A Door to Another World
I have loved Jan Van Eyck’s riddling Arnolfini Wedding Portrait — beautiful and disturbing in equal measure — since I first laid eyes on it…
Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth
“More like a mermaid than a queen”: The last time I saw John Singer Sargent’s great painting of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth…
Serendipity: Adventures in Writing
“I don’t know.” Three simple words. One potent and seductive phrase that led to a remote loch in the Scottish Highlands as I researched Haunt Me Still…
Hilliard’s Burning Man
“The flames seemed to flicker and hiss”: who is burning in Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature, and why?
Zabdiel Boylston, in my dreams
No portrait of Zabdiel Boylston survives, but this is how I like to imagine him…
The Turkish Bath by Ingres
Ingres’s painting of luxuriant nudity began as an awareness of absence. As a young man, the painter read Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s dream of unscarred skin…
