A pair of comfortable Gonse chairs brought last year’s sales to a splendid end, with Old Master drawings set to star at auctions and fairs early in 2026

From George Stubbs’s golden vision of the labourer’s place in society to Ford Madox Brown’s heroically monumental celebration of manual labour, artists gave individual interpretations of work, as Michael Hall reveals

Georges Seurat spent much of his short life painting the quietude of the Northern French coast, honing his rigorous technique on the play of light, sky and water

Philippe Ariès Pages RessuscitéesEdited by Guillaume Gros240pp. Cerf Éditions. €24. Given that Philippe Ariès wrote about man’s relation with his own mortality, it is piquant that the historian has be

There is much to admire in Andrew Graham-Dixon’s study of Vermeer—but not its tendency to overinterpret the old master’s work “Johannes Vermeer is the most laconic of the Dutch old masters,” Andrew Gr

The most sensual pictures of women sprang from Ovid’s verses, the Aeneid gave Turner his longest-lasting subject matter and Edward Burne-Jones saw himself in Arthur’s deathless slumber. Carla Passino explores how literature influenced art