Category Archives: Museums and Galleries

And by making the short trip from the Queen’s Gallery to London’s Natural History Museum, visitors can see many of the insects that Merian herself witnessed and painted in her famous book. The museum is once again staging its Sensational Butterflies show and it is a wonderful experience for adults and children alike. Maria Merian […]

Whenever and wherever an Escher exhibition is held it does good business. The public flock to see his mind-bending designs and impossible views; he is favoured by groups as disparate as rock musicians and hippies and by cosmologists and mathematicians. Yet his work has been mostly disregarded by the mainstream art world which has seen […]

McCauley ‘Mac’ Conner was one of the original ‘Mad Men’ of New York’s Madison Avenue, the advertising capital of America in the decades which followed the Second World War. He’s been described in the British press as the real Don Draper, but he wasn’t. In the TV series Draper was a creative director, selling ideas […]

The great Spanish Master Francisco Goya was no stranger to dreams and, perhaps more frequently, nightmares, judging by his works. From the terrifying Saturn Devouring his Son to the horrific scenes depicted in his portrayal of the Napoleonic occupation of Spain in The Disasters of War, he seems to have lived in a shadow world […]

London’s Design Museum currently has a pop-up exhibition to mark the 150th anniversary of the founding of John Lewis in Oxford Street, a company which has now grown to be one of the most successful retailers in Britain. JL’s approach is to combine style with practicality, giving its customers what they want at a fair […]

The Estorick Collection in London usually specialises in exhibitions of modern Italian art, yet its current show contains 80 photographs portraying the period of la dolce vita, literally the sweet life, and the title of Federico Fellini’s famous 1960 film, shot in and around Rome. Its anti-hero, Marcello Mastroianni, plays world-weary journalist Marcello Rubini and […]

The eighteenth-century artist Joseph Wright of Derby had, in the words of one eminent critic, “an almost preternatural ability to render the effects of artificial light in darkened spaces.” Influenced by Caravaggio and de la Tour, he demonstrated this ability in such works as The Orrery and Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. […]

I have already written about the momentous year of 1963 (http://www.culturevoyage.co.uk/books/) and make no apology for doing so again as it was so important for British society. Some argue that ‘Swinging London’ was just that, a musical and artistic frenzy fuelled by drugs which was limited to the capital and ignored by the rest of […]

Eric Gill, the famous sculptor and calligrapher, cast a very wide shadow over all who came into contact with him, not least his younger brother MacDonald, known as Max. Although a highly accomplished architect, graphic designer and letterer in his own right, Max’s work is still often mistaken for that of his brother’s. But a […]