James Beechey

Hell too, John-Paul! And glad you agree.

Bloomsbury's critical fortunes have been cyclical since the 1920s and I won't be at all surprised to see another bursting of the bubble in 2026.
4/4

Bloomsbury's current resurgence began with the Vanessa Bell exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2017, after which auction prices for Bloomsbury art rocketed, public and commercial galleries mounted new exhibitions, fashion designers jumped on the bandwagon, etc.
3/4

Many of the critics who hated that exhibition are still writing for the same publications today; and I predict a similar response to next year's show. After 1999 Grant, Bell et al largely disappeared from view in public galleries for more than fifteen years.
2/3

The answer is probably yes. Tate's 1999 exhibition The Art of Bloomsbury received a critical mauling - very unfairly in my view. (Full disclosure: I wrote an essay in the catalogue.) The gist of most reviews was 'why should we care about these ghastly people about whom we've heard far too much?'
1/4

This is not, in fact, his first wife Grace Canedy - who had returned to America a year before this painting was made - but his younger sister Irene Battiscombe. It was painted at the Battiscombes’ house in Warwick in spring 1910.

This is not, in fact, his first wife Grace Canedy - who had returned to America a year before this painting was made - but his younger sister Irene Battiscombe. It was painted at the Battiscombes’ house in Warwick in spring 1910.

The Prince of Wales (as he then was) was prompted to commission this by his admiration for Bastien-Lepage’s portrait of Sarah Bernhardt (of whom he was also a great admirer). Bastien’s huge popularity & influence in Britain derived from the exhibition of the latter at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880.

And hating a painting can definitely be cathartic. Here’s one I especially loathe - a set-piece so contrived it seems an absurd parody, with the models dropped onto the bed like limp puppets and a child tossed onto the floor like a discarded doll.
2/2

I’m not sure I share John-Paul’s hatred of Cezanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses; but having caught the Cezanne exhibition at the Musée Granet in Aix just before it closed earlier this month, I would trade it for almost any other picture on show there.
1/2

A lot of people on social media like to point out that when people die the tributes are often accompanied by photos of them when they were young and beautiful (as opposed to old and beautiful). So let me just say that I’m posting this because it’s one of my favourite portraits full stop by one of the greatest ever British portrait photographers. And fuck off.

#RIP Prunella Scales. Photo by John Deakin, 1964.

Who is this baby painted c.1912-13 by Harold Gilman? I make a very tentative suggestion in a catalogue note for Bonhams Modern British sale next month:
www.bonhams.com/auction/3071...

My catalogue note on this rediscovered Interior by Harold Gilman, in Bonhams Modern British sale on 19 November:
www.bonhams.com/auction/3071...

'The Vineyard.' (c1938) Throughout the interwar years, Vanessa Bell lived predominantly in London and travelled to Europe, taking extended stays in Italy and France. Her paintings at this time consist of warm, sunny landscapes that document her travels abroad.

David Trotter · Unconditional Looking: Mrs Dalloway’s Demons Virginia Woolf admired Jane Austen above all for her ability to grasp the exceptional moment – ‘in which all the...

Quoted in David Trotter’s review in @lrb.co.uk of new books published to coincide with the centenary of Mrs Dalloway.
2/2

Leonard Woolf, in a 1964 BBC interview, when asked to define his wife’s ‘genius’:
1/2

Happy 80th birthday to my not-at-all-fearsome friend Maggi Hambling.

‘A hunger for wild, physical sensation’: Alan Hollinghurst on painter and writer Denton Welch who died tragically young When the young painter was left severely injured after being knocked off his bike, he began to write – with astonishing vividness. As his paintings go on show, novelist Alan Hollinghurst celebrates th...

Alan Hollinghurst’s catalogue essay is reprinted here:
3/3

A fascinating exhibition at John Swarbrooke Fine Art (11 Fitzroy Square, London W1, to 30 October) resurrects his less well-known - and tragically curtailed - artistic career.
2/3

Denton Welch (1915-48) belongs to a small band of British artists who were also novelists or poets - including William Blake, Wyndham Lewis, David Jones & Alasdair Gray. His 1945 autobiographical novel In Youth is Pleasure is a minor masterpiece.
1/3

The second of four portraits Harold Gilman made of the Polish-born artist Stanislawa de Karlowska, the wife of his great friend and fellow member of the Camden Town Group, Robert Bevan. To be sold in Christie’s Modern British sale in London tomorrow evening.

www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6...

Gore was not married when he lived at 31 Mornington Crescent. He gave up his rooms there on his marriage in January 1912 and moved with his wife Mollie to 2 Houghton Place, on the other side of Hampstead Road.