So Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in October 1876, charting the latest instalment of the Holbein cult. He was renting a room in Isleworth, west London, still hoping for a religious career

The Marlborough Family by Sir Joshua Reynolds

There’s no shortage of great picks at this year’s TEFAF Maastricht, the Netherlands, including a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, a pastel portrait by Dora Maar and two sections of 4th-century Roman mosaics

John P. Murphy New Deal Art 336pp. Thames and Hudson. Paperback, £19.99. Seymour Fogel’s “Wealth of the Nation”, installed in 1942 in a federal building in Washington DC, depicts a group of workers en

John Piper was a modernist who rejected Modernism, a versatile artist who defied categories, but one who remained true to the spirit and detail of the places he painted

It’s a sunny summer afternoon in a verdant corner of the Essex countryside. A pretty pastoral landscape lies before us, with cattle sheltering in the shade of oak trees, rolling green fields, and a gr