Monaco Mon Amour
Monaco attracted artists, from Renaissance times to the Principality Over the centuries, the Riviera on the two sides of the border has attracted poets like Percy B. Sherry, Lord Byron, WB Yeats and Ezra Pound and painters of renown. Today, as in the past, the border attracts refugees as well as the great and the […]
Artists Liberation – sell your art online
Is selling ones art online practicable WITH THE EMERGENCE OF CAPITALISM IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY EUROPE the figure of the intermediary became important in the economic life of artists. An early picture dealer was the British consul in Venice, Joseph Smith, who as Canaletto’s agent, advised him in 1746 to make what was a very successful […]
The joys and hazards of buying at auction
Commissions add considerably to what you finally pay. Forming an old master collection need not necessarily be expensive and it is, happily, one of those investments activities where the pleasure and appreciation of the beauty of ones acquisition increases the longer you possess it. Concentrate your energies at the auction sale on evaluating the quality […]
Rembrandt, Old Master Superstar
Living in the Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish art. In 1630 Rembrandt’s etched his self-portrait depicting him as a beggar. The author depicts him, in this painting, down and out in working-class Dublin and trying to eke out a living as a pavement artist beneath the classical colonnades of Gandon’s ancient Irish House of […]
Where are the Women Old Masters?
One suggestion is that they are buried beneath a mountain of good and not so good male Old Masters; the truth is, female old masters are quite scarce. Helena of Egypt; Floor mosaic ‘Alexander the Great and Darius III in the battle of Issus’, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples. Looking through the English-language 2006 edition of […]
Planning your Museum Visit
DURING THE BOOM YEARS OF THE 1980-90s. there was a vast expansion in the size of art museums the world over. It ranged from the London National Gallery Sainsbury wing built in 1991, the National Gallery of Ireland that expanded on the back of the country’s building boom, not to mention President François Mitterrand’s Louvre […]
Collaborative Art
VERY FEW ARTISTS WHO VENTURE into the field of politics, be they ever so famous, emerge unscathed. The Greek sculptor Phidias (c.480 – 430 BC), oversaw the construction of the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens in the city’s Golden Age under Pericles the city’s leading politician. Despite his contemporary fame Phidias fell victim to […]
Caravaggio: mad, bad, and dangerous to know
Mad, Bad, and Dangerous Artists THAT MOURNFUL PHRASE, uttered by Lady Caroline Lamb to describe her spasimante Lord George Byron is one, had it been around two hundred years earlier, could have been appropriated by anyone with the mixed fortunes to come within the orbit of Michelangelo Merisi, this early example of a tortured artistic […]
Travels with My Art
SHIPPING YOUR PAINTINGS if you are an artist exhibiting your work at a gallery some distance from your home or even abroad can be a tricky, difficult, expensive and nor without risk to the work of art. If you are the owner of a personal collection it can be even more traumatic as, unlike the […]
Rembrandt’s Dark Secrets
Art historians – perennially on the outside looking in – have, starting with Giorgio Vasari in 1550, loved to give the Old Masters an aura of mystery and alchemy while the reality of the artist’s life, yesterday as today was, sadly, much more prosaic. Rembrandt’s relationship to his clients was less the lonely misunderstood genius […]