In September 1899, Claude Monet booked into a room at the Savoy Hotel. From there he had a good view of Waterloo Bridge and the south bank beyond. Setting up his easel on a balcony, he began a series of paintings of the river and the buildings on its banks. So entranced was he by the river that, over the next three years, he came back twice to continue working on a series that would mushroom to over 100 canvases.Waterloo Bridge, Overcast 1903 (main picture) shows the bridge packed with pedestrians and horse-drawn, double decker buses picked out in flicks of yellow and red. Making their way Read more ...

In Paris on a business trip in 1916, Wilhelm Hansen was no doubt typical of many husbands in confessing to his wife that he’d been a bit reckless in his personal spending (“You’ll forgive me once you see what I’ve bought”). But he was hardly typical in his purchases: “Landscape paintings by Sisley and Pissarro, a portrait by Renoir, and Claude Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, one of his best-known works!” he excitedly wrote home to his wife. In the space of the next two years Hansen acquired no fewer than 156 Impressionist paintings, and it’s the bulk of this collection that features in The Danish Read more ...

The limitations of life on screen are all too apparent at the moment, and yet still there are instances where online can offer something beyond the reach of an old-fashioned trip to an art gallery. Ultra-high resolution reproductions of works of art are a case in point, and many museum websites now allow us to examine their collections in the microscopic detail once reserved for conservation departments. A new photograph of Rembrandt's The Night Watch, 1642, renders it in a whopping 44.8 gigapixel image, itself a composite of 528 exposures, and allows anyone interested to zoom in on Read more ...

Anyone lucky enough to have a garden will be newly appreciative of the oasis that even the humblest of outdoor spaces can provide. Based on the Royal Academy’s hugely successful 2016 exhibition of the same name, and broadcast on Monday evening by Exhibition on Screen via Facebook, Painting the Modern Garden opened the door to a different world. As the camera lingered on constellations of dahlias, banks of lavender and waterlilies, tended by contented insects to the twitter of birdsong, the film’s opening sequences plunged us into the living artwork that is Monet’s (not humble) garden at Read more ...

Art historians can so easily get carried away looking for a thesis, a scaffolding on which to hang theories which can sometimes obscure as much as reveal. Not so here: as near perfect as might be imagined, this is a beautifully laid out, fresh look at a master painter, that lights up the National Gallery's basement exhibition space. For decades Monet has been the epitome of the blockbuster artist, but we take almost for granted the pleasure of looking at his incandescent paintings. He has become the feel-good painter par excellence. His paintings are gorgeous and sumptuous and long ago Read more ...

Yesterday the record for the most expensive painting ever sold was broken. At Christie's in New York Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi the hammer was knocked down on a price of $450 million. It's a lot of money, period, and even more for a painting which some doubt is by Leonardo at all. One doubter insists that Leonardo the great scientist would have refracted the light through the orb in Christ's hands. That won't bother the buyer, whose identity is unknown.Salvator Mundi soars to the top of the list of the 75 most expensive paintings sold in the last 30 years. The recent Leonardo Read more ...

Jules Dalou, Edouard Lantéri, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Charles-François Daubigny, Alphonse Legros, Giuseppe de Nittis? Perhaps not household-name Impressionists, but the subtitle of Tate Britain's exhibition, French Artists in Exile 1870-1904, makes things clearer: this is really an examination of cross-channel conversations occasioned by the drastic military and political crisis in France in 1870-1871 – the Franco-Prussian war, followed by the Commune.Not only did some 230,000 or more combatants and civilians die, but many a familiar landmark was pulverised as central Paris was profoundly Read more ...

Painting the Modern Garden explores the interstices between nature and ourselves as revealed in the cultivation of gardens, that most delightful and frustrating of occupations, and an almost obsessive subject for many artists. About 150 paintings from the 1860s to the 1920s, gathered together from private and public collections in North America and Europe are on view, amplified by letters, plans, documents, photographs and illustrated books on horticulture.The exhibition embraces not only artists’ responses to gardens from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, but obliquely the new Read more ...

Billed as an exploration of the contribution made by immigrants to British art, Migrations is ridiculously ambitious. Starting with the sixteenth century, it hops and skips through to the present day, inevitably leaving out a lot of people on the way. Hans Holbein who settled here in 1532 and, as the King’s Painter, produced that splendidly iconic portrait of Henry VIII, which establishes the monarch’s authority by making him look as square and solid as a rock, is not included.Instead, the exhibition starts with a delightful portrait of Lady Harington (1592) by Marcus Gheeraerts, court Read more ...

Fake or Fortune? on BBC One, with Fiona Bruce and art dealer and sleuth Philip Mould, ought to have been called CSI: Cork Street for its blend of fine art and forensic science. They were trying to resolve whether a Monet was in fact a Monet, using a 240 million-pixel camera, Monet's own accountbook (which Fiona Bruce ran her ungloved fingers across) and plenty of ominous music. Next up: who killed Marat in David's picture?The mystery of fakes, forgeries and misattributions becomes ever more fascinating as pictures fetch greater prices at auction; Monet's record stands at £41 million. The Read more ...

This time, the hype was perhaps deserved: Christie's did have a claim to be putting on, last night, the sale of the century.The Impressionist and Modern works were of a distinctly high calibre: Picasso's high Blue Period Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto, a moody but perceptive masterpiece; a Nymphéas by Monet verging on the abstract, with subtle fields of colour; and a clutch of 10-million-pounders, including another Picasso, a Van Gogh and a Klimt. So how can a record-breaking sale total of £153m be a disappointment? First, the Monet didn't sell, reaching £29.4m before it was withdrawn Read more ...

It is a curious feeling to go to meet a hated figure and find a delicate, blonde girl with a sweet face.On Monday, 23-year-old ballerina Alina Somova opens the batting for the legendary Mariinsky Ballet’s Covent Garden tour in Romeo and Juliet, needing to defy her critics who line up from West to East accusing her of vulgarising the majestic, poised St Petersburg style that defines classical ballet worldwide.Even for a ballerina, in an art where physical evolution seems to move twice as fast as anywhere else, Somova is peculiarly flexible. She throws her leg high over the vertical, even in a Read more ...