The gargantuan, bewildering Louvre

Johannes Vermeer brightened his native Delft with luminous pictures of women caught in intimate moments, but the serenity of his work, of which he produced remarkably little, is at odds with a life mired in debt, as Carla Passino discovers

Opera is dead. And has been for quite a long time. I don’t care what anybody says about Poulenc and Prokofiev, I cannot be persuaded that any listenable music theatre has been written since Puccini. (

Painting a local cricket match, Sherree Valentine-Daines received an invitation that changed her career and led her to become artist-in-residence at Goodwood

Kerry James Marshall, ‘poised between narrative and allegory’

Alexander Marshal–this country’s first major botanical painter–deserves to be better known, writes Tiffany Daneff, after seeing his luminous originals in the Royal Collection