When they met in the 1890s, William Rothenstein regarded Augustus John as one of the great hopes of British art. A brilliant student at the Slade, he remained largely independent from artistic trends and movements. This work depicting William Hughes, Prime Minister of Australia,…

In the summer of 1916, William Rothenstein wrote to Eric Kennington to express admiration for his painting.  They met in London, and William invited him down to his home Iles Farm, Oakridge in Gloucestershire that June, afterwards Kennington described this visit as a…

'Ice Cream Man.' In July 1911, after an artistic epiphany on honeymoon in Concarneau, Brittany and a chance meeting with the Irish artist, Roderic O'Conor, Alfred Wolmark embarked on the pioneering 'colourist' path that he followed for the next two decades of his working life.

Mark Gertler was born in Spitalfields, London in 1891 to a family of Polish immigrants, his childhood was marked by poverty, but his artistic talent was recognised by William Rothenstein who encouraged to paint and arranged a scholarship for him to start at the Slade School in…

'The Pump, Nash End.' (1931) Albert Rutherston was William Rothenstein youngest brother, born in Bradford, Yorkshire, he anglicised his surname in 1916 during WW1 as a declaration of patriotism for the country of his birth. This painting shows a small courtyard and garden…

'Mother and Child.' (1903) Today, I'm looking at William Rothenstein and his immediate artistic circle. Rothenstein, a student of Rossetti and Ruskin, was an artist, critic, teacher, writer, lecturer, and Official War Artist in both world wars and is best known for his portraits…

'Men in a Cafè.' (1928) Born in Bristol, England in 1892, Paule Vezelay first became known as an illustrator and printmaker in Britain. A trip to Paris in 1920 began her lifelong love of the city to which she would move permanently in 1926. In France, she became increasingly…

'Evening Light, Snowdonia.' (c1960) If there is a stereotype of North Wales as a land of mountains, it has much to do with the art of Kyffin Williams who, for more than half a century, painted the rugged landscape of Snowdonia and its people in a style unmistakably his own.

'Revue Girls, Scala Theatre,' depicts a colourful stage scene in the Scala theatre in Amsterdam, executed in freely applied, vigorous strokes and fresh, radiant colours. It most likely depicts Fien de la Mar in the famous Bouwmeester-revue, whose colourful shows Isaac Israels…

'Girl by a Window.' (1921) For Matisse, like Vermeer, the window played a key role in his paintings, both as a source of light and as a link to the greater world beyond it.  The model for this picture is Henriette Darricarrère, Matisse's studio assistant who is looking out…

'A Street in Paris.' Ann Estelle Rice was born and educated in Pennsylvania, but her artistic career took flight after her entry into Paris’s thriving artistic community in 1906. During her relationship with the Scottish artist John Duncan Fergusson, she began to produce…

'Bad weather, coast of Finistère.' Of all the members of the Pont-Aven School, Henry Moret was the most faithful to the area. He first visited there in the 1880s and, in 1896, settled permanently in the small fishing village of Doëlan, between Pont-Aven and Lorient. Moret was…

Rex Whistler's picture shows the moat and bridge of Rushbrooke Hall in Suffolk. This mid-16thC house was the seat of the Jermyn family and was demolished in 1961.

During WW2, Whistler joined the Welsh Guards and died leading his men in the first battle of his military career.…

Like many of his Spanish contemporaries, Catalan painter Eliseo Meifrén y Roig was lured to Paris in the late 1880s after seeing the many fresh ways of viewing and understanding Paris. He produced many café scenes that captured the population, bohemian, working-class, bourgeois…

John Singer Sargent spent part of several summers in the early 1900s painting open-air subjects in Italy’s Val d’Aosta. The resulting works reveal his pleasure in the description of brilliant light; here a party of climbers almost seem to merge with the rockface.

'Sunrise in an Italian landscape.' Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidauld began his career making copies of 17thC Dutch landscapes. Encouraged by Claude-Joseph Vernet, he evolved a luminous landscape style and stayed in Italy from 1785 until his return to Paris in 1790; his time there marked…

'Campfire,' (1918) is a scene Keith Henderson will have known well - he studied art at the Slade School before studying in Paris with Degas who encouraged him to carry small pieces of paper to pull out and sketch on quickly in all sorts of circumstances, much as did with another…

Thomas Dugdale Cantrell's 'The Arrival of the Jarrow Marchers in London, Viewed from an Interior,' (1936) was painted in the same year as he was made an Associate of the Royal Academy - 207 unemployed men began a near 300 mile march to London to protest against the poverty…

Since his early Impressionist paintings in the 1880s, John Lavery had been fascinated by the effects of sunlight falling through trees onto water and creating fugitive, dappled effects, but it was only in 1913 (the year of this picture) he first succumbed to the charms of the…

'An Orchard in Spring.' (c1908) Hugo Baar was a Moravian landscape painter who trained in Vienna and later joined the Secessionists, the most influential and enduring of the art revolutions to spread across Europe at the end of the 19thC and which included a very broad range of…