Previous Posts: February 2026

As exhilarating as a lungful of oxygen: that’s how some of his contemporaries felt about John Constable’s paintings. Others, though, were baffled by his uncompromisingly fresh and realistic treatment of the natural world. Susan Owens follows Constable through the seasons, tracing the rhythms and resonances of the artist’s year to offer a vivid, unconventional perspective on this beloved figure.

Whether in London in May, preparing pictures for exhibition and longing for the Suffolk spring, or painting boat-builders and waiting to be married in a particularly gloomy September, Constable’s life and work were unusually shaped by the yearly cycles of weather and agriculture, as well as by the often competing demands of the art world. Raised in Suffolk and trained to manage his father's land, his rural background had an enduring impact on his painting. His was the approach of one who knew the laneways, ploughs and millponds he painted intimately, and who understood the countryside as a place of both labour and natural phenomena.

Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellowships, Beinecke Visiting Senior Fellowships, and Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellowships support research in the history, theory, and criticism of the visual arts of any period or geographical area.

For the Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellowship, we especially encourage applications that contribute to scholarship in understudied areas.

We welcome applications from scholars in any discipline whose work examines art or artifacts or has implications for the analysis, interpretation, and criticism of visual art or visual culture.

Everyday Poetry: Spanish Still Life Painting of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries is devoted to the emergence and development of the bodegón in Spain from the early seventeenth century to the Enlightenment. Bringing together approximately thirty works by artists including Juan van der Hamen, Juan de Zurbarán, Tomás Hiepes, Josefa de Óbidos, Pedro de Camprobín and Luis Meléndez, the exhibition traces the evolution of Spanish still life from its early austere formulations to the more elaborate and decorative compositions of the later period. Far from a minor genre, the bodegón occupied a central position in Spanish painting, offering artists a rigorous framework in which to explore naturalism and pictorial order.

“Translating Monet’s brushstrokes into LEGO bricks was a key design challenge,” says Stijn Oom, LEGO Designer. “The team meticulously created a tactile 3D surface by layering tiles and plates in both vertical and horizontal directions, mimicking the brushwork and carefully adapting Monet's subtle palette of hues within LEGO’s signature colour options. Reimagining the nuance of the original work in LEGO bricks required certain elements of the work to be abstracted, all while preserving essential details of the composition to evoke Monet’s signature artistic style. The build transforms with viewing distance: individual pixels and textures are visible up close, resolving into a peaceful Impressionist landscape from afar, mirroring the nature of Monet’s later works."

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543) is renowned as an outstandingly realistic painter—the acme of Renaissance naturalism. In fact, he was a purveyor of cunning ambiguity. Holbein’s Wit: Pictorial Ingenuity in Renaissance Art reveals the artist at play, juggling the uncertainties and paradoxes that arise in the enterprise of imitation. Spanning Holbein’s career in Basel and London, and encompassing his portraits, devotional paintings, and designs for prints and the decorative arts, the book explores this celebrated artist’s subtle pictorial wiles. Holbein was immersed in the multi-faceted world of Renaissance ingenium or ‘wit’, which could mean innate talent, mental acuity, generative capacity, and a person’s unique nature. In dialogue with witty patrons such as Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More, Holbein advanced an ingenious kind of artmaking characterised by visual jokes, puns, and internal contradictions. Responding to humanism’s literary conceits with an inventive pictorial language, he upended conventional assumptions about naturalism and the status of painting to assert the worth of an autonomous artistic intelligence.

The sitter depicted in this new acquisition is Frances, Mrs. Alexander Champion (née Nind, 1740-1818). Frances spent much of her early life in India, then under British rule, and in 1759 married Colonel Thomas Alexander Champion in Calcutta, where he was Commander in stationed as Chief of the Bengal Army. She amassed a collection of Indian works of art, including coins, miniatures, and ivory boxes, some of which remains in the collection at Hatchlands Park, Surrey. The couple returned permanently to England after Colonel Champion’s retirement around 1775, moving into a fashionable address in Bath, where Frances’s Wednesday evening parties were said to have been a coveted social invitation.

One of the treasures of the Kunstmuseum Bern’s collection is the significant holding of works of earlier art. The presentation Life in Full. Old Masters from Duccio to Liotard places a particular focus on the Bernese renaissance and early Florentine and Sienese painting from the 14th and 15th centuries. A fascinating exhibition that reflects life in all its diversity: martyrdom meets grandstanding, asceticism meets opulence, virtue meets lust.

It includes artistically rich altar panels made by the Bernese Carnation Masters between 1480 and 1520, and the exceptional holdings of works by Niklaus Manuel, who was not only a painter, poet and graphic artist, but also a reformer, mercenary soldier and alderman of the city of Bern. Opulent still lifes and majestic portraits made by artists such as Joseph Heintz, Albrecht Kauw and Johannes Dünz, reflect the economic affluence of Bern in the age of the baroque. 

Birds – we can’t imagine life without them. To us, birds symbolise freedom, beauty and love. But birds are also pets, a source of food or hunting trophies. The exhibition BIRDS - Curated by The Goldfinch & Simon Schama delves into our enduring relationship with these creatures that we love, yet keep in cages. What does our relationship with birds tell us about how we treat the natural world?

Carel Fabritius’ 1654 painting The Goldfinch and British (art) historian Simon Schama bring birds from around the world to the Mauritshuis. We reflect on our relationship with birds through works by Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Tracey Emin, Iris van Herpen and many other artists.

In 2022, Professor Hassan Ugail, Director of the Centre of Visual computing at the University of Bradford, published research on analysis of the de Brécy Tondo, comparing its colour, texture, tonal values, hue, saturation and brushwork with 32 authentic paintings by Raphael, resulting in a comparison algorithm reporting a similarity value of 99%. Following this, the de Brécy Tondo was exhibited at the Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, from July 2023 to January 2024. 

However, the attribution to Raphael has been disputed and is generally accepted as a later copy. The picture was possibly owned by Queen Henrietta Maria (1609-1669), who may have passed the work for safekeeping to her treasurer and receiver-general, Sir Richard Wynn (1588-1649). For further information, see https://www.debrecy.org.uk/.