As I shared in The Magic Down the Rabbit Hole, immersing myself in a subject and following its trails is one of the biggest delights…
In Modern Painters, John Ruskin urged artists to “go to nature in all singleness of heart… rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing; believing all…
Shakespeare began Hamlet with the ghost of a slain king, but if there is a lasting phantom that haunts us from the play, it is…
Today has been cold and grey, the kind of day that makes me want to do nothing other than curl up and read. I’ve been…
I have written about William Holman Hunt’s painting Isabella and the Pot of Basil many times before. I included it in a recent Wombat Friday…
Today I have been pondering allegories of love in art. Namely, the choices artists make when representing the concept of Love in physical form. It…
William Morris’ Love is Enough has been on my mind this morning. “He makes a poem these days–in dismal Queen Square in black old filthy London…
I’ve seen comments online that say the Pre-Raphaelites mainly appeal to adolescents. Even this 2007 piece from The Guardian quotes a senior curator at Tate…
Sir John Everett Millais’ painting The Woodman’s Daughter is based on a poem by Coventry Patmore. When first exhibited in 1851, this excerpt of the…
Literature is filled with fictional portraits. Visual art and the written word can intertwine in glorious ways. Dorian Gray’s mysteriously aging painting springs to mind…
