioneers are as good as politicians, if not better, at putting a jolly spin on stories. The week just ended was one of the busiest of the year, and both Sotheby's and Christie's were keen for it to be remembered as one of their best. "The highest ...
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