In his 1954 autobiography Leda and the Goose, Tristram Hillier was to recall how in 1931, during a hiking trip with friends across the Pyrenees, he had his ‘first glimpse of Spain which seemed to me like a return to China … No grass, no trees, but only rock and tawny earth that stretched away to the shimmering horizon like a lion’s pelt ’. He especially loved the translucent light found in the country’s south, which he felt was invested with ‘a dramatic quality, both noble and cruel’. His Spanish landscapes, like Andalusian farm, 1949, are charged with electric energy and poised in breathless and eer

Although Arthur Hughes was not officially elected to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), he is closely associated with the group and is constantly referred to as a Pre-Raphaelite. He met most of the artists while still a student at the Royal Academy, and he quickly adopted their style. Fair Rosamund is one of his earliest and finest works. The dry and scumbled technique combined with dazzlingly luminous colour is reminiscent of the gouache and watercolours by of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The sorrowful story of Rosamund de Clifford was a particular favourite for artists and poets in the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Rosamund was reputed to be one of the most beautiful women in England and the mistress of King Henry II. Legend has it that in 1176, she was poisoned by the King’s jealous wife Eleanor of Aquitaine. Henry is said to have created a secret garden for Rosamund, accessible only via a maze. Hughes has painted the moment Eleanor, seen lurking in the background, discovers the entrance to the garden, providing her with the opportunity to commit murder. The tall blue Delphiniums close to Eleanor produce a strong poison, indicating the means to dispose of her riva

James Dickson Innes first visited Collioure, a seaside town in the French Mediterranean just north of the Spanish border, with his friend John Fothergill in the spring of 1908. At Collioure, Fothergill recalled, Innes ‘had his fill of heat, light and gaudy local colour, and his all-excelling sense of colour was awakened’. Collioure was to provide the defining moment for Innes’s emerging sense of himself as a landscape artist. The summer of 1911 found him drawn there again and seeking to thin out his oil paintings like watercolour, an effect he has admirably achieved in Collioure, along with a heightening of his overall pa

Samuel Peploe’s earliest still lifes were indebted to the legacy of French Impressionism. Imbued with the spirit of Édouard Manet’s flower paintings of the early 1880s, they paid homage both to Manet’s luscious handling of the oil medium and to the painterly bravura of the seventeenth-century Dutch master Frans Hals. Reproductions after both artists constantly adorned the walls of Peploe’s studio. Around 1900 Peploe moved into a spacious but dark studio space in Devon Place, Edinburgh. Here he crafted jewel-like still-life arrangements in which the objects chosen for consideration were highlighted dramatically against dark bac

Justin Clemens and Rosemary Forde launch this bilingual collection of A Constructed World’s complete writings on contemporary art and cultur

In the fifteenth century, on the Venetian island of Murano, a revolution in the manufacture of European glass was unfolding.

Figaro Illustré was a monthly supplement published by prominent French newspaper, Le Figaro. Each issue contained a combination of news and lifestyle articles, literature and fashion

Les Élégances Parisiennes was a large format French fashion journal published monthly from 1916 – 1

Chiffons was a French fashion magazine published in Paris between 1907 and 1932.

Runs of early French fashion serials, journals, artist books and international magazines are a highlight of the Campbell-Pretty Fashion Research Collection and chart the symbiotic relationship between fashion and fashion…

Fashion photography forms the most varied section of the Campbell-Pretty Fashion Research Collection.

NGV International | 5 April 2019 – 4 August 2019 | Admission fees apply Known as the man who made sculpture move, Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was one of the most…

1 March – 14 July 2019 | NGV International | FREE entry Featuring a rare suite of Gabrielle Chanel’s little black dresses to the deftly draped haute couture gowns of…

The European mastery of a true hard-paste porcelain technology in Dresden in 1708 was a major scientific, technical and cultural achievement.

In 2015 the National Gallery of Victoria was fortunate to acquire from a private donor a painting by the distinguished British artist George Frederic Watts (1817–1904