Journal

A widow asked for a picture to dream by. Böcklin painted it five times, Rachmaninoff set it to music, and for a few decades it was on walls across Europe.

At thirty he was Amsterdam’s most fashionable painter; at fifty his house was sold at auction. Rembrandt’s fall, and the extraordinary late work that came after it.

A shipwreck, a cover-up and thirteen days on a raft. How a twenty-seven-year-old painter turned a national scandal into the founding picture of Romanticism.

The model did not turn up, so Whistler painted his mother. The story of Arrangement in Grey and Black, a farthing in damages, and a painter who wanted you to look at the wall.

Honoured by the Paris Salon at twenty, a journey across India looking for a subject, and death at twenty-eight. The short, extraordinary life of Amrita Sher-Gil.

The most convincing saints in Western art were painted by a man the Roman police knew by name. The life of Caravaggio, from tavern brawls to a death sentence.

The gold in The Kiss is real metal leaf, laid on by hand. What a printed reproduction can carry, and what it honestly cannot.

Grainstacks, a cathedral front, a footbridge, a pond. Monet repeated his subjects because he was painting the light, not the thing.

The most recognisable image in Japanese art depends on a pigment discovered by accident in Berlin. Without Prussian blue there is no Great Wave.

Frames do not survive shipping, framing is a local decision, and bundling it would make everyone pay for a frame they may not want.