Vincent van Gogh made sunflowers his personal motifs, but, when he looked to experiment with colour, a full florist’s roster of irises, roses, poppies, poured out of his brush, as Michael Prodger discovers

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found Andrew Graham-Dixon ...

A negatively coded colour has become cool

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

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

A cyanotype of a fern leaf by early photographer Anna Atkins soared above its estimate in Surrey and ‘the most striking likeness’ of Horatio Nelson is drawing every eye at the LAPADA Fair