10 Impressionist Artists

1. Claude Monet
2. Edouard Manet
3. Pierre Auguste Renoir
4. Camille Pissarro
5. Alfred Sisley
6. Berthe Morisot
7. Mary Cassat
8. Frédéric Bazille
9. Gustave Caillebotte
10. Paul Cezanne

The Art of the Forger

It's a strange thing with books, how they can hang around a long time before they are read. The Art of the Forger by Chris Wright was first published in 1985 (a staggering 35 years ago). I'm not sure when I bought my copy but a long time ago. Anyway the other day for some reason I plucked it off the shelf and read it. It's not a long read and has lots of illustrations. It's chiefly about a painting called The Fortune Teller. Wright takes us through the story if how he eventually came to believe it is not by De la Tour the renaissance artist but is a fake from the early twentieth century. He believes it is an example of several from the same hand. With a walk on part for Anthony Blunt the whole story is fascinating and raises as many questions as it answers. Art history is a strange world open to abuse and sometimes rather murky.

Books recently read

My reading schedule is a bit higgledy piggledy but I have recently finished three unrelated books of various sizes. One was George Orwell's first novel Burmese Days which is a fine novel, despite what Orwell came to think, and an unsentimental insight into English attitudes in the 1920s as the British Raj began to wind down. The more Orwell I read the more I admire his skill. The other two books are non-fiction. Victorians Undone is a large roving thing by the journalist Kathryn Hughes. With chapters on Darwin's beard and George Eliot's hand it is an unusual approach to history but a fascinating read. Some will want to avoid the book because of some of the subject material it gets into and the very occasional lapse of judgement in the expressions used. Otherwise it is well written, informative and thought provoking. The third and final one to mention is a little SPCK hardback by Tudor historian John Guy. The first half is excellent but it is supplemented in the second half with discussions of More's impact down the years, including the fascinating story of how he was made saint and how first Robert Bolt and then Hilary Mantel got hold of the character and shaped him to their own purposes. Really worth a read.

Art History: Lessons

I was with some friends today having lunch in the Côte Bistro in Camden Town (I'd not eaten in such a place before but can recommend it - see here). This was probably the last time that I will be with this group, having come to the end of my Tuesday morning Art History classes. They will be carrying on next term but I don't think I will be able to do that. Anyway, thinking about my original goals I think I can say that, apart from helping me to have a day off each week, the course has helped me begin to learn several lessons, about

1. The basic history of art since the Renaissance
2. How to look at a picture
3. The art world - artists, dealers, etc
4. Teaching - how to do it more subtly (thank you Annette)
5. People and how they differ and don't differ
6. People and their views on theology and religion
7. People and their objections to the gospel
8. People and the way they bond
9. London and its many, many (often free) galleries and museums
10. The difficulty of witnessing and how hardly souls are won

10 Histories

1. Church history
2. Art history
3. History of science
4. Ancient history
5. Black history
6. Gender history (including women's history)
7. History of education
8. Social or cultural history
9. Maritime history
10. Music history or historical musicology