JOHN DOWLAND IS MY NAME: musician, composer, greatest lute player of my age in Europe, some say, when in England Elizabeth and James were on the throne. I died in 1626 when I was 63 and was buried on

Train Landscape , 1940, watercolour on paper, 17¼in ...

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

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

LS Lowry is arguably England’s greatest artist. He painted a subject area that no one had ever painted before, the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, and became popular with the general public to

The sale of a Fabergé imperial egg and a 15th-century triptych made headlines last year, but one of the most powerful pieces was a painting by Richard Parkes Bonington showing what he could have become, had he not died so young