The problem with Paul Gauguin
There’s no doubt that the painter was an important and intriguing artist, but that doesn’t excuse his behaviour
How Harriet Backer worked wonders in Norway
The painter is in no need of rediscovery at home, but her painstaking depictions of everyday life deserve to be better known abroad
How Finland eventually fell for Impressionism
The movement was slow to find favour in the north, but this gave Finnish artists time to take what they wanted from France
The painters who have made the most of poor visibility
As a book about mist and fog in European painting shows, artists have often taken a very hazy view of the landscape
Family fortunes – ‘The Rossettis’, reviewed
The Tate does a decent job of bringing the Rossetti women to the fore – but it still lets Gabriel run away with the show
There’s nothing nonsensical about the lonely landscapes of Edward Lear
The Victorian poet and painter mapped out his moods in meticulous detail, sometimes even minute by minute
Sea change – a fresh perspective on the art of Oceania
A rehang of Christchurch Art Gallery’s permanent collections emphasises non-European patterns of influence
Depicting Moby Dick – the artists who set out to capture Melville’s white whale
Moby-Dick is a novel suspicious of visual representation – but one that has inspired scores of illustrators and painters
French Canadians – how Impressionism caught on in the Great White North
This welcome survey of Canadian artists shows how the quintessentially Parisian style was imported and reimagined
How Victorian London inspired Vincent Van Gogh
The Tate explores how the painter’s eyes were opened to new influences during his time in the city
How Whistler tamed nature in his landscape scenes
With the man-made world a strong presence in his Nocturnes, beach scenes and gardens, Whistler was no pure nature boy
Psychorealism by the sea with Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff
André Breton once described the pair as the ‘best and most truly Surrealist’ of British artists
The enigmatic visions of Odilon Redon
A new exhibition suggests that Redon’s pictures owe as much to literature and music as they do to the visual arts
The many moods of Edward Lear
Jenny Uglow’s biography brings the writer and artist’s love of contradictions to the fore
Gathering dust at the Whitechapel Gallery
With its abstract qualities and unsettling symbolic significance, dust emerged as a key theme in 20th-century photography
The Tate was right to look again at queer British art
Context is as crucial to this exhibition as the art itself. Tate strikes a tricky balance between the two
Crossing space and time with the Victorians
‘The breadth of the Atlantic, with all its waves, is as nothing’
How photography and painting focused the Victorian mind
An exhibition at Tate Britain makes forceful claims for the imaginative use of memory in both art and photography
Does the spirit of Charles Dickens live on in his furniture?
A table owned by the author has been export stopped in the UK – a situation that Dickens himself would have relished