Over a long career, John Hardman has specialised to great effect in teasing out, from speeches, decrees, minutes, memoranda, letters, diaries and unsent drafts, the varied moods of French political de

After early profligate years in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, Francis Grant traded sporting scenes for portraits and climbed the ladder to become president of the Royal Academy. A forthcoming exhibition at Dickinson does justice to his drawing

Cezanne 25 at Aix-en-Provence

Capturing the immediacy of fighting and the writhing bodies of soldiers, as well as keeping narrative clarity, proved enormously difficult for painters depicting battles before the advent of photography. Michael Hall reveals how they rose to the challenge

From rustic barns to Riviera villas, Pablo Picasso’s studios were engines of invention. Picasso: From the Studio at the National Gallery of Ireland, in partnership with Musée national Picasso-Paris, t

In a John Behan bronze, collector Jacqueline O’Donovan, a child of the Irish diaspora, can sense the desperation of a starving people forced to flee their land